The V-for-Victory Grip in Table Tennis.
(Written by the Founder)
On a recent trip to China I encountered a new grip, under
development at one of the premier table tennis schools, which I would like to
share with the US and international table tennis community. This article
describes this discovery and what I have learned in trying to use it since my
return. I believe it will have a significant impact on our sport.
In October 2000, I took a trip to China with my sister, to visit my mother
who is teaching English for a year at a university near Shanghai. In fact, at
the same time the USATT-organized Youth and Coaches trip to China was traveling
from Beijing to Shanghai, we were traveling from Shanghai to Beijing (cf.,
http://www.tomveatch.com,
"China" for a
detailed report).
During this trip, through the generosity of, and helpful contacts provided by
Y. J. Liu of Vancouver BC, I was able to get in touch with and make a visit to a
Chinese table tennis school (the
Cao Yan Hua
table-tennis school in Shanghai) for a couple of days of personal training.
Basically this was a live-in elementary school where the students played table
tennis several hours a day in addition to their regular primary-school
education. Cao Yan Hua, the perennial Women's World Champion of the 1980's, is
from Shanghai, and she started this school just a year or two ago. Already it is
one of the premier places in China for development of future champion-level
table-tennis players. The kids' skill level was about 200 points times their
age; I felt I could probably beat the 7-year-olds with my 1565 USATT rating; I
had a hard time earning 8 points a game from the 9-year-olds; and with the
10-year-olds, well, there was no point in being humiliated, so I didn't play
them! It was a tremendous adventure and, just like Marco Polo, I came away with
some new things to share with you.
Observations at a Chinese Table Tennis School
In my eyes-open moments between practice sessions, I made two remarkable
observations. First, in the land of the pen-hold grip, 90% of the kids in this
school were playing shakehand. When I asked, the coaches said that shakehand is
easier to learn than penhold, so since these are kids, that's what they do.
Second, and what I want to tell you about here, is the brief glimpse I had of a
boy playing with what I'll call the "V-for-Victory grip" or "V grip", where the
blade is held in the V between the forefinger and middle finger. I have been
learning to play with the V grip recently, and in this article I would like to
share with you what I have learned. I believe this discovery will be momentous
for our sport: I predict that the 2008 Olympics will be won by a player using
this grip.
Summary
In summary, the V grip is easier to learn and provides more control, more spin,
and more speed all at once, as compared to the other grip styles. Below I will
describe the V grip itself, then the playing style of the boy I saw, the
mechanics of the forehand and backhand topspin and chop strokes as well as my
hidden corkscrew serve, and finally the mechanical advantages of this style of
play over the penhold and shakehand grip styles.
Grip mechanics
To make the V grip, hold your hand up, and spread your forefinger and middle
finger apart in the V-for-Victory sign (a.k.a., the Peace Sign), pointing up.
Let the handle of the paddle also be vertical, with the blade above the handle,
and put the handle against the palm, rotated so that the blade is perpendicular
to the palm and is squeezed BETWEEN THE FOREFINGER AND MIDDLE FINGER. You can
bend the last two knuckles of the forefinger and middle finger, so that you grip
the paddle blade between bent fingers as if between bent tongs. Hold the handle
against your palm with ring finger and pinky, and rest the thumb on the top of
the handle wherever it seems comfortable; you can curve the forefinger around
the thumb. Here are some
pictures.
The V grip is something like a pistol grip but instead of having the business
end of the weapon extend out from between thumb and forefinger, in the V grip,
the paddle sticks out between the forefinger and middle finger. ("Pistol Grip"
is the name used for a different and even more strange blade configuration from
China, discovered by Barney Reed, Sr., which looks something like a cut-off
handsaw, with the blade made of the first few inches of the saw.)
The handle on the boy's paddle, that I saw in China, was something like that
of a pistol with a rounded vertical flange coming down from the horizontal
blade, which was pressed into his palm and butted up against the heel of his
palm, and held there by the ring finger and pinky. The idea is that the blade
and the palm are perpendicular instead of parallel: the blade is horizontal when
the palm is held vertically with the thumb on top. Using small rotations of the
wrist about the axis of a horizontal forearm the grip shifts between angles
appropriate for extreme topspin, when the forward edge (on the side closer to
your opponent) of the paddle is raised, and for extreme chop, when the forward
edge is lowered.
