When serving, many players focus on height, deception, speed, spin, and placement.  These elements are very important.  However, the main reason that you need to practice serving is to develop precision.  If you have control over your serve, it is easy to control the rally when you are serving.  Here are a few consequences of having poor precision…
 

Fighters win and winners fight!  At the US Open last month, a girl was losing 10-0 in the final game and won 12 straight points!  When you are playing well, when everything is going your way, when the shots are easy, then of course you can win!  However, if you want to reach your peak potential, then you must learn to fight even when you aren’t having a good day, even when your opponent gets tons of nets and edges, and even when you are down 10-0 and you feel like it is over!

 
 
The students that I’m currently coaching range from about 100-2200 USATT rating.  For each of these students they are at a different learning stage.  In this blog posting, I will be giving the progressive order of the strokes and the order in which they should be learned.  If you are having trouble with one of the strokes listed below, see if you have perfected these items in order of priority.  Note: You might have missed one of the important aspects! J
 
Serve
1. Ball control
2. Spin
3. Height
4. Depth
5. Placement

In table tennis, there are ten common training methods – drilling with a training partner, serving practice, robot training, multiball training, practice matches against a variety of opponents, video analysis of your own game, video analysis of top players, physical training, mental training, and tournaments on a regular basis.  I will talk briefly about the first four and then show you a short video demonstrating each of those elements of training.