How to Level Up With A Robot!

Hello and welcome to Peck Pong. Today we're going to be talking about robots and how you can incorporate a robot in your practice to improve your level. Some of my biggest improvements have come when I have used the robot to practice and specifically from 1300 until 1700, 2100 until 2300 and I still use a robot today. So I think if done right it can also have a similar effect on your game as well. In this video we're going to be covering the three stages of practice. Many different types of practice routines and things like that if you're interested in learning how to use a robot to practice as well as some very unique ways to use a robot to enhance your practice that maybe you haven't thought of or that nobody has showed you. When it comes to robots you don't need a fancy robot. A lower end robot will do the trick for phases one and two. When you get into phase three which is some variations and stuff like that it'll be hard to simulate that with a robot that is on the lower end of the price range. Most of my career I've done practice with a robot that is on the lower end and very simple and I've gotten a lot of really good work just by being more specific with what I practice. Personally I like to use the Power Pong robot. I've really enjoyed the user interface and practicing with it. It seems to be able to do pretty much everything that I want it to do in terms of variation, placement, spins, and stuff like that. If you find this video useful and you want to invest in your own Power Pong robot I have left a link in the description for a coupon code for five percent off on any of their robots so if you want to do that that's that's there for you. All right so let's get into phase one of practicing with your robot. All right so the first stage is stroke development, repetitions, and movement and one of the biggest questions I get on this channel is how can I get my moving faster and a lot a common complaint is that I can move when I know where the ball is going but as soon as it hits a game I really can't move and I just feel like I'm stuck to the ground. So this is a common problem and I have made a small diagram or picture to illustrate the progression of how how moving in a game can be. So let's get this thing here and we will examine this. Here is my beautiful diagram. I know it's a it's a really nice piece of art. So this is where most people stand. They're kind of sitting here and they're saying like they're doing really well when they're practicing but as soon as it gets to a game speed they can't seem to make this gap. So my goal as a coach is to figure out how to get my marker here. My goal is to figure out how to get them to bridge this gap with smaller steps and I believe I have found a really nice way to do that and you can also simulate it with a robot. So typically what I do I get a box of multiball and I stand a little bit farther away from the table and and I go random 50 percent 60 percent of the table and I have them move like that because when I move a little further away it gives them a lot more time to a move and b it also gives them a lot more time to see where the ball is going like initially off my racket and this is a really good way I have found to kind of build them up to a game speed and I'll what I'll do is I'll just start a little bit far back and once they kind of mastered that then I'll just move a little bit closer a little bit closer and then we're kind of finally at uh right at the table and they're able to move uh at a game speed and so what you can do with a robot is you can kind of set the robot back farther away and you can have it on random going anywhere and then you also can move in that random manner and it will help you to kind of bridge the gap between game speed and practice speed. When you're trying to improve as a player I feel like a lot of the time you need to spend is just doing repetitions of the correct stroke and gaining that kind of feeling and it can be really hard in the United States or maybe anywhere for that matter just because I feel like the dynamic here is that you go to a club and people usually just want to play matches and it's really hard to find a practice partner. I was kind of lucky because I had my brother and he also was interested in practicing a lot so but many people are not like that so a robot is really great because it lets you just isolate yourself and practice those repetitions and get that stroke really ingrained. I would definitely recommend getting a coach and learning the stroke or watching my videos maybe to figure out how to do a stroke but once you have the stroke kind of proper you just need a lot of repetitions and that's what a robot can do for you. Practicing things like forehand underspin loop, backhand underspin loop, forehand topspin loop, maybe basic moving from side to side, working on your pushing technique, and also your flip techniques and stuff like that. The robot really helps to isolate those strokes and you can kind of get a lot of repetitions in. I would caution you on a pitfall that many people fall into and that is because the robot is very consistent. A lot of times people just set up the robot to do a certain skill like for example underspin loops and they find this like perfect angle and they hit the ball over and over and over again the same exact way with terrible technique and then they walk away feeling like a champ, like they've figured the world out and they get into a game and games are not like that at all. The ball is constantly doing many different things, spins, heights, steps, speeds, etc. and the euphoria they felt at first with the robot is gone. So I would caution on that and just use the robot to focus on clean techniques as opposed to just getting the ball on the table. So there are a couple different ways you can use a robot in a creative way to get a kind of a form of practice you normally wouldn't get with a robot and the first one is to move the robot way far back and try to simulate counter loops. That can be fun and a nice way to kind of bridge the gap if you're trying to learn how to counter loop balls and you can also have it simulate a chopper because the ball comes in a lot different when it's coming from a distance with underspin than when someone pushes. So having the