Stylistic observations
The boy that I saw was about 10 years old, and I estimate that his skills were
on the level of a 2000-level player in the U.S. rating system, along with all
the other 10-year olds at this school. His style of play was to stand relatively
back from the table, and to swing the wrist and paddle like a whip to produce
extremely fast and spinny topspin loop drives with the bottom side of the
paddle. The forehand strokes reminded me of a
jai-alai player, and the
backhand strokes were equally whippy.
He seemed to be very relaxed and comfortable, with a wide-spread posture and
bent knees but a vertical body posture, with a smooth rhythm that seemed almost
casual, yet the drives combined extreme speed and spin with apparent
effortlessness. He made it look so easy that it actually gave the impression of
being playful and non-serious (most of the boys were very serious about
playing), I even thought he might be lazy! Now, having studied the stroke for a
while, I must say that these characteristics are intrinsic to good form when
using the natural strokes and style of the V grip, and not a reflection that the
boy I saw lacked any iota of seriousness.
It turns out that it is extremely natural and effortless to produce cracking
power drives, power loops, and even incredibly rapid far-wide-to-the-side
reaction-block loop counters. The posture and strokes that fit the style make it
so you don't look like you're working very hard; indeed you're working a lot
less for a lot better results than players using other styles.
Stroke mechanics
Let me describe the mechanics of block, topspin and chop on both forehand and
backhand, using the V grip. Although I describe them separately, the same side
of the blade is used for both forehand-underspin and backhand-underspin, namely
the thumb side; similarly topspins are done on both forehand and backhand with
the same side of the blade, namely the bottom side.
Backhand
On the backhand, the edge of the blade on the back of the hand can be lifted or
lowered by a wrist rotation about the axis of the forearm. With the back-of-hand
edge lifted, swinging the wrist from bent to open, or the forearm in the same
arc, produces a topspin stroke. With the back-of-hand edge lowered, swinging the
wrist from bent to open, or the forearm in the same arc, produces a chop stroke.
Thus slight lifting and lowering gives angles appropriate for extreme topspin
and chop, where the movement of the wrist's main "hinge" joint combined with the
arc of the forearm through the same plane combine in a powerful swing that can
generate very heavy spin.
Lifting or lowering by rotating the wrist 90 degrees in either direction puts
the paddle into a flat-hit or blocking position. With elbow pointed toward your
opponent, and thumb toward your chest, the small "handshake" movement of the
wrist combines with the very large movement of elbow extension to produce
another extremely powerful, but in this case flat-hitting, stroke.
Between these pure extremes of extreme topspin and flat-hit are a
smoothly-varying range of combinations of drive (via elbow extension) and spin
(via elbow rotation about the axis of the upper-arm, which swings the forearm in
the same arc and plane that the hinge-opening wrist follows).
The back-hand block is done simply by moving into flat-hit position without
doing an elbow-extending drive stroke. This block stroke has three
characteristics, derived from its simplicity and from the forward position of
the elbow, which lets you freely rotate your body toward the backhand side much
more easily than the penhold or shakehand grips in which the elbow must be kept
more or less back and in the body's way, during a backhand block. First, the
block movement is more intuitive than for other grips, because the natural
movement of rotating your body toward the backhand side (to gain coverage of
wide-to-the-backhand shots) does not conflict with any simultaneous need to keep
your elbow back in order to angle the block back toward the table. Second, the
same reasons also make the movement lightning-fast. And third, it also makes it
easier to cover much wider backhand angles, reaching far wide-to-the-backhand
shots with reaction-time responses. I have been able to powerfully block and
counter-drive against loops and loop drives to my far backhand with this grip,
after a very few hours of practice, shots that I have never before been able to
return, even after years of playing and studying this game using other grips. I
find myself grinning with surprise and amazement at the shots that I can
successfully slap back. Finally, and best of all when those wide-to-the-backhand
shots are topspin and topspin/sidespin loops, the available range of wrist
rotations extends easily from vertical to flat, and with a powerful
elbow-extending "swatting" motion you can effortlessly block down a loop no
matter how topspinny it is.
I have observed several things about the V grip's backhand chop stroke, in
which where the upper (thumb-side) surface of the paddle undercuts the ball.
First it is extremely stable, since even with large-muscle movements the blade
stays in its plane. Second it is able to generate extremely heavy backspin
through an arcing forearm, with or without the hinge of the wrist swinging open.
