balls – 360TT Blog

Eyes, ears and the size of the hall: the science of reading the ball

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 18:30:00 -0300

Have you ever noticed that, when your opponent hits the ball hard, you “seem to know” how it is coming before you even see it cross the net? I have always had the impression that we react faster to a sound than to an image. Not because of the speed of sound or light through the air, but because of the time the brain takes to receive and decode each one.

Something else we notice often, and that many professionals talk about: in a big hall, the ball seems to travel less. Some players even adjust their racket for these venues, making it a little faster. In a small room, it is the opposite: everything seems faster. Part of this is perception and part is real physics, and I will explain both.

The idea for this post came from a conversation with my friend Luiza, who is starting out in table tennis at our Academy. Few people in the table tennis world know this, but I worked for many years in car audio, on systems built for in-car sound quality and competitions, which forced me to study acoustics and our hearing system; I also taught classes on loudspeakers and speaker cabinets at Senai Ipiranga, in São Paulo, for JVC do Brasil. Luiza is “just” an aerospace engineer and an acoustics specialist, which gives you a good idea of what our conversations are like. In this particular one, she mentioned that we react faster to a sound than to an image, and that matched what I have always seen at the table. I went to find out what science says. And the two impressions are more connected than they seem.

TL;DR: the sound of the hit arrives after the image, but the brain processes sound faster and, over the distance of a table, it wins the race. The ear gives the first clue about the spin: every racket has three sounds, and a study from the University of São Paulo showed you can recognize spin by ear alone. The eyes can be trained (in a German TV test, the fighter pilot scored average and Timo Boll came close to double), and sound even changes the speed you “see”: a ball that cracks loudly scares you more than it actually travels. In a big hall, sound, background, distance and cold rubber add up; the air only changes the game at altitude, where the same topspin lands longer. At the end, what the pros do and what to take to your game: arrive early at the hall, train with earplugs (the Deaflympics even ban hearing aids), use peripheral vision against glare and look after your eyes and ears.

Sound arrives later, but the brain reads it first

First, the physics. Light is practically instantaneous. Sound travels at about 343 meters per second (in air at 20 °C). With your opponent 4 meters away, the noise of the hit reaches you about 12 milliseconds after the image.

Now, the biology. In the ear, sound physically moves the cells that pick up the vibration, and the signal goes out almost immediately. In the eye, light has to trigger a chemical reaction in the retina before it becomes an electrical signal. Result: sound takes about 8 to 10 ms to reach the brain; the image, 20 to 40 ms (figures gathered in Kosinski’s review, from Clemson University, citing Kemp and Marshall).

This shows up in reaction time. On average in the classic studies, we react to a sound in 140 to 160 ms and to a light in 180 to 200 ms. A study with students (Shelton and Kumar, Neuroscience & Medicine, 2010) measured 284 ms for sound and 331 ms for the image: almost 50 ms of difference. A larger study, with 120 medical students (Jain and colleagues, 2015), reached the same conclusion.

Do the math: the ear starts about 40 ms ahead and loses about 12 ms on the sound’s journey. There is still an advantage left. Researchers call the distance at which the two tie the “horizon of simultaneity”: somewhere between 10 and 15 meters (an idea from neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel). At a table tennis table, well before that, sound wins.

And 40 ms seems like nothing, but a ball at 60 km/h travels about 67 cm in that time. That is a quarter of the table.

What the ear tells you before the eye sees it

In the post about the invisible enemy of your drive, I explained the Tau factor: the brain works out when the ball will arrive from how fast it “grows” on the retina. The problem is that Tau needs the ball to already be traveling. At the instant of the hit, it has nothing to measure yet.

Sound does. It arrives practically at the instant of contact with the ball and carries information about the hit: whether it was flat or brushed, hard or soft. A Brazilian study (Santos and colleagues, Journal of Human Kinetics, 2017) recorded the sound of forehands with four levels of spin and asked 34 players to identify each one by ear alone. They got it right 50.9% of the time, well above chance (25%). And training level (years of practice and hours per week) made no difference: everyone “hears” spin.

I usually tell my students that every racket has three sounds, and each one tells you how the ball is coming:

Contact mostly on the topsheet (the ball just brushes the rubber): it makes almost no noise. It is a ball with a lot of spin.
Mostly on the sponge: a characteristic sound, reminiscent of the “click” of the old speed glues. It is the stroke that sinks into the sponge, with speed and spin together.
Mostly on the blade: a louder, drier crack. It is the flattest ball, more power than spin.

🔬 Did you know: what the USP study measured

Researchers from USP in Ribeirão Preto invited 34 players during the 2014 South American Championship: 24 men and 10 women, with almost 10 years of practice and about 16 hours of training per week, on average. In the lab, a professional athlete played topspin forehands, all at about 50 km/h, changing only the spin; high-speed cameras measured the rotation of each ball. Then each player listened to 20 of these sounds on headphones and tried to say what the spin was.

Sound of the hit	Ball rotation	Correct
Flat	up to ~60 per second	76.5%
Medium spin	~105 per second	46.5%
Heavy spin	~140 per second (~8,400 per minute)	42.9%
Light spin	~84 per second	36.5%

The flat ball was by far the easiest to recognize: it is the crack of the blade. And the most curious part: players with more years in the game did not hear better. The authors’ hypothesis is that table tennis players train vision and touch a lot, but almost never the ear. In other words: game hearing is a skill almost nobody trains, and it is right there, for free, waiting to be trained.

But the ear does not replace the eye. In 2025, researchers from Taiwan (Lin and Liu, Psychology of Sport and Exercise) tested high-level university players with sound only, image only and both. With sound only, they still recognized the ball, but started the movement later and with more irregular timing. Vision is still in charge; sound is the clue that arrives first.

Table tennis has known this for a long time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the “combination” racket became fashionable: an offensive inverted rubber on one side and pips or an anti-spin on the other, both the same color. And it was not a choice: the rule at the time required both sides to be the same color. The player twiddled the racket in their hand between points (or during the point), and the opponent had no way of knowing, by color, which side had hit the ball. That left the sound, which is different for each rubber. That is why stamping your foot on the serve was such a great trick: it hid exactly the noise that would give the rubber away. The ITTF gradually closed the loopholes: in 1983, at the Tokyo congress, it began requiring two clearly different colors, required players to show the racket to the opponent and the umpire before the match (and at every racket change), and banned foot stamping on the serve; in 1985, it decided that one side would be black and the other red, a rule that took effect in July 1986. With color giving the rubber away, the foot-stamping rule lost its purpose and was dropped. Today, players who stamp their foot on the serve want to mask the spin, not the type of rubber.

Fast eyes can be trained

There is a video I have kept for years that came to mind while writing this post. It is a German TV report (the Planetopia program, around 2008) called “The magic eye”, about the vision of Timo Boll, then 27. “You have to get into tunnel vision and focus on what matters: the stamp on the ball,” he says, talking about the brand and model printed on the ball. From the spin of that stamp, he adjusts his arm and the racket angle “in fractions of a second”. (The cover of this post is Boll at the Beijing Olympics, in 2008, in a photo by Andre Kiwitz, CC BY-SA 2.0.)

