My name is Tahl Leibovitz and I'm here at SPiN, New York.
I am a professional table tennis player who has been competing internationally since 1995.
I am here today to speak to you about the intermediate and beginner aspects of the Olympic
sport of table tennis The backhand push is extremely important in table tennis; you can
win a lot of points pushing with your backhand.
What we do at the higher levels is we try to use a quick backhand push so that we can
cause the opponent to return a sort of passive ball, we can try to counter that ball.
Now we have a few different types of backhand pushes but what I'm going to demonstrate is
one where we sort of pass through the ball really quickly, because we want to get a lot
of spin on the ball - like that.
So that's really where it's spinning.
The other one is where we just touch the ball because we have no spin, where we just sort
of touch it.
That's a little high but this one's low.
And the other one is where we just put light spin.
What's really effective is to be able to push the ball quickly and into your opponents backhand
because then you'll get a weak ball.
So when we use the backhand push we just need to be able to sort of move our hand, again
passing through the ball.
We have to pass through the ball.
You see that?
The ball's coming; it's called accelerate racquet speed‚ it's mainly used on forehand
loops and different things, but we use it for chop also.
We pass through the ball quickly, when we get to the ball.
So it's sort of really quick.
OK?
So that's the most important point of getting an effective backhand push is to stay low,
keep your racquet low, and pass through the ball quickly, even when you do no-spin.
OK, so that's the backhand push.