Third it provides tremendous control, so that I have no trouble nailing intended
short dropshot dink chops alternating with flat-trajectory deep chops, to left,
center, or right of the table, with much better control than I have ever
attained with my penhold grip, which until now has been the superior grip for
the close-to-the-table chopping game. The amazing degree of control is due to
the stroke's in-the-plane stability and to the fact that it is carried out by
larger muscle groups making fewer joint rotations over larger joints. For
example, to shift aim from a chop to one edge of the opponent's side of the
table to one aiming toward the other edge, the modification in the stroke is
done not by rotating the wrist, since in this stroke the available wrist
rotation to do that is the small "shakehand" rotation -- which better used by
keeping it stiff, or using it as a small, fine adjustment. Instead, you raise or
lower elbow via a large rotation of your shoulder joint, and this sets the
leftward or rightward cross-table angle of the chop stroke. Obviously when you
are using big muscles and big joints to make control adjustments, you gain a lot
more control than when you are using small muscles and small joints, which can
spin out of control so much more easily.
Forehand
So far I've talked only about the backhand; the forehand follows basically the
same principles, although it definitely feels more wierd than the backhand when
playing with it. Again the table-side edge can be lifted or lowered, and the
forearm swung through an arc to produce an extreme topspin or chop stroke. And
again the wrist can rotate 90 degrees in either direction to reach a
flat-hitting position. Of course instead of the elbow pointing toward the
opponent as for the backhand, the elbow either points down or is lifted to the
back in the two flat-hitting positions. The forehand topspin stroke, which is
the most powerful stroke for basically all penholders and most shakehand
players, is equally powerful in the V grip, but feels exposed and wierd with the
wrist and elbow both rotated far outward at the beginning of the power part of
the stroke; it gets a lot stronger and more solid as you swing the wrist from
open to closed and the forearm in the same arc, and as you push down extending
the elbow to drive forward through the loop or drive stroke. Kept compact it
feels more solid; this is a very quick, short, blocking stroke yet with plenty
of power and leverage if you swing with it even a little bit, to produce massive
acceleration and some just amazing drives and loops. I have had the same feeling
of wonder at these shots as I did when I first hit golf balls at a driving
range: the ball rockets out of there so fast that it seems like a miracle that I
actually did that myself.
After only little practice, I have so far found the forehand chop to be
somewhat less stable than the backhand chop with this grip, but I expect that to
be solved by stiffening the wrist a little more, which shifts the in-the-plane
chop-spin movements from being controlled by the movements of the wrist joint to
being controlled by the movements of the forearm.
Serves
Two more important issues include serves and shots at the elbow. In my own game
I am really a serve specialist, with a lot of sidespin and deceptive
under-the-armpit side-topspin/chop/corkscrew special effects. So far I'm finding
that this grip produces better spin, speed, and control in service strokes as
compared with the penhold grip, just as in the other strokes, again primarily
because of the in-the-plane stability of the wrist "hinge" movement, but also
because the stroke encourages you to bring your head down closer to the point of
ball contact, and that means you can both see and control what's going on that
much better. Indeed with the V grip my corkscrew serves are better controlled
than with my normal penhold grip, and I find it a lot easier to add topspin or
chop, and to produce triple-bounce serves or ultra-speed corner-to-corner
services. These strokes all share a beyond-90-degrees side-turned body position,
a toss of varying heights, my upper-arm parallel to the ground and pointing back
away from the table or behind me, and a heavy wrist snap in one direction or the
other, with the ball coming out under the armpit. I find that my under-armpit
deception serves are better hidden with this stroke because my elbow is higher
and less of the paddle can be seen flashing by through the armpit space. In
addition, a guess-the-direction game can be played on your opponent, since with
the same overall stroke, you can do a small, hidden wrist rotation and send the
ball in the opposite direction, with the opposite spin, giving no visible clue
to your opponent. Finally, I've discovered an ultra-speed topspin serve that I
never had before by adding a hip punch rotation to my normal corkscrew topspin
movement.
The stability and control in V grip services again derive from the
in-the-plane characteristic of the blade during the wrist hinge movement and the
forearm rotation; to set the plane of movement you basically have to adjust the
position of your elbow by rotating your shoulder, a very large movement as
compared with wrist or forearm, and once you have that right, it's really right;
small jiggles will have a hard time screwing it up; and at the same time the
free swinging of elbow and wrist don't destabilize anything, but rather simply
accentuate the movement of the blade within the already-fixed plane.