The report was filmed at Ruhr University Bochum, with researcher Gernot Jendrusch, and has two tests. If you want to watch it, the video is on YouTube, in German; you can turn on subtitles with automatic translation into English.

The stamp replaced by numbers. They replaced the stamp on the ball with numbers from 0 to 9, and a machine fired balls at three speeds. Boll got 4 out of 5, then 3 out of 5, then 2 out of 5. The challenger was Benedikt, 21, an amateur player from the state league. At the highest speed, he got one more number right than Boll. The reason, according to Jendrusch: he followed the ball’s trajectory for longer and had a chance to read the number at the last instant. A word of caution: it was a test of reading the ball, not of hitting it.

The speed of the eyes. A ring with a gap moves across the screen, faster and faster, and the person has to “jump” their eyes to it and say which side the gap is on. The test measures up to what speed the eye can locate the target. A German fighter pilot joined the challenge, 40 years old with 3,600 flight hours in a Tornado fighter jet, who deals with planes approaching at about 500 meters per second:

Who	How far the eye located the target
Ordinary person (average)	180 degrees per second (~50 km/h)
Fighter pilot	180 degrees per second (average)
Benedikt, amateur table tennis player	205 degrees per second
Timo Boll	330 degrees per second (~90 km/h)

The pilot was average. Jendrusch explains that his profession does not demand that much from the eye muscles; racket sports do. As for Benedikt, he says the result comes from his age (he is young) and also from the sport, which taught him to perceive movement early. Boll’s motion vision, according to him, is 50 to 60% above the average person.

Behind the report there is serious work. Between 2007 and 2008, Bochum and the Aalen Institute of Optics put together a complete profile of the German national team’s vision. Boll’s motion vision was about 20% better than that of his teammates. In the interview that accompanies the study (Zeitschrift für praktische Augenheilkunde, 2008), he says he reads the stamp on the ball mainly on the serve; on hard balls, it is not possible. In the same work, racket sport athletes score well above athletes from other sports and people who do not play sports.

And the good part: according to Jendrusch, motion vision can be trained very well. In tennis and volleyball, there are already specific exercises for it. Boll himself says the same.

Sound also changes the speed you “see”

This is where it gets interesting. Sound does not just arrive first: it changes the speed you think the ball has.

German researcher Rouwen Cañal-Bruland and colleagues showed tennis videos in which the hit sounded louder or quieter, with the same image. The louder the sound, the farther people thought the ball would land (Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2018). In a second study (Cognitive Research, 2022), with and without the sound of the hit, people judged the ball faster when they heard the sound, even though it was exactly the same video. In a simulated baseball test (eNeuro, 2023), a louder hit made people overestimate the ball’s speed.

And then there is the startle. A loud, sudden sound triggers an ancient body reflex that speeds up the reaction and puts more force into the movement. In a 2024 study, reaction time dropped from about 169 ms (image only) to 140 ms (image and sound) and to 108 ms with a 120-decibel startling sound. That is why we get “startled” by that ball that cracks loudly off the opponent’s racket, and often it is not even that fast. Beginners even blink, which makes defending that ball even harder. The body reacts to the noise, not to the ball.

Why the ball seems slower in a big hall

Now put all this together with what everyone feels in a big hall. There are four things adding up: two of perception and two real ones.

The same sport, two worlds: the table tennis venue at the 2008 Beijing Games and our Academy's room in its first year. Photos: Andre Kiwitz (Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0) and 360TT.

1. Sound spreads out

In a small room, the walls and ceiling are close. The echo of the hit comes back almost together with the original sound, and the noise gets louder and “fuller”. In a big hall, the ceiling is high and the walls are far away: with a wall 15 meters away, the echo arrives about 85 ms later, separate, weak, mixed with the noise from other tables and the crowd. The hit sounds smaller. And, as we saw, a quieter hit makes the ball seem slower. I did not find a study measuring this inside a hall: it is the link between what the studies show and what we experience at the table.

2. The eyes lose their reference

In 1931, psychologist J. F. Brown showed that the speed we perceive depends on the “frame” around the movement: in a larger frame, the same movement seems slower (Psychologische Forschung). In a small room, the ball passes in front of nearby walls and objects. In a big hall, the background is far away and dark, and the table even looks smaller.

3. Distance: the ball travels farther and really arrives slower

This part is not an illusion. In larger halls, there is often more space per table, and with more room behind the table we tend to step back further. A table tennis ball is light and loses speed very quickly in the air, especially today’s 40+ balls, which are larger than the old 38 mm ones (I told that story in the ball guide). By our calculations, a ball that leaves the racket at 72 km/h and flies 4.5 m instead of 3 m arrives about 19% slower and about 130 ms later. It is the factor that weighs the most.

4. Cold and humidity on the rubber

A big hall, air-conditioned or without sunlight, tends to be colder. And rubber is very sensitive to cold: it loses elasticity and plays slower. Humidity matters too: the rubber loses grip and the ball slips. It is no accident that so many players rub the rubber with their hand and breathe on it between points: the breath warms the rubber a little and, together with the hand, removes the dust. Sure, we live in a tropical country and it is hot here, but bear in mind that in many countries where table tennis is popular, winters are harsh and below-zero temperatures are normal.

The subject is so serious in those countries that heated racket cases have appeared: one by Donic, called Rubber Warmer, and a case with a patented heating element that, according to the manufacturers, brought the rubber to 40–50 °C. Players who tried them say on forums that the racket gets much faster for about 30 to 40 minutes. The idea did not catch on, but it shows how big the effect of cold is.

What about the air in the hall?

That barely changes anything. Air pressure depends on altitude, not on the size of the room: it is the same in the big hall and the small one in the same city. Temperature changes air density a little: between 15 °C and 30 °C, the ball loses only about 1% more speed in the cold by the time it reaches you. Humidity changes the air even less. In other words: in a big hall, the culprits are the sound, the background, the distance and, perhaps, the cold rubber. Not the air.

At altitude, the air really changes the game

Changing cities is another story. The higher you go, the thinner the air, and that affects two things.

The first is air resistance: with thinner air, the ball loses less speed along the way.

The second is the Magnus effect, the force that makes a spinning ball curve. On a topspin, the spin pushes the ball down; that is why you can hit hard and the ball still lands on the table. And this force is huge: in our simulation, the same ball without spin would go more than 1 meter farther. The catch is that the Magnus effect depends on the air: with thinner air, the same spin curves the ball less.

Colombian researcher Jorge Escobar, a fluid mechanics specialist and table tennis player, says that in Bogotá (2,600 m) topspin drops less and balls go long (American Physical Society, 2012). We did the math for a topspin at 54 km/h that leaves the racket 40 cm behind the table, 15 cm above it, and lands near the end of the table at sea level. The same stroke, changing nothing:

Where	Air thinner than at sea level	The ball lands
Santos (sea level)	reference	at the end of the table
Belo Horizonte (~850 m)	~10%	~15 cm farther
Brasília (~1,170 m)	~13%	~20 cm farther
Bogotá (~2,600 m)	~27%	~46 cm farther (off the table)

The same stroke in four cities, to scale. 360TT simulation.

