17 HRS AGO - Frozen Shoulder Syndrome I've been seeing a physical therapist three times/week, 90 minutes/visit, for two months, where I go through rigorous massage and shoulder stretching routines. I also do a 20-minute stretching routine twice a day. Yesterday I saw the doctor again for an update. He put me through a number of tests. The good news was that my shoulder flexibility has gone from 50% normal to 70%. The bad news is that the shoulder hurts just as much as before - no improvement there. I can play with the pain - it's not that bad - but I'd just be injuring the shoulder further. I'd already been diagnosed with a frayed rotator cuff, tendonitis, and bursitis in the shoulder, and with an extreme lack of shoulder flexibility due to muscle stiffness. Yesterday the doctor gave me a final diagnosis - Frozen Shoulder Syndrome. If I were to quit table tennis completely and only do normal things with the shoulder, it would gradually go away in 1-3 years - but that's not Collapse

5 DAYS AGO - Forehand Blocking Here's the last point of the match (18 sec) where 14-year-old Japanese whiz Harimoto Tomokazu (world #13) recently upset world #1 Fan Zhendong at the ITTF-Asian Cup. The camera angle shows just how fast these players play. But to me the key thing here is what Tomokazu does at the start of the rally when Fan loops to his forehand - he blocks. Yes, at the highest levels of our sport, where nearly everyone tries to counterloops everything on the forehand (and often on the backhand) - he forehand blocks. And this is a well-placed block. He has an angle into the forehand, so Fan has to be ready to cover that - and so when Tomokazu instead blocks down the line, he forces Fan to play his backhand, followed by an awkward, out-of-position forehand, which sets Tomokazu up to win the point. (Fan would have tried to counterloop.) One of the most under-used shots in table tennis (at all levels) is the down-the-line forehand block - most players automatically go crosscourt, Collapse

16/04/2018 - Why? Because I'm totally exhausted from running the 3-star Butterfly MDTTC April Open this weekend, plus teaching a class Sunday night. Because Tuesday the power will be out from 7AM to 5PM for electrical repairs. (They were supposed to do this a few weeks ago but it got postponed at the last minute.) Because I have to put together the write-up, formatted results, and photos for the tournament. Because I have to do catch up on some writing projects. Just because! But to tide you over until Wednesday, here's Ukulele Pong (14 sec), with Mary Lieu! Collapse

12/04/2018 - Michael Maze Short Push Denmark star Michael Maze retired in 2016 after a series of injuries, but recently has been training for a comeback at age 36. He's a former top ten player, who won the bronze medal in Men's Doubles at the 2004 Olympics, made the semifinals of Men's Singles at the 2005 Worlds, won the Europeans Men's Singles Championships in 2009, and made the quarterfinals of Men's Singles at the 2012 Olympics. At the 2005 Worlds he beat two Chinese players, Wang Hao (Men's Singles Silver Medalist at the 2004 Olympics and world #1 or #2 at the time) and Hao Shuai, often lobbing them down. Against Hao in the quarterfinals he was down 0-3 and saved three match points before winning in one of the great comebacks in history. He's a lefty looper, and probably the best lobber in the world. But he's also known for his soft touch, such as in receive.  Here's a video (1:35, some of it in slow motion) of him practicing his short Collapse

09/04/2018 - Tip of the Week How to Return Nets and Edges. Susan Backed Pingpong Parlor Coming to D.C. - SPiN Washington! Here's the article. I think it's great we'll have one nearby! They really are a different type of club, going for the upper-scale recreational player, with more of a party atmosphere. I've been to the SPiN NY club twice, and had fun playing there. They now have (or will soon) clubs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Philadelphia, Seattle, Austin, and now DC. Here is their main web page. Here's their About Us page, which explains their interesting history. Their location is right in the middle of DC, which according to Google Directions is just over 30 miles driving distance south of my club, MDTTC. So there's no serious conflict between the clubs - and as I've blogged before, having multiple full-time clubs in one region, but not too close, actually helps all of them as each club brings in new players who might also join or attend Collapse

04/04/2018 - Head Chinese Coach??? April Fools! Yesterday's blog was, of course, an April Fools' joke, something I do every year on April 1. This year it fell on a Sunday, and I was off on Monday, so it came out two days late - but note that I dated the blog April 1, even though it came out on April 3! Also note that I said I'd been hired as the Head Chinese Coach on Sunday, which was April 1. And most important, read the first letter of each line (which I've now bolded), which reads out (twice), "April Fool April Fool"! It should also have been suspicious that each line had a hard break ("manual line break") instead of flowing like all the other articles - otherwise I couldn't force the starting letters. (Plus do you really think I'm going to kick Ma Long and Fan Zhendong off the Chinese team if they don't learn English? Or that China would hire an American coach due to his table tennis books?) But some emailed me believing it was true.)  Here Collapse

30/03/2018 - Upcoming USATT Stuff As usual, there's all sorts of time-consuming USATT stuff going on behind the scenes. I get a double-whammy because I'm both on the USATT Board of Directors and chair the USATT Coaching Committee, both unpaid volunteer positions. (I'm probably going to have to drop one of them next year - just too much.) A lot of it is email correspondence. Fortunately, I'm a writer, so emailing is a strength. But then you add all the local volunteers stuff (such as the monthly MDTTC newsletter I'll be working on today), and then add in all the actual paid stuff, and I'm pretty busy.  This past year there's also been a major headache with one individual who believes there's a huge conspiracy against him, and has lodged numerous complaints - a total of 64 (!!!), to be exact - against about 20 USATT people with both the USATT and the ITTF Ethics Committees, with one big filing to each containing the complaints. (I'll give a full report on Collapse

27/03/2018 - Tip of the Week Finding Simple Tactics That Work. MDTTC Spring Break Camp We had a great first day of camp yesterday. As usual in recent years, I worked with the beginners - though they weren't all exactly "beginners"! I got to work with one five-year-old for the first time. I was expecting to have get him started, but lo and behold, he'd been taking lessons regularly with our coaches, and already had an excellent forehand, a decent backhand when in position (not easy when your head barely comes over the table and so the racket hides the ball when you hit backhands unless you hit from the side), and had incredible focus for his age. He was fun to work with. There were five in my group. All had played, though two (both about 8) hadn't had formal coaching. With those two, I focused on the basics, while the others did more footwork. By the end of the morning training session, all five were doing the two-one drill. They had great stroking practice at the end of the Collapse

23/03/2018 - Coaching "Future Stars" vs. Coaching "Older Players" and Fixing Bad Habits There's a huge difference between coaching, say, a young, up-and-coming player, who started out with a good coach and has good basic technique; and coaching either an older player, or one who has technique problems. Many top players, without extensive coaching experience, can be somewhat effective in working with young, up-and-coming players, since they are basically coaching younger versions of themselves, and are simply molding the player as they hone those good techniques as they player develops. In fact, much of the coaching may be inspirational, where you help the player strive to be the best. There's more to it than this, but there's less creative thinking involved in trying to solve problems, as opposed to continued pushing of the player to higher and higher levels, where the biggest need is often exactly what the top player brings - high-level play as a practice partner. Collapse