In short, although the penhold grip has heretofore been the leading service
grip (certainly over the shakehand grip) in terms of intensity of sidespin and
intrinsic capability for deception, I find the V grip superior to the penhold
grip in both respects.
Elbow shots
The next question is how the V grip handles the point of weakness and indecision
at the elbow. Shots aimed at the elbow of a shakehand player force a quick
decision to hit with a forehand stroke or a backhand stroke; oftentimes you
can't get around in time to make the shot; and sometimes an opponent will curve
a sidespin shot so as to convince you initially to use a forehand stroke since
it starts by coming out toward the forehand, but then it curves into your body
and you can't back off far enough to keep your forehand on it. The cut point at
the elbow between forehand and backhand is a primary weak point of shakehand
players. Different players may adjust better to the left or to the right,
depending on their style. Some players cover substantially overlapping ranges
with both forehand and backhand, so they can defend this weak point well; while
others have big gaps at their elbows.
As a response to this problem, the V grip shares with the Seemiller grip the
ability to do a windshield-wiper stroke; topspin to one side or the other side
can be met with an elbow-underneath windshield-wiper stroke; shots to the middle
can receive the same windshield-wiper counter. However this is most effective
when the elbow shot comes at you with top-spin. A chop or flat shot is hard to
respond to; you can try to rotate around enough to loop through the chop or bend
your elbow more to bring the forearm up towards vertical for a straight-up flat
block, but these are extreme and unhappy solutions for handling these shots.
I also noticed that the backhand stroke can be somewhat uncomfortably
extended a few inches into the space naturally stroked-through by a forehand
stroke, and vice versa, so that there is indeed some overlap of forehand and
backhand stroke zones. But it seems to be less overlap than is available with
the shakehand grip (and the penhold grip, you could say, doesn't even have this
problem), so I would say that elbow shots are the primary weakness of the V grip
approach to table tennis. However, it seems that with some attention, that
weakness can be made solidly defensible. The best approach seems to be to play a
little farther back from the table and to concentrate on your footwork, so that
you can get around an elbow shot and handle it with a regular forehand or
backhand stroke. This is what I observed in the off-the-table play of the boy in
China. Another element here is a happy discovery that I made when I found that I
could successfully top-sidespin an elbow shot that had already blown past me, by
reaching back behind me and using the thumb side of the paddle; I fall back and
to the side to give the ball space to go past my body, drop my hand behind my
waist, thumb oriented towards my back, then I can lift the ball out as though
I'm pulling it out of my back pocket; and amazingly the result is a pretty
stable topspin/sidespin countershot, with good speed and power.
General characteristics
The V grip is a dramatically new and different way of playing table tennis. It
reduces cognitive load (and therefore response time), stabilizes the stroke by
removing or minimizing the destabilizing effects of small-muscle groups by
locking them out of the stroke or making them irrelevant to blade angle, and
assigns drive, angle, and spin to different large-muscle groups.
Extended Reach
The grip also adds reach. Just as the penhold grip adds slightly less than an
inch to the reach of the blade (measured from elbow to paddle tip), the V grip
adds about another inch of extension. This produces is an effect in the
direction of playing table tennis with a tennis racket, if you can imagine that,
in terms of the increased leverage and ball-contact speed that is produced. It
means more blade speed, more power, and more spin, in addition to slightly
better reach for wide-angled shots.
Wide angles
Most of the wide-angle reach advantages are from the backhand's forward elbow
position, described earlier, which allows more body rotation and thus greater
backhand-side reach, and on the forehand, from the naturally correct angle of
the paddle for returning wide and deep shots that you have to reach back to get.
At the same time the grip allows you to flip short balls at very sharp angles
and high speeds against your opponent, since you can extend the blade straight
in front of you as far as you can reach, and produce massive lateral blade
acceleration using the large muscles that move the forearm and stabilizing the
stroke with stiffness in the handshake rotation dimension of the wrist. This
sideways-flip shot is much more solid and powerful than the corresponding shot
with the shakehand grip, which requires simultaneous coordination of a lot of
additional muscular support across the hinge joint at the wrist, which the V
grip doesn't need.