These are estimates from a simple model, not measurements. Temperature also plays a part: the same stroke lands about 7 cm farther on a 30 °C day than on a 15 °C one.

What this means in practice:

If you train at altitude and play on the coast, you feel the ball dropping sooner and arriving slower, the same feeling as in a big hall. It is worth raising your topspin arc a little and, if needed, making your racket a little faster. Playing closer to the table can also help.
If you come from sea level to altitude, you see the ball going long. The answer is to close the racket more and trade a little power for spin.
In both cases, use your first session in the new place to calibrate the length of your ball: pay attention to the sound and the depth of your ball, whether it is landing shorter or longer on the opponent’s side.

What the pros do

That is why so many professionals adjust their racket for big halls. In a 2021 video showing how he glues his rubbers, Dimitrij Ovtcharov says he uses more layers of glue when the hall is big. I also remember Samsonov saying he switched to a faster blade in these venues. Others use more booster. And this is nothing new: when the 40+ ball arrived, slower and with less spin, even Ma Long changed his blade to compensate (Ma Long’s lesson).

Boll, Ovtcharov and Steger, team bronze in London 2012, and Samsonov in Beijing 2008. Photos: Joel Solomon (Flickr, CC BY 2.0) and Andre Kiwitz (Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0).

And they all do one thing first: they get to know the hall. At major tournaments, the best players practice in the competition hall in the days before, precisely to recalibrate sound, background, distance and ball. We can say that acclimatizing to a new playing venue is extremely important.

What to take to your game

1. Arrive early and hit in the hall

A tournament in a big hall, or in another city? Arrive early and hit as much as possible at the venue. Your brain needs to recalibrate the sound, the background, the distance and the length of the ball. The first points of the match are not the place for that. And, between points, keep your rubber clean, dry and warm if the venue is cold.

2. Adjust your racket carefully, and never on match day

If you always play in a small room and are going to a tournament in a big hall (or coming down from altitude to the coast), you can do what Ovtcharov does: one more layer of glue. Our performance glues work exactly like that. With EasyGlue Green+, two layers keep the original speed of the setup, and from the third layer on the glue creates an elastic film that makes the racket faster with each layer. EasyGlue Carbon does the same with a more direct response, like a carbon blade.

EasyGlue Green+ glue360TT water-based performance glue: two layers keep the speed of the setup; three or more make the racket faster with each layer. Visit the store →

Two rules: test it in practice before the tournament (never change anything on the day) and remember that the glue film counts toward the ITTF’s 4 mm thickness limit. Booster is another option; I explained everything in the post Let’s talk about boosters?.

3. Train with earplugs

Wear earplugs in some practice sessions. You will notice how often the sound of a hard ball scares you more than the power of the ball: without the crack, that ball that seemed like a rocket arrives much more “normal”. You also learn to trust your visual reading more, which helps in a noisy hall. A German study (Petri and colleagues, 2017) found no difference in the stroke quality of beginner and advanced players when the sound of the ball was removed or its volume changed: you can play well without it.

🤟 Table tennis without sound: the Deaflympics

Deaf athletes do not compete in the Paralympics: they have their own Games, the Deaflympics, which have existed since 1924 (older than the Paralympics) and include table tennis. Brazil has already hosted one edition, in Caxias do Sul (2022), and the most recent was in Tokyo, in November 2025.

The most curious rule: to compete, athletes need a hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in the better ear, and hearing aids and cochlear implants are banned in the entire playing area. Athletes are checked at the entrance to the court and can be disqualified if they are wearing one. In other words: everyone plays without the sound clue, on purpose. It is earplug training taken to the extreme. And notice what this rule says: if hearing the ball made no difference, hearing aids would not need to be banned. The rule itself recognizes that hearing matters in the game, exactly what this post argues.

And the brain compensates. In a study with lights flashing at the sides of the field of vision (Codina and colleagues, Frontiers in Psychology, 2017), adults deaf from an early age reacted on average about 146 ms faster than hearing people. The advantage only shows up in peripheral vision, precisely the kind that helps follow the ball’s trajectory.

The greatest example comes from China: Shi Ce, who was born with an ear malformation and started playing at age 9, won more than 10 golds at the Deaflympics. In 2005, Shi Ce won all four events at the Chinese National Games, against hearing athletes, in the strongest country in the world in the sport.

Then take the earplugs out and do the opposite: pay attention to the sound of your opponent’s hit (flat, brushed, muffled). In multiball, the coach varies the spin and you try to say what it was by the sound, before the ball arrives.

4. With glare in the hall: listen to the hit and watch the trajectory

In a hall with glare (light reflecting off the floor, a window behind the table) or with low contrast in the background (a white or light wall), the ball tends to “disappear” at some point along its trajectory. When you have the ball locked in your sights, that disappearance creates a pause: the brain waits for the ball to reappear before reacting, and you are late.

In these venues, I have always told my athletes to pay more attention to the sound of contact on the opponent’s racket and to watch the ball with their peripheral vision, following the trajectory instead of locking onto the ball. It seems the brain already identifies the trajectory and does not depend on the ball all the time. Science supports this:

The periphery of the retina is faster at picking up changes than the center, which is best for detail (Jendrusch, 2008).
High-level players do not always follow the ball with their eyes all the way: they jump their gaze to where it is going (Aoyama and colleagues, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2022). With a slow ball, the eye glides along with it; with a fast ball, it “jumps” after it, and Boll’s brain, according to Jendrusch, already knows where the next jump has to go.
When the ball disappears for an instant, the brain completes the trajectory on its own, using experience and gravity (Bosco and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2012).

Combine this with the sound of the hit, which arrives first, and the ball that disappears in the glare is no longer a problem.

Tip

The ear gives the clue; the eye confirms it. If sound and image “disagree” (a hit that cracks loudly, but a ball that comes slowly), trust what you see.

5. Keep your vision and hearing in check

None of this replaces eyes and ears that work well. If you have not read it yet, go back to the post on vision in table tennis and, when in doubt, see an eye doctor.

The same goes for your ears. We lose a little hearing over time, slowly and almost without noticing; age-related loss starts before old age, and years of noise (concerts, loud headphones, work) speed it up. If the sound of the ball is part of how you read the game, it is worth seeing an ENT doctor and getting an audiometry, the test that measures hearing. Hearing loss cannot be reversed, but you can catch it early, protect what you have and compensate in your game by relying more on your eyes.

The bottom line

The ball is the same in any hall. What changes is what reaches your eyes and your ears, and how your brain puts the two together. Sound arrives first, tells you the spin before the image does and even changes the speed you think the ball has. Big hall, small room, cold, altitude: each place affects that reading, and those who understand it adapt faster.

And most importantly: reading the ball is not a gift for the few, it is training. The eyes learn to follow the trajectory, the ears learn to recognize the hit, and a good amount of time in the hall before the match recalibrates everything. If you learn to hear the ball, you gain a few milliseconds that, on a 2.74 m table, are worth points. Train your eyes, take care of your ears and pay attention to the next crack that comes from the other side of the table.