robot back and kind of shooting underspin balls can simulate a chopper which can be really helpful because a lot of people don't play choppers. The second way is to lower the robot a little bit lower towards the table on maybe a chair or something because when you're trying to simulate a serve normally robots sit a little bit too high to simulate a serve and normally when people serve at a high level they serve a lot lower and touch the ball lower. So what you can do is kind of get a chair and set your robot down and you can simulate long serves and short serves a lot better this way. You can also change the location of the robot to simulate a serve as well because many times people serve from different corners of the table. Another way to use the robot is to wait until it spits the ball out before moving. A lot of times in games someone catches you wide in the forehand and you have to make a very large movement and the robot can simulate this perfectly if you just kind of wait for the ball to shoot out before moving and you can really work on your cross step and work on catching the ball a little bit later and looping it back. One of the added benefits about the power pong robot is that when it's oscillating and spitting balls to different locations if you're not really paying attention to it it's actually quite hard to see where the metal plate will be aiming whereas with other robots the the head moves and it's very easy to predict where the ball will go because it's blatantly obvious but with the power pong robot it's very hard to see which direction so that can add a added benefit of variation that you can use when maybe doing a blocking drill or something and you want to work on your ability to adjust very quickly without knowing where the ball is going. All right so phase two and this is where the power of the robot really comes into full force. When I went to Sweden and trained full-time I had a coach there who kind of opened my eyes to the game of table tennis. He was explaining to me the different serve receives you can go with the spins against the spins late touches loop variations angle adjustments putting a lot of spin on your loops putting less spin on your loops hitting the ball a little bit harder or you know hitting it a little bit more soft with the top sheet of the wood of the blade and he taught me a lot of different stuff and I absorbed the concepts but I never really got a chance to fully practice those skills until later when I came back home and I had a lot of isolated time with my robot and what I did was I just set up the robot into different sequences and just really worked on each of those touches and really dialed them in and I'll go over a few of them so bear with me it'll be a little bit long-winded but I just want to show you the power of the robot and how many different things you can do with it. So some of the things you can work on are your forehand flips your forehand inside out flips you can work on your short flips you can work on both wings of your heavy cuts as well as your fast long pushes with less spin you can work on short pushes right off the bounce on both wings as well as short push late touch on both sides you can also work on wide push variations and you can work on looping from off the side of the table and work on different locations as well as looping medium long balls off the end of the table and you can also work on looping over the table when the ball is kind of a little bit high and then you can work on serve receive like receive against backhand serves with the spin you can work on different cut variations you can work on short cuts on those flips and then you can also work with backhand pushes pushing wide with backhand against backhand serves and then you can push long with heavy spin or light spin you can work on late touches with them and then you can also move into your forehand spins and all the different variations of touches late early with against and things of that nature so i think you're getting the point as to how many different variations you can practice and you might be wondering why you need to be practicing all of those and the truth is if you want to win in table tennis from my experience being able to making a nice receive against the spin a little bit more with a swipe is more effective than making a fast push against certain players and sometimes making a fast push is more effective than making a slow heavy push so being able to toggle your receives or just your touches in general will help you to win more matches and having a robot lets you isolate those different skills and when that happens in a game you feel a lot more prepared and like you've got the reps in so up until now all these different drills and skills have been practiced with a pretty basic robot and you can just adjust the spin adjust the placement and maybe adjust the speed to kind of dial it in this next phase is going to require a robot that has a lot more adjustability and programming and thankfully in the last maybe five six years robots have come out that have been able to really fine tune different skills and start doing different variations and stuff like that okay so now we're going to get into phase three which is the phase that i'm in right now and that i really enjoy practicing with my robot whenever i get a chance and that is game like variations and randomization and what does this mean well in games there's a lot of different variations and randomizations that happen like reoccurring themes for example let's say i'm doing backhand backhand a lot of times in games people are mixing up the speeds and spins and being able to program a robot to shoot out balls a little bit faster and then maybe one or two slow ones and then one or two fast and kind of oscillate between the two and have me get used to that off tempo really helps uh when in a game because then i'm able to adjust to the timing a lot better so being able to program your robot to simulate a lot of these game-like randomizations and variations can be very helpful to yeah keep improving keep improving your level as you get better when maybe you don't have a practice partner who can sit there and block different tempos for you or push at different depths so i'm going to go over my top six favorite drills that i do just