Five Ways To Improve Your Reaction Time
You can have the greatest table tennis technique in the world, but if your reaction time is poor than you will still get burned. Here are five ways to improve your reaction time:
1) Most tables have the ability to fold up, creating a back board for you to hit against. A very simply way to improve reaction time is by hitting up against the board over and over again.
However, make sure to switch up where you place the ball on the board so you aren’t just hitting the same shot over and over again.
2) When you’re playing with a friend and you’re just messing around, hit every single shot that you can no matter if it hits the table or not. Try to keep the ball going as long as you can. Play it off the ground, off the wall, or just out of the air.
3) Another thing you can do with a friend is play short table tennis. Move yourself up to the edge of the table and play a game without moving your body away from the edge of the table. This will force you to react quickly to all shots.
4) A fun way to practice when you don’t have someone else to play with and you’re sick of playing against the back board, is to play with the walls and everything else around you.
Move to the side of the table and hit the ball against the wall or whatever else is around so that it will come back to the table. This is fun because the variability of where the ball is going to go helps you learn to react quickly to random shots. Plus it’s fun just to try and keep it going as long as you can.
5) Reaction time and hand eye coordination are two different things, but must work together. You might be able to react quickly to the ball coming at you, but if you can’t make the proper connection with the ball, then it serves no purpose.
Practice just hitting the ball up and down on your paddle, almost like it was attached with a string, and keep it going as long as you can. When you get better at that, switch it up by flipping the paddle around and shortening the bounce.
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