And you, do you pay attention to the sound of your opponent’s racket? Have you ever noticed the ball “slower” in a big hall, or felt strange playing in a higher city or on the coast? Tell me in the comments.

Double Happiness: the story of DHS, the brand intertwined with Chinese table tennis

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:12:00 -0300

If you play table tennis, you have seen those three letters a thousand times: on your training ball, on your forehand rubber, on the colorful table in the World Championships broadcast. Few people know that DHS stands for Double Happiness, and that the name was born from two celebrations in 1959, one of them a world title. By the way, many players call a ball that clips the net and then the edge a double happiness: double luck for the hitter, none for the receiver.

Telling the story of DHS means telling the story of Chinese table tennis. Since the first title, the two have walked together, in a cycle that has repeated itself for more than 60 years: the team tests, the factory adjusts. When the rules change, both adapt together, and they almost always come out ahead.

This post is based on the DHS Service Guide, the brand’s technical handbook (4th edition, 2022, in Chinese), which DHS made available to 360TT as its official distributor in Brazil. It includes a timeline of the sport and of the factory. Since it is the brand’s own version of its history, I checked what I could against other sources and I point out when a figure comes only from DHS.

TL;DR: the ball reached China before the national team did: the sport landed in Shanghai in 1904 and the first Chinese ball came out in 1927 (before the national team, the ball). In 1959, China’s first world title gave the brand its name, and it debuted at the 1961 World Championships in Beijing, the same event where a 15-year-old Brazilian knocked out the champion. Then came ping-pong diplomacy, the 40 mm ball and the Hurricane (the world against China), the Ma Long era and Paris 2024. At the end, what this story teaches players.

The story in one picture: from the English dinner table to the tables of Paris (text in Portuguese). Infographic: 360TT

Before the national team, the ball

Table tennis was born in England at the end of the 19th century as a dinner-table game: rackets made of stretched skin, rubber or cork balls wrapped in wool so as not to damage the furniture, a net strung between two chairs. Around 1890, the Englishman James Gibb adapted a hollow celluloid toy ball, and the game got the ball we know. From there the sport went to Japan, where it became takkyu.

In 1904, Wang Daowu, the owner of a stationery shop in Shanghai, brought ten complete sets back from Japan and gave the sport the name that stuck: pingpang, after the sound of the ball. Curiously, in the West that name had an owner: the English company Jaques registered “Ping-Pong” as a trademark in 1901, and in the United States the rights went to Parker Brothers (today they belong to Escalade). That is why the federations adopted the name table tennis. In China, pingpang simply became the name of the sport. In 1926 the ITTF was founded and held the first World Championships in London that December. And Shanghai started manufacturing: the first ball made in China came out in 1927; in 1928 and 1929 the first racket workshops appeared (one of them made 2,000 to 3,000 a year); in 1937, the Lianhuan ball (“linked rings”) was the first Chinese ball good enough for competition. In English, DHS itself calls that ball Double Circle, and the two interlocked rings survive to this day as the mark of DHS’s training ball line, such as the Double Circle D40+. In 1946 the Hualian ball factory was founded.

Old Double Circle balls, made in Shanghai: the two rings of the 1937 Lianhuan still on the stamp. Photo: reproduction

An old Chinese racket, from the days of the first Shanghai workshops. Image: DHS Handbook

Meanwhile, world table tennis already had an owner. The handbook tells this story in five eras, and in each one the game and the equipment change together. From 1926 to 1951, Europe ruled: 109 of the 117 world titles, with the shakehand grip, defensive play and pips rubber with no sponge, which gave little speed and very little spin; the idea was to miss less than the opponent. From 1952 to 1959, Japan changed the game twice: it swapped the shakehand grip for the penhold, to attack from a distance with the forehand, and brought the novelty that changed everything, the sponge, which gave rise to sandwich rubber (rubber with sponge), still used today, and multiplied speed and spin.

China only joined the ITTF in March 1953, and that same year it played its first World Championships, in Bucharest: it beat Austria and Sweden and lost to England and Hungary. Between 1956 and 1958, Hualian and three other Shanghai factories became joint ventures with the state and formed the basis of what would become DHS. In 1957, Hualian made the first Chinese ball with a sealed seam. All that was missing was the name.

Packing balls in a Shanghai factory, in DHS's early years. Image: DHS Handbook

1959: two joys and a name

In 1959, in Dortmund, Germany, Rong Guotuan won the men’s singles at the 25th World Championships and became China’s first world champion in any sport. That same year, the People’s Republic turned ten. Two joys. According to DHS and the Chinese press, Premier Zhou Enlai named the ball made in Shanghai Hong Shuang Xi, “red double happiness”, the same name as the 囍 symbol the Chinese use at weddings. In English, Double Happiness. As an acronym, DHS.

The ball with the “double happiness” stamp. Image: DHS Handbook

The name came with a deadline. China was going to host the 1961 World Championships and wanted to play with its own equipment, so the country set up a joint technical effort with factories and research institutes. In September 1959, the new ball and table were tested by national team players, among them Xu Yinsheng, and approved. The same effort produced the first Chinese racket with inverted rubber and sponge. In 1960, the ball was approved by the ITTF, the first Chinese sports product to get that approval. It was the first turn of the cycle: the team tested, the factory adjusted.

An old table from the DHS collection. Image: DHS Handbook

1961: Beijing, the home debut

At the 26th World Championships, in Beijing, the ball, the table and the scoreboard were DHS: it was the first time sports equipment made in China appeared at a world championship. And at home, China won the men’s team event, the men’s singles and the women’s singles. For the handbook, this is when the center of table tennis moves from Japan to China, with fast close-to-the-table attack, and the game becomes China’s “national sport”.

The 26th World Championships, Beijing, 1961: the debut of DHS equipment. Image: DHS Handbook

🇧🇷 Biriba, 15, against the world champion

At that same World Championships, in April 1961, a boy from São Paulo wrote his name into history. Ubiraci Rodrigues da Costa, known as Biriba, aged 15, beat Rong Guotuan, the 1959 champion whose title had given DHS its name. It was in the third round of the men’s singles, in front of some 15,000 Chinese fans, and he reached the last 16. He received a telegram from Brazilian President Jânio Quadros, and his run was only matched by Claudio Kano in 1987 and surpassed by Hugo Calderano in 2021.

It was no bolt from the blue. At 11, Biriba was already South American champion among adults; at 13, he beat two Japanese world champions, Ichiro Ogimura and Toshiaki Tanaka, in exhibition matches at the Ibirapuera arena in São Paulo, the school that dominated the sport at the time. On November 18, 1958, the sports newspaper A Gazeta Esportiva put him on its front page alongside Pelé and tennis player Maria Esther Bueno: “the golden triangle of Brazilian sport”.

Biriba, aged 13, with Pelé and Maria Esther Bueno at the A Gazeta Esportiva offices, on November 18, 1958, each holding the other's tool. Photo: A Gazeta Esportiva

Biriba died in São Paulo on September 25, 2025, aged 80. This is 360TT’s tribute to the first great name in Brazilian table tennis.

