rubber to improve backhand topspin/flick
Ravili4 asked 6 years ago
Hi guys! I’m training for an almost year already thrise a week, but one thing I still can’t be confident in matches is my backhand topspin/flick, especially against backspin. Now I’m playing with Butterfly Grubba all+ with Xiom vega Europe on BH, now I’m going to change my BH rubber because its got old and wanted you to give me please me some advices in what rubbers could help me to improve my play, maybe softer/harder or more tacky? Ball rather often drops from racket or going to the net
Tom Academy Coach answered 6 years ago
Hi Ravili4,
The backhand flick is definitely a shot that can take time to get right and be confident with. The blade you have is good for someone playing for the length of time you have, it has very good control. I’ve tested Xiom rubbers in the past and found them to be good quality and nice for generating spin so it may the case that it’s simply your rubber has got very old and worn as you said and a fresh sheet of the same rubber will give you the extra grip to help with this shot. If you are definitely looking for a change then a great way is to try other people’s bat’s at your club or you friends to see what rubbers you find you like personally. I wouldn’t however go for a rubber which is very hard and tacky such as hurricane because this requires a more precise contact and different feeling. Something like tenergy or tibhar still have a good quality topsheet to create spin and would be a step up in speed and something like stiga genesis would be perhaps a touch slower but very high amounts of grip.
If you can send in a YouTube link of a video of you playing we’d be happy to analyse your flick and give you some technical tips too!
My personal suggestion is to stay with what you have but buy a nice new sheet, it can often be tempting to change equipment but it’s important especially when you’ve been playing around a year or so to keep working on the technical elements and try not to change rubbers etc too much. Hope that helps, any more questions just let us know!
Ravili4Thank you for a quick respond Tom! Firstly I doubted if my blade and rubber pair works well together, as I can understand from your answer its ok with that and suits my level of playing)) Honestly I’m not a person who likes to change eqipment just to try or someone who blames racket instead of poor technique, so the reason is to get better feeling in this shots using more proper rubber if its possible to progress quicker) because that xiom was given me by other coach as a good rubber when I just started and haven’t possibility to make a good choice by myself) one of my friends offers me almost new Tibhar evolution fx-p to try, what do you think about it?
No problem, yeah I totally understand what you mean sometimes when starting out it’s good to just get the advice of a coach to know what to start with. Yeah the blade and rubber combination is fine for learning and developing shots for sure.
The Tibhar evolution is a good rubber for sure, it will definitely be faster than what you have and that will be the biggest difference, it will feel more springy and reactive compared to what you have now. But give it a try and play with it for a while to give it a fair test, I think just having a newer rubber will help straight away. If you find it’s a bit too fast you can always then try other options or of course ask us what we think to try next 🙂
Let me know how you get on with it!
All right Tom, I’ll give it a try and do my best to prosress with that tricky shots)) I think week or two later I can give a feedback, so hope to stay in touch!
Last one thing- I tried to do some kind of comparison between these two rubbers on revspin.net and found then very similar, but your sayd Tibhar would be faster than xiom, I mean what is the reason why, or could my comparison on given characteristics (on the site) could be helpful or not?
Ok that’s great, sounds good to me!
Yeah online comparisons and statistics in magazines can give you a rough guide but there are definitely not always the most accurate way to find out what equipment is like because all companies and manufacturers want to make their equipment sound very good.
They are both fairly similar rubbers but evolution when testing both feels certainly quicker than the xiom, best way to find which you like the most is trying and testing a few different rubbers wherever possible and you’ll get to one you feel really confident and comfortable with that you can stick to! 🙂
