Hello dear friends of the knob,

have you already returned to the hall after the summer break?

For many players, it's the same every year:

You haven't been in the hall for several weeks and in good weather you may have even "forgotten" that the table tennis hall is there. In the WhatsApp groups of your club and your team, you could see holiday photos rather than training impressions.

OK. You look at the game plan and think that you should start training again. The first hits and the further training are a disaster. No feeling in your hand and you're standing on the plate like a tree trunk.

"The next training session will definitely be better," you think to yourself. But it's almost as bad as the training before. "Hmm. Maybe this season it won't do anything with the forehand topspin and I should just limit myself to the backhand".

The first game of the season is almost here and the schedule is starting to feel pressure...

Sounds like a tricky situation. But you know from experience that it always worked out and that it got better and better with a little more training. What can you do to find your rhythm as quickly and easily as possible after a long break?

Our tip:

Play in as long as possible and then start with very regular exercises and lots of repetitions to find a basis again.

After a longer break, the movements that were actually used are no longer correct and you have a lot of diversification in your game.

Only when you feel a little more confident with your standard shots does it make sense to play exercises with serve/return or sets.

If you still feel very insecure due to a lack of training, then it makes little sense to start with sets straight away.

Your body will also thank you after a long break if you start out with regular movements that are not too jerky at first to get used to the strain.

What about nub rubbers?

Basically the same and we should start with frequent repetitions and regular exercise courses. I myself always like it to get in and to develop a good feeling for the ball when my training partner plays into my pimples for as long as possible (techniques almost irrelevant) and when I can then repeat a wide variety of techniques over and over again.

However: Not every training partner likes to do this over a longer period of time at the start of training. Some players like playing against pimple rubbers and others don't. We should accept this. Especially when it's one of the first training sessions of the new season, I can fully understand why someone wants to play in regular, familiar strokes before playing irregularly against our pimple rubber for a long time.

We wish you a good start into the first training sessions of the 2022/2023 season. Of course, we are all the happier if you use our materials from Sauer&Tröger (for example with our Hellfire-X in the summery fresh colors purple and green).

Sebastian, Niclas and the entire Sauer & Tröger team