The rest of the decade strengthened the partnership. In 1963, in an ITTF test, the DHS ball tied for first place with England’s Halex. In 1965, at the World Championships in Ljubljana, every Chinese player used DHS rackets (the “65” series), China took 5 of the 7 titles and the Chinese women beat Japan, which had dominated the women’s game for eight years.

The small ball moved the big ball

China stayed away from the World Championships for six years and returned in 1971, in Nagoya, Japan. That is where the most famous episode in the sport’s history took place. The American Glenn Cowan, 19, got on the Chinese team’s bus (by mistake, according to the best-known version). Zhuang Zedong, three-time world champion, went to talk to him and gave him a silk painting of the Huangshan mountains; Cowan returned the favor with a T-shirt bearing the peace symbol. The photos went around the world, and days later the American team was invited to play in China, one of the first groups of Americans to enter the country since 1949. This was “ping-pong diplomacy”, which brought China and the United States back together after 22 years of closed doors and paved the way for Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972. “The small ball moved the big ball”, as the Chinese say.

If you want the behind-the-scenes story, there is a great book: Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World, by American journalist Nicholas Griffin (Scribner, 2014). He tells how table tennis was used as a political tool from the 1950s on, and he even doubts the “chance” encounter in Nagoya: in his view, the Chinese were expecting Cowan.

Ping-Pong Diplomacy, by Nicholas Griffin (Scribner, 2014). Image: book cover reproduction

With the sport back to life in the country, DHS production grew again, and in 1972 its ball got the highest overall score in an ITTF test.

The 1970s, however, belonged to Europe’s comeback. The Europeans combined Chinese fast attack with Japanese topspin and caught up with the Asians. China’s answer came in 1981: after two years of rebuilding, the team won all 7 titles at the World Championships in Novi Sad, the first time a single country took everything in 55 years of the event.

In the early 1980s, DHS also went out into the world with the PF4 line (ball, racket and rubber), the first Chinese brand to open markets abroad. The PF4 still exists, today as a family of tacky-topsheet rubbers.

The old PF4 package. Image: DHS Handbook

DHS PF4The legendary rubber that took DHS to the world, updated for the 40+ ball: the same spin as always, with more speed in attack. Visit the store →

In 1988, in Seoul, table tennis became an Olympic sport. In 1995, DHS unified its brand into a single company, and its ball was the official ball of the World Championships in Tianjin, where China, once again, took all 7 titles. That is the birth of what the Chinese call “the world against China”.

The PF4 ball presented as the official ball of the 43rd World Championships, Tianjin, 1995. Image: DHS Handbook

The world against China

With China winning everything, the ITTF began changing the rules to make the game more competitive and easier to watch on TV. DHS was involved in those changes. In 1996, according to the handbook, the ITTF commissioned it to develop the bigger ball. The Sydney Olympics, in 2000, were the last major competition with the 38 mm ball, and a DHS ball: the first time Chinese equipment was official at an Olympic Games. That same year, the World Cup in Yangzhou debuted the 40 mm ball, also DHS. I covered that change in detail in the ball guide, from 38 mm to 40+. Next came 11-point games (2001) and the serve without hiding the ball (2002).

The Sydney 2000 ball, the last major competition with the 38 mm ball. Image: DHS Handbook

In rubbers, the turning point had come in 1998, when DHS launched the rubber already glued to its sponge at the factory. Until then, Chinese players bought the topsheet and the sponge separately. That is how the G888 (used by Wang Liqin and Yan Sen while the ball was still small) and the Kuangbiao family, known worldwide as Hurricane, were born. With the 40 mm ball, speed became the priority, and the Hurricane 2 and the Hurricane 3 were designed for it.

The G888, from 1998: DHS's first rubber already glued to its sponge. Image: DHS Handbook

DHS G888DHS's first rubber already glued to its sponge is still in production: a very tacky topsheet for maximum spin in mid-distance attack. Visit the store →

In blades, it is a comeback story. Since the 1980s, the Chinese team had used almost only foreign blades. In 2003, DHS studied the game of eight national team players and launched Hurricane blades named after each of them. In 2005, at the World Championships in Shanghai, the Hurricane Wang helped Wang Liqin win the singles and the mixed doubles. In 2006, the Skyline 2 and Skyline 3, made for Ma Lin and Wang Hao, completed the lineup, and 70% of the team’s forehands were already on DHS rubber.

Wang Liqin at the 2005 World Championships in Shanghai. Image: DHS Handbook

In 2008, DHS supplied the Beijing Olympics, and China won the team events and the top three places in both singles.

The table of the Beijing 2008 Games. Image: DHS Handbook

Shortly afterwards, on September 1, 2008, the ban on solvent-based speed glue came into force (I told that story in Why Is Your Glue Water-Based Today?). It is the best example of the cycle: DHS tested less tacky rubbers and thicker pimples with the national team, and the players’ answer was to keep the rubber tacky. So the factory worked on the sponge instead. That is how the NEO line was born, with a sponge treated at the factory to be “stretched”, imitating the effect the glue used to give.

DHS Hurricane 3 NEOThe rubber that has followed the Chinese team from the 40 mm ball to the present day, with a factory-treated NEO sponge. Visit the store →

The Ma Long era

Ma Long signed with DHS in 2008, and the history of his blades shows the cycle in detail. According to the handbook:

2008: the first Hurricane Long, built on the blade he was already using;
2011: he switches to a seven-ply, all-wood blade and puts together 51 straight wins starting at the Suzhou Open. DHS launches the Hurricane Long 2;
2012: the Hurricane Long 3, with improved internal glue at his request, and the blue handle with the yellow crescent that became his trademark;
2013: the Hurricane Long 5, with inner carbon and aramid layers, with which he wins the National Games;
2016: after the gold in Rio, the Long 5 gets a smaller blade face;
2021: the Golden Slam edition, to celebrate his Tokyo feat.

The evolution of Ma Long's blades (labels in Portuguese). Images: DHS Handbook; layout: 360TT

Ma Long and the Hurricane Long 5 Golden Slam. Image: DHS Handbook

I covered that evolution, and what it teaches about changing blades, in the post Ma Long’s Lesson. In 2015, with the Long 5 and Hurricane 3 on both sides, he won the World Championships, the World Cup and the Grand Finals. In 2021, in Tokyo, with the same setup, he completed the Olympic, World Championship and World Cup singles titles for the second time, the “golden grand slam”, and was the first player ever to do it.

Meanwhile, the ball changed again. In 2011 DHS announced a ball made of a new material, and the ITTF decided to retire celluloid, which had been used for more than a hundred years. The change took effect on July 1, 2014. Besides changing the game, it solved a practical problem: celluloid catches fire easily and was shipped as dangerous goods; the plastic ball travels by air without restrictions. DHS’s first new ball was the official ball of the World Championships and the Rio Olympics; in 2017 came the ABS plastic ball that led to the DJ40+, the Tokyo ball.

