Hey Pat, I can understand your frustrations for sure because I’ve also had similar situations happen to me many times in the past. What you’ve mentioned about getting tense and tight in games is very common actually and lots of players find this happens to them, where in training the shots feel great and high quality but in matches you can’t get the same feeling or even play the shots you’ve learnt.
There’s a few ways to improve this and help transfer your training level into matches because from what I can see in the video and what you’ve said I can see you have the ability and ability understand the shots well its just often you are rushing slightly which is causing the mistakes.
So the first thing is to try and slow down in games and focus on the first 3 balls just getting them in the table consistently with spin. Focusing on spin is a great way to slow down without playing too negative as well. Especially on the forehand side because I can see you have a strong forehand I, some shots were excellent but often the mistakes were due to not enough spin. I would also say getting really comfortable with pushing on both sides helps as then you don’t feel you have to attack every ball and rush to finish the points.
The next thing to do is in practice, try to do lots of irregular drills so you don’t know where the ball is going and you are always having to read the signals and make decisions. Also plenty of serve and follow up topspin shots which is common in games.
I think a lot of what is happening right now is just confidence and developing the belief and consistency in those attacking shots. This will help you be able to relax more and things will progress as you feel the shots are transferred better from training to match play. It can be frustrating and take a bit of time but I’m sure you can get there with what I mentioned.
The video editing software for the matches is a nice idea and definitely worth it when watching back games to analyse so thanks for passing on the details for him too.
Any questions on this just let me know.
Thanks, Dan 🙂
