Session 4 – Backspin

Week 4 – Backspin

First we started warming up so that we were nice and loose and ready to do the drills. For the warm up we just started rallying with each other using any type of shot just getting used to the ball. We done this for about 5 – 10 Minutes before moving onto the main activity and skill based exercise. In the main activity we focused on one skill, the backspin shot.

The first part of the Backspin Shot is to position yourself with you keep your knees bent and have your feet shoulder width apart, with one of your feet slightly behind the other. Make sure your body is slightly square on to your opponent. When the ball and bat make contact put your weight on to your back foot, make sure that you make contact with just under the middle of the ball and make sure there is little follow through but the follow through goes under the ball to generate the backspin. After getting used to the shot we added in some rules in which made us have to get the ball to hit the mat.

What is Backspin? – With backspin, the bottom of the ball is moving in the same direction that the ball is travelling. The force exerted on the ball by its spin will be generally upwards (again, assuming the ball has been hit almost horizontally). This upward force works in the opposite direction to gravity, causing the ball to drop more slowly. Since a table tennis ball is light and easily slowed by air, a heavy backspin stroke performed from several feet from the table will often slow down its forward speed quite noticeably over the opponent’s side of the table, and then slowly fall onto the playing surface. This ‘stop and drop’ effect is used by defenders when playing against topspin attacks.