The figures DHS publishes about the Chinese team and the market show how big this is. They are the brand’s own data, from 2022, but they are impressive:

97%of the Chinese team's forehands on DHS rubber

46%of the team's blades are DHS

50%+of the world's table tennis balls are made by DHS

70%of major competitions use the DHS 3-star ball

The handbook also shows a lesser-known side. In 2010, the top four in the men’s singles at the World Championships all played with DHS equipment. In 2017, the brand launched the Gold Arc 5 and Gold Arc 8, non-tacky, European-style rubbers, made in Germany by ESN and tested by Wang Liqin and Ma Long. And, in 2022, the colored Hurricane 9, after the ITTF allowed colored rubbers. On the backhand, DHS rubber also gained ground with the 40+ ball: 32% of the team’s backhands in 2022.

From Paris 2024 to today

The handbook dates from 2022, so from here on the sources are the ITTF and the specialized press. At Paris 2024, DHS was the official supplier of the tables and nets for the Olympic and Paralympic tournaments, with a table made for the Games based on the Rainbow II. It was the seventh Olympic Games in a row with DHS equipment, from Sydney to Paris.

In April 2025, the ITTF renewed DHS as the official table supplier for the World Championships Finals from 2025 to 2028, starting in Doha, with the Rainbow table. It was on that table that Hugo Calderano reached the World Championships final, the best result ever by a Brazilian.

The Rainbow table at the 2025 World Championships in Doha, before play began. Photo: ITTF

🏓 Curiosities from the handbook

The 44 mm ball: in 2003, DHS launched a bigger ball, slower and with less spin, for recreation and beginners. Today it is used in physical education classes in Chinese schools.
The racket gauge: the device that measures rubber thickness at racket control in international competitions is supplied by DHS.
A museum table: the Rainbow table from the London 2012 Games, with arches shaped like the Olympic rings, was kept permanently by the International Olympic Committee at its headquarters in Switzerland.
The Beijing table: the table for the 2008 Olympics was designed from the Chinese character for Beijing, 京.
The two-color ball: in 2014, DHS and the Chinese federation tested a two-color ball, which makes spin more visible on TV and for the receiver.
The World Championships trophies: each of the 7 titles has a trophy with its own name, such as the Swaythling Cup (men’s team) and the Corbillon Cup (women’s team). They are made of silver and pass from champion to champion: the winner only gets to engrave their name.

The London 2012 Games table, now in the IOC collection. Image: DHS Handbook

The two-color ball, from 2014. Image: DHS Handbook

DHS D40+ ABS Bi Colour ball (box of 10)The two-color version of the D40+: you can see the spin as it rotates, great for training how to read spin. Visit the store →

Leaf through the handbook

For those who want to see the original, here are some pages from the DHS handbook: the cover, the nine timeline pages this post is based on, the page on Ma Long’s blades and the one on the history of the balls. Click any of them to enlarge it.

Cover

1890–1937

1946–1963

1965–1989

1995–2000

2000–2005

2007–2009

2010–2014

2014–2020

2021–2022

Ma Long's blades

History of the balls

Pages from the DHS Handbook (Service Guide, 4th edition, 2022, in Chinese). Images: DHS Handbook

What this story teaches players

🤓 360TT technical view

Reading the whole timeline, one thing stands out: equipment changes because the rules change. The 40 mm ball, the end of speed glue, the plastic ball: every ITTF change forced manufacturers to rework rubber, sponge and blade. DHS had the advantage of being inside those decisions and of testing everything with the strongest team in the world before it reached the shop.

That is why Chinese rubber is the way it is. The Hurricane, tacky and hard, was born for the Chinese style, which generates speed and spin through technique: technique is what puts real energy into the hard sponge. With little energy, the rubber feels slow; with technique, it becomes practically two rubbers in one, with control on passive balls from the tacky topsheet and power from the hard sponge. I explained this in detail in So, which rubber should you use? The null hypothesis method, where I also tell how the rest of the world adopted tacky and hybrid rubbers, driven by the German company ESN, the same one that makes the DHS Gold Arc.

The other lesson is simpler: what the Chinese team uses is available in the shop, with differences in quality control between versions (I explained this in the Hurricane 3 guide). Since 2023, 360TT has been the official DHS distributor in Brazil, and it was as a distributor that we received from DHS the handbook this post is based on.

Now I want to hear from you: what was your first piece of DHS equipment? A PF4, a Hurricane, a box of balls at the club? Did you know this story? Tell me in the comments.

See DHS rubbers in the shop

From the 38mm Ball to 40+: A Complete Guide to Choosing Yours

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:18:00 -0300

Equipment guide

The ball is the smallest piece of equipment in table tennis, yet it is the one that has changed the game the most over the last 25 years. Changing your racket is a personal choice. Changing the ball was imposed by the ITTF itself — and every change reshaped the way the game is played at a high level.

If you have been training for a few years, you have probably heard “40mm ball” and “40+ ball” spoken of as if they were the same thing. They are not. Understanding the difference explains why that “impossible to receive” serve from the old era is easier to handle today — and why choosing the right ball changes your training in practice.

TL;DR: the ball changed three times in 25 years: from 38mm to 40mm in 2000 and from celluloid to 40+ plastic in 2014, with less spin and longer rallies. The stars measure manufacturing precision, not quality, and the color is chosen for contrast with the table and the background. The buying guide shows the right ball for each level, from training to competition.

The era of the 38mm celluloid ball (1900–2000)

The first official table tennis ball, made of celluloid and 38mm in diameter, was introduced in 1900 and barely changed for 100 years. It was light and extremely responsive to spin — the friction between rubber and celluloid allowed extreme rotation, and by the late 90s professionals were already generating spin at the physical limit of what the ball could take.

Add another detail of the time: the serve could be made while hiding the contact between racket and ball. Combined with extreme spin, this made the serve almost unbeatable — in practice, most points ended within the first 3 balls of the rally. The result: a game that was too fast, hard to follow even from the stands — and the ITTF itself recognized this as a problem for the sport on TV.

The switch to 40mm (2000–2014)

In 2000, after the Sydney Games, the ITTF increased the ball diameter from 38mm to 40mm — still celluloid — to slow the game down and lengthen rallies. A bigger ball meets more air resistance, loses speed faster and is less receptive to extreme spin.

But that was not the only change of the period — and together, they reshaped the sport:

2001: the end of the 21-point system, turning games into the 11-point sets we know today, making matches more dynamic.

2002: a serve rule requiring a minimum vertical toss of 16cm and a clear view of the contact, ending the “hidden” serve of the previous era.

2008: the ITTF banned speed glue because it contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs) harmful to health.

Each of these changes, on its own, seems small. Together, they took away much of the advantage that came only from “supercharged” equipment and gave weight back to technique. And, as a bonus, the athlete’s physique had to evolve — a lot.

The plastic era: the 40+ ball is born (2014–today)

The celluloid ball is highly flammable — the same material used in the earliest cinema — and that was always a real problem: warehouse fires, ever-tighter air transport restrictions and rising insurance costs. The ITTF decided to replace the material.

