Practice › Table tennis
Table Tennis Shadow Practice With a Live Form Coach
Table tennis is won on small, repeatable movements: a short backswing, contact in front of your body, a quick recovery. Shadow practice trains those with no partner and no table, and Formanti watches each stroke through your phone camera and tells you what to fix.
Everything runs on your phone, and your video is not uploaded. Pick a stroke below to see what it looks at and the drills you get for the mistakes it finds.
No equipment needed. Practise at home. Just do the swing properly in front of your phone. No court, ball or shuttle is needed, and a racket is optional: the coach judges your movement, so a shadow swing at home in a hallway or garden is enough.
What you get after a session
When you finish, you get a report like this one.
- How many swings were in range, out of how many.
- The one thing to work on next, then the next, each with a drill.
- Every swing as a picture with your skeleton on it: ticked, or flagged with what was off.
How to practise table tennis on your own
- Put your phone 2 to 3 metres away with you in full view, and stand about where you would at the table.
- Drill one stroke at a time, 15 to 20 repetitions, keeping the backswing short.
- Recover to your ready position after every stroke. Practise that as much as the stroke itself.
- Read the report and take the one repeated mistake to your next table session.
What to work on first
Short and in front. Almost every table tennis fault comes from a swing that is too big or contact that is too late. Keep the backswing short, take the ball in front of your body at the top of the bounce, and spend as much time on recovering to ready as on the stroke itself.
Table tennis shots you can practise
- Forehand drive: A steadier table tennis forehand drive: short swing, contact in front, quick recovery.
- Backhand drive: A compact table tennis backhand drive: elbow in front, forearm drives.
- Smash: A table tennis smash that lands: wait for the high ball, step back, hit through it.
- Forehand loop: A heavier table tennis forehand loop: drop low, brush up, drive with the legs.
- Backhand flick: A sharper table tennis backhand flick: step in, bat over the table, snap early.
- Push: A tighter table tennis push: open face, low and short, contact at the top.
- Chop: A better table tennis chop: step back, high to low, open bat, backspin.
- Serve: A legal, reliable table tennis serve: open palm, toss up, contact behind the line.
Frequently asked questions
Can you practise table tennis without a table?
Technique, footwork and the serve motion can all be shadowed. You do not get ball feel, but you do get thousands of clean repetitions.
Why does it ask me to stand side-on?
A single camera cannot judge depth well from the front. Side-on, it can see how far in front of your body you are making contact.