between-points – 360TT Blog

SpongeBob, Waldner and Taleb: Table Tennis Lessons

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:57:00 -0300

Quick question: what kind of sponge is SpongeBob?

If you answered “a kitchen sponge”, you’re in good company. Yellow, square, full of little holes — the very image of the sponge next to the sink. And that’s exactly how I used Bob in a text I wrote in 2021 that only circulated in WhatsApp groups: as a symbol of resilience. Squashed, he always bounces back to his original shape. “Be a SpongeBob player,” I said.

Five years later, rereading that text, I realized I had gotten two things wrong.

The first: Bob is not a kitchen sponge. He lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea. He’s a sea sponge — and not by accident: the creator of the cartoon, Stephen Hillenburg, was a marine biologist before becoming an animator. Hold on to that, because it changes everything at the end of this text.

Kitchen sponge or sea sponge? The difference is the subject of this text.

The second: resilience is not the goal. It’s the middle of the road.

This post is a rewrite of that old text — now with the help of an author who changed the way I think about training, competition and growth: Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

TL;DR: resilience, going back to normal after pressure, isn’t enough: the goal is to come out better than you went in, which is what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility. Stress in the right dose, with recovery, makes you stronger; changing everything out of anxiety (switching rubbers after every loss, tinkering with technique before a tournament) is iatrogenics, the remedy turning into the disease. It all comes down to the 8 to 10 seconds between points, and you can train it: there’s a table to find out which level you’re at, training ideas, Waldner in 1997 and the truth about SpongeBob.

Fragile, resilient, antifragile: a recap

In May, when China lost two matches in the group stage of the World Team Championships and still left London as champions, I wrote about it here on the blog: The Antifragile China: From Chaos to the World Title. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth it — but here is the three-line summary:

Fragile is what breaks under pressure.
Resilient (or robust) is what withstands the shock and goes back to the same state.
Antifragile is what comes out of the shock better than it went in.

The idea that hit me hardest in the book is simple and uncomfortable: the opposite of fragile is not resilient. Taleb uses the example of a package sent by mail with the label “fragile — handle with care”. The opposite of that would not be a package labeled “I don’t care how you handle me” (that’s the robust one). The opposite would be “please, mistreat me”. Something that gets better when it’s shaken.

In my 2021 text, I defined resilience as “going back to your natural state after suffering pressure”. And right after that, I asked the athlete to change, leave the comfort zone, adapt. I was asking for antifragility without having the word for it. Going back to your natural state is great