From July 2014, every official ITTF event started using plastic (poly/ABS) balls. Since they can be up to 0.5mm bigger than the old 40mm celluloid balls, they got the “40+” marking to tell them apart. In 2023, celluloid was officially removed from the rules — today every table tennis ball is made of plastic.

The effect on the game was real: the friction between rubber and plastic is lower than between rubber and celluloid, and professionals initially reported a 10 to 15% drop in their ability to generate spin — a significant number at the elite level. The sport reacted in a chain:

Tacky and hybrid rubbers, like those in the DHS Hurricane line, practically became the standard to recover part of the lost spin.

Blades with carbon fiber and a thicker core, like the DHS Fang Bo Carbon B2X and the DHS Hurricane Long 5X, gained ground to compensate for the ball’s lower response with more structural power in the racket.

Players had to become more athletic. Without the “help” of the ball and speed glue, generating the same power now demands more real physical preparation — legs, trunk and hip explosiveness became part of the technical equation for good.

What the stars mean (1★, 2★, 3★)

The star rating indicates the ball’s level of precision and consistency — it is not about “good or bad quality”, it is about manufacturing tolerance:

1 star: a training ball, with greater tolerance in weight, roundness and hardness. Ideal for multiball, robots and heavy everyday use.

2 stars: intermediate, a balance between durability and consistency — good for more serious training or recreational play.

3 stars: competition standard, approved by the ITTF for official tournaments, with maximum consistency in weight, roundness and hardness.

The DHS DJ40+ is a good example of how strict this selection can be: even though it is already within the margin the ITTF allows (weight between 2.67g and 2.77g, roundness with a tolerance below 0.25mm, hardness between 0.68 and 0.81mm), the most carefully selected batches of the ball use only a much smaller fraction of that range — the smaller the percentage of the total margin used, the higher the precision of the ball.

White or orange? Color is not aesthetics, it’s a rule

The ITTF rule is straightforward: the ball can only be white or orange, always matte — and the main color of the player’s clothing must be clearly different from the color of the ball chosen for the match. It makes sense: if the ball and your opponent’s shirt look alike, you literally lose sight of the ball against their body.

This matters more today than it did a decade ago. For a long time, the standard at major competitions was a blue or green table — today green has practically disappeared, and black has established itself as blue’s partner at the main WTT events (the DHS W1000 table, for example, is black and has been used since 2023 at stages such as the WTT Grand Smash and the Cup Finals). In other words: the choice between a white and an orange ball is not about “which one looks nicer” — it is about which one contrasts best with the table and the background where you play or compete.

Buying guide: the DHS balls we have at 360TT

As an official DHS distributor — the world’s largest ball manufacturer and official WTT sponsor — we bring the complete line, from training to competition:

Ball	Stars	Recommended for	Notes
Double Circle (white/orange)	Training	Beginners, clubs, multiball and robots	The most economical of all, with surprising quality and durability — best value for training and multiball
D40+ 1★ (white/orange)	1★	Recreational training and daily use	Great value for everyday play
D40+ 2★ (white)	2★	More serious training and recreational games	A balance between price and consistency
D40+ 3★ (white/orange)	3★	Club and regional competitions	Competition standard with good value
DJ40+ 3★ (white)	3★	Competition and advanced players	Official ball of the Tokyo 2020 Games and the WTT circuit — renewed as the official WTT ball for the 2021-2028 cycle, the benchmark for feel and spin in the DHS line
RS40+ 3★ (white)	3★	Competition and advanced players	Also official WTT, made with recycled plastic (PCR), slightly stiffer and faster feel
D40+ Dual Color	—	Technical training, seeing spin	Helps you see the ball’s rotation during practice

Choose the right ball for your game

Choosing the right ball is not about spending more — it is about matching your level of play to the ball’s tolerance, and also about using each model wisely for its specific purpose. If you train every day, the Double Circle or the D40+ 1★ do the heavy lifting without wasting your budget. If you are moving up a level or already compete, the D40+ 3★ is the natural next step. And if your game already asks for the best there is — in a real match, not in multiball — DJ40+ and RS40+ are the balls the best players in the world use.

Tip

If the back wall where you train is white, buy orange balls!

Now I want to hear from you: do you already know which ball fits your game? Tell me in the comments.

See the full line of DHS balls

The Invisible Enemy of Your Drive

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:27:00 -0300

Picture the scene: you practice your forehand perfectly in front of the mirror. On the robot or in basic multiball drills, the stroke flows with flawless weight transfer. But when real match play comes, reality knocks on the door: you spray the ball, catch it on the edge or miss the shot completely.

The first reaction of 99% of table tennis players is to blame the equipment or the mechanics of the body. You think the rubber lost its “grip” or that your arm is shrinking. But what if I told you the real culprit may not be your arm or your racket?

The problem is that your brain may be receiving the information late. Before being a motor sport, table tennis is a sport of extreme visual perception. And science has already proven it with relentless numbers.

TL;DR: the elite player is not a robot: he corrects the stroke in mid-flight, which scientists call compensatory variability. To do that, the brain reads the ball through the Tau factor and has to nail the impact within a window of just a few milliseconds. Any vision problem, from astigmatism to aging eyes, steals that time, and your distance from the table changes what the eye has to do. After seeing an eye doctor, you can help yourself with low-light training and with choosing the right blade.

The “robot” myth and the magic of compensatory variability

For a long time, it was believed that the elite player was like a robot that simply repeated the same memorized movement (a motor program). To test this, scientists Reinoud Bootsma and Piet van Wieringen analyzed the biomechanics of professional Dutch athletes attacking balls at more than 60 km/h.

The discovery changed the sport: the elite player is not a robot. Their precision at the moment of hitting the ball was much greater than at the moment they set up the stroke. How? Through compensatory variability.

The table tennis player’s brain makes micro-adjustments during the stroke. If he misjudges the ball and starts the stroke late, the brain sends a signal to brutally accelerate the arm and compensate. They don’t blindly repeat the same stroke; they correct it in mid-flight.

How the brain reads the ball: the Tau factor and the 5-millisecond window

Our brain doesn’t calculate speed in km/h and distance in meters like a traffic radar. Our eyes use an optical variable called Tau. They read the “relative rate of dilation” of the ball, that is, how fast the outline of the ping-pong ball is growing and expanding on your retina. It is this expansion that tells the nervous system how many milliseconds are left before impact.

The relentless math: the 5.2º angle and the impact window

To give you an idea of how demanding this is visually and motorically, the study placed a 55 cm diameter target about 2.5 meters from the racket’s contact point. For the ball to land inside that target consistently (hitting it at least 75% of the time), the direction of the racket’s movement could not vary more than 6 degrees from the center of the target.

Statistically, this means the standard deviation of the racket’s direction at the exact moment of impact cannot exceed an absurd 5.2 degrees. It is a margin of error invisible to the naked eye!

Now combine that angle with arm speed: at the moment of contact, the angular velocity of an elite athlete’s racket reaches 800 degrees per second. When you divide the 5.2º margin of error by that dizzying 800º/s, the math is merciless: the player has to time the moment of impact with a maximum precision of 6.5 milliseconds, and the ideal window is 2 to 5 milliseconds. Blinked, or your vision blurred? The racket goes past the correct angle and the ball ends up in the net or in the barrier.

