A New Discovery: Part 2

I hit against the robot feeding me topspin. First with inverted penhold. Then with inverted shakehand.

Perhaps it's a mental thing with me, or what I've trained my body to do but I was clearly hitting with more spin with the inverted shakehand. The natural angle of the blade when the arm is extended with shakehand lends me to believe this to be optimal.

See this demonstration.

As you're reading this, if you can, extended your arm to the side. Fingers pointed & all. I think most, if not all people would do something similar to this person above. This is a natural, relaxed position. Now lets imagine he's holding a shakehand blade.

You see how closed the face of the blade is? Skimming the top of the ball (obviously he'd have to open up a little) would be no problem. This is kind of what I was experiencing last night.

Now lets take the same natural grip & put a penhold blade in it. The face of the blade would almost be completely flat or even. If he wants to topspin he incoming ball, he will have to change his finger placement to accommodate for the FH. Slight finger placement change is common place in penhold.

What you do is with your fingers extended on the back, apply pressure with your thumb or not to essentially teeter totter the angle of the blade accordingly. Penholders do this naturally without thinking about it.

Well I don't extend my fingers on the back of the paddle. I curl them. Its the only way I can twiddle with the speed I do. If I never twiddled, I probably would go with the fingers extended approach. Consequently, with the fingers curled on the back, It's much harder to adjust the angle as instead of there being a thin point on the back of the paddle (fingers extended) there's a circular flat shape. I hope that makes sense.

Long story short. For me, for one reason or another, I find it more natural to hit into the ball more flat with penhold vs massively spinning it.

I put my TSP Spectol Red in place of the inverted last night and it was back to normal. What a relief. The TSP is a tuned more firm sponge designed for the 40+ mm ball. I initially didn't like it because it was too fast but I feel I didn't give it enough time. It's still plenty fast. Faster than my inverted actually. I just have to be controlled while I get use to it.

An additional plus is that the stroke mechanics between a SP FH and a LP FH are not dramatically different. So my body doesn't have to learn two completely different techniques for every shot.

I will try to bring more club play as I progress.