Paddles
What about paddles? While
specialized paddles are best, I find that any kind of (two-sided) paddle can
be used with this grip: the pistol-type handgrip I saw in China; my own "Sung
Yang Special," a Korean-style radically-modified twiddler-grip penholder
paddle with asymmetrically-offset thumb-and-forefinger gripping posts; and also
your average shakehand or two-sided penhold paddles. So you should really be
able to use your own paddle for an initial tryout of this approach, at least,
although I would recommend you have something custom made for you if you decide
to really get into it.
Stability of the stroke
Generally speaking, the V grip produces swinging, slingshot-like, whippy
strokes, in which, as the wrist swings open and shut, the blade moves in an arc,
lying flat within a plane, which is itself the plane of the surface of the
blade. To get this ideal and stable stroke characteristic, every other
wrist-moving stroke in table tennis requires simultaneous and coordinated
movement in more than one of the natural degrees of freedom of the elbow, wrist,
and shoulder, or uses primarily the smaller, "handshake" rotation of the wrist;
none of them keep the blade flat in the plane of the blade as the main hinge
joint of the wrist bends and straightens. This means that the V grip grip allows
big wrist- and forearm-swinging motions which require no coordinated adjustments
of other joint rotations to keep the blade in a plane. Movement in the plane of
the blade is of course the kind of movement that produces spin. By stiffening
and preventing the small, handshake rotation of the wrist, and by providing that
the free-swinging, large, hinge rotations of the wrist have no directionally
destabilizing effect on the stroke (just adding a little more or less spin --
and even that you can cancel by stiffening the hinge joint also, or you can use
it to enhance the spin-generating forearm rotation), all the destabilizing
effects of movements of the small joints are taken out of the equation. Then the
position of the upper arm, and the extension of the elbow, become primarily
responsible for controlling the shot. The result is much more control (since you
can more easily control large muscle groups), and at the same time, more speed
and power (since the upper-arm and elbow do the driving work instead of the
wrist), and also more spin (since forearm rotation in the plane of the blade can
produce very high blade speed).
A New, Big Ball Game
These characteristics are perhaps even more important now that the big ball has
arrived. A new style that generates hyper-spinny, hyper-powerful shots, from
standing a little farther back from the table, is just what the doctor ordered,
since the big ball is heavier and faster after contact with the new heavier
paddles, but slows down faster, so that a middle-distance game is favored. The V
grip is a style that will do particularly well with the 40mm ball.
Quick and Easy to Learn
In my experience using it so far, I've seen that players who try it can produce
consistent backhand rallies not far below to their current skill level after
only a few minutes of practice with a patient partner.
It seems to be relatively easy to learn; easy to calibrate your shots; easy
to attain stability and reliability in repetitive drills. The ease and speed of
learning with the V grip could not contrast more sharply with my own extremely
long and painful experience in learning the reverse penhold backhand, which I've
been actively studying for most of a year and which I have still not
successfully made into a stable, game-useable stroke (see www.tomveatch.com,
click on "China" for the story of how far I've gone to improve it). In contrast,
I started winning games with good players after less than three days of practice
with the V grip, and I fully expect to surpass my penhold skill rating after a
month of drill and play. I find myself creatively hitting big strokes in ways I
hadn't imagined I could, with zing and accuracy.
Conclusion: Try it, you'll like it!
In conclusion, the V grip has tremendous mechanical advantages over both the
penhold and shakehand grip styles of play including control, speed, spin,
simplicity, response-time, and reach. So let me encourage you to take some time
to try it out for yourself; with a little patience I believe you will discover
it can quickly improve your game, even if you've spent years tuning up details
of your game within shakehand, penhold, or even Seemiller styles. What I've
found is that my skills are easily transferrable into this new form, and
actually I have found that only now can I finally do what I've been trying to
get myself to do for a long time -- the good habits come naturally. Another
advantage, if you are an early adopter, then you will have a real advantage
against the conservative masses who aren't willing to try something new.
Although the initial reaction of many people that I have talked to about it has
been laughter -- they can't believe I'm serious, and if I'm serious they think I
must be crazy -- nonetheless the reasons given here would argue that the V grip
is going to change the world of table tennis very soon. I hope you'll consider
being a leader, rather than a silent observer, of this change. And if you don't
believe it, then I encourage you to remind me of my mistake after the 2008
Olympics! But if I'm right, then promise you'll try it yourself!