Vision saboteurs and the veterans’ challenge

This is where the invisible enemy strikes. An athlete’s visuomotor delay (the time between the eye seeing and the brain correcting the arm) is about 110 milliseconds. But if your vision is not perfect, that time increases, and you lose your 5-millisecond window.

Astigmatism and myopia: if you have “just half a diopter” and think it doesn’t matter, know that it distorts the edges of the ball. If the outline is not 100% sharp, the brain can’t calculate the rate of dilation (Tau) quickly. The arm receives the command late.
The veterans’ challenge (presbyopia): with age, the eye’s natural lens loses elasticity (aging eyes). The ability to quickly switch focus from a distant object (the ball leaving your opponent’s racket) to a near one (the ball bouncing in front of you) plummets. That is why veteran athletes need to make up for the loss of biological “hardware” by developing much greater tactical anticipation and reading the opponent’s movement before he even hits the ball.

The geography of the game: distance from the table vs. vision

Your distance from the table doesn’t just change the tactics, it changes the physics of your vision.

Close to the table: the angular velocity of the ball relative to your eye is extremely high. The Tau factor changes violently in fractions of a second. It demands absurd reflexes and visual acuity (which is why playing right up against the table later in life is so hard).
Medium/long distance: when you take a step back, the ball has more room to travel and the angular velocity drops. The optical rate of dilation becomes smoother. You “buy” neurological time to read the Tau but, in exchange, you have to cover more physical ground with your legs.

The 360TT verdict: practical solutions to shield your game

Perfect technique demands perfect neurological data. As a coach, I recommend three immediate actions if you are struggling with the timing of the ball:

1. Immediate vision correction: the “hardware” adjustment

I’m not a doctor

An essential warning: I am a table tennis coach, not a doctor. Only a qualified ophthalmologist can make your clinical diagnosis and prescribe the exact corrective lens for the anatomy of your eye.

That said, remember that, together with great training and the choice of the ideal racket, you need to make sure your eyes are working in your favor, so go see an eye doctor! In practice, optometry and sports science point to very clear paths on the best types of correction for ultra-high-speed sports:

Soft contact lenses (the gold choice): sports vision studies show that the preference for contact lenses among athletes is up to four times higher than in the general population. For table tennis, soft lenses (especially silicone hydrogel or daily disposables) are considered unbeatable. The biomechanical reason is simple: since the lens conforms to the cornea and moves together with the eyeball, it delivers the real size of objects (preserving exact depth perception), doesn’t fog up with sweat and, most important of all, eliminates prismatic distortion in peripheral vision and the blind spots caused by frames.
Sports glasses with aspheric lenses (the technological alternative): if you simply can’t adapt to contact lenses, using your regular everyday prescription glasses will sabotage the reading of your Tau on balls to the sides. Science recommends curved sports frames (wraparound) equipped, without exception, with aspheric lenses. The aspheric design is flatter and thinner, which drastically minimizes aberrations and distortions at the edges of the lens when you look out of the corner of your eye. In addition, demand lenses with very high impact resistance (such as polycarbonate) and a premium anti-reflective coating to neutralize the glare caused by the artificial lights on gym ceilings.

2. Training “in the dark”: manipulating constraints

This is a high-level tactic. Deliberately train a few times in places with low contrast, reflections in the background or slightly dimmer light. Why? It forces your brain to stop trying to focus on the ball perfectly and start using peripheral vision, raising your level of attention to your opponent’s body language. When you go back to a top-level gym, the ball will look huge and slow.

3. The equipment adjustment: sweetspot and usable area

If your vision delays your impact by 1 millisecond, the ball will catch the edge of your traditional racket. To compensate, rackets with larger heads (semi-large models or defensive size) increase your physical margin of error. Having a bigger sweetspot (ideal hitting area) also saves that late stroke. But be careful: there’s no point in having a huge sweetspot if the racket is an uncontrollable “triple-bottom stainless steel frying pan”. Look for blades with soft inner fibers or improved control.

In table tennis, the precision of your drive starts long before the racket touches the ball. It starts the instant your eyes lock onto the target.

Now I want to hear from you: have you noticed how the lighting in certain gyms completely destroys your rhythm? Or felt that, over the years, the timing of the ball seems to have changed? Leave your comment below telling us about your experience!

From VHS Tapes to 'Bashing': A Reflection on Table Tennis Today

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:38:00 -0300

It has been a while since watching matches was as fun as it used to be. Let me explain: I stopped playing in 1995 or ‘96, I don’t even remember exactly. Back then, to watch a recent match, we waited months for a VHS TAPE (ask your dad or grandpa what that is… lol) to arrive from Europe or Asia. That’s how it was with the 1995 World Championships, won by China’s Kong Linghui, who was a complete unknown to us. I watched the match in early 1996, when I got hold of a tape with the final, the full match, no highlights, commentary in a language I didn’t understand, no subtitles and pretty mediocre picture quality.

From VHS to live

Back to 2025: today we watch a World Championships final LIVE, in ultra-high resolution, with an electronic scoreboard on screen, replays and even a VAR called TTR. Along with those great advances came changes to the game to make it more “TV-friendly”. Since the ban on speed glue and the switch to the 40+ ABS ball, the game has changed a lot. Before, it was much more serve and third ball; today, there are far more rallies. That’s great for television, but now the game is much more physical, players have to be far more athletic and, because of that, we joke that it’s just bashing. This is not about disrespecting the impressive athleticism of today’s players, just a personal preference. With Xu Xin retired, there are only a few crazy ones left, like Simon Gauzy, playing interesting, creative matches.

The end of pure penholders

These changes killed the pure penholders (one rubber). Penholders in the men’s game have very slim chances at the top level, where we once had a World Championships runner-up with this style. Short pips penhold like the old-school Chinese players? Unthinkable. The heavier, slower 40+ ball took away part of the speed and the “venom” of pips, demanding a physical strength that tips the equation against these styles. And that made the game a bit samey: serve, smash and more smashing. Is it fun? Sure, but I admire creative variety more than raw power. That’s where it got kind of uninteresting.

Women’s play is still creative

On the other hand, for a while now I have preferred watching the women’s matches. Penholders still perform very well. We have the pips “little auntie” Ni Xia Lian, over 60 and still wreaking havoc; North Korea’s Kim Kum-yong with long pips on the backhand and an absurdly effective style; Germany’s Sabine Winter, who swapped her backhand rubber for an anti-spin and has played memorable matches; not to mention the Indian players and their pips bathed in the Ganges River (credits to Marcelo Hilário… lol). I can’t leave out Adriana Diaz of Puerto Rico, who seems to work magic at the table, and the incredible Sun Yingsha of China. Even with conventional equipment, their matches are a joy to watch.

At the end of the day

In short, men’s matches have become boring to watch, and women’s matches are great fun.

Now I want to hear from you: do you agree with me? Which playing style do you enjoy watching most today? Tell us here in the comments.