because there's there's a lot of different drills you can do but i'm going to go over my six favorite ones to show you the power of the robot and if you have a robot maybe you can do them yourself to keep improving your game so the first one we'll go over is i already mentioned it the backhand different speed variations this is just definitely one of my favorite drills i've been doing this a long time and what i really focus on is keeping my racket in front hitting the balls and when i programmed a slower ball to come in there i really try to see it and take advantage and take a little bit of a bigger swing so it's a really good drill to kind of get me in the right frame of mind for when we're going back and back and in games the next drill that i really like to do and it's a little bit complicated maybe i can show a little diagram of where the balls go but it's 60 of the table all forehand and i have a couple balls going long and nice and fast and then i have two or three balls that go short uh in the forehand not that short but short enough that i have to kind of step in and kind of lift the ball up because a lot of times in games when someone's blocking to you they're not really blocking uh exactly always out sometimes the ball is coming a little bit inside you have to make that step in and then i have it programmed to also go once or twice to my backhand one time fast and one time a little bit slower to kind of keep me honest because i don't want to become uh just a forehand dominant and just kind of always hitting forehand over and over and over and not being able to adjust for backhand so i have programmed in there a couple backhands to just keep me honest and have my racket in front so that by chance if if it does go to my backhand i can be ready and make that transition and this one really works me out and i love it and it really helps me to get my depth correct uh and my pacing as well when i'm playing games so the next drill we'll go over is short until long to backhand and a lot of times in games people are serving short or receiving my serve short and i have to make that step in and make a good push back and sometimes they go short again and i have always be mentally ready for that long backhand push because in table tennis people target your long backhand after you've stepped in so this drill is really great because it keeps me honest and it also really targets my in and out movement so another really good drill you can program is for yourself one of the key things to improve your backhand flip is to be able to gauge the depth of your opponent's serve and this is a really big one when you're really trying to increase the level of your backhand flip because a lot of times people get the backhand flip but they can't execute it in a game and one of the main reasons is because the depth is always changing so being able to flip a shorter ball a medium ball or a ball that actually comes just a little bit out is really important to be able to gauge the depth and make a good flip so i have my robot kind of doing these three different depths and it's my job to pay attention and move in or stay out all right so the final drill we'll go over and this one is serve receive and a lot of times in games people will do for example maybe a backhand serve and they'll target three different locations when they serve maybe short at the forehand short at the backhand and long to the backhand and with the robot you can set it up so you can hit all these three different places and i have to admit it did take it does take a little bit of time to kind of set it up the robot kind of set up on a chair to simulate the serve and it's a little bit lower so yeah just but the payoff is really worth it once you get it really dialed in so the real beauty of this drill is that typically when you play an opponent if they get ready with their backhand serve you already know pretty much that they're going to do maybe one of three or four serves and you have to remember in your head which receives are the good ones and sometimes you have to toggle them to kind of keep your opponent off off guard so with this drill what i like to do is i try to use my memory and remember each receive what i want to do with it so for example if i'm playing an opponent and i know that when they do that backhand serve if i can push the short one to my forehand back again short then i'm going to be winning and if i can maybe flip that one that they do short to my backhand then i'll also win and if i loop that long one down the line i'll be winning and that takes a lot of mental load to remember all three of those receives but when you do this drill it really targets that portion of the game to increase your kind of ability to memorize which receives you want to make and then on top of that you can kind of keep moving forward and do different receives because a lot of times in matches your opponent will get used to your receives and being able to turn on a switch and say okay now that short one that i was pushing to short again i'm going to push that one long but i'm going to keep the other ones the same and kind of targeting your memory like this can really help and just doing serves over and over and receiving them can yeah this is definitely one of my favorite drills that i've been using with the robot and like i said it's pretty hard to find someone who's just going to sit there and serve backhand serves for you for you know 30 minutes straight so the robot really comes in handy with this you can do backhand serves you can do forehand serves you can target topspin serves underspin serves even dead serves i know with the power pong robot you can do dead serves which is really nice because i had trouble receiving the dead ones and being able to cut them nicely has helped help my game all right so that's the video i hope you guys enjoyed it maybe you can start incorporating the way i practice with a robot in your game and again i have left the link in the description for the power pong robot website and the coupon code to get five percent off any of the robots i personally use the omega version because i really like the app it's very simple for me to kind of uh save drills that i really like and also build them i hope you guys enjoyed the video and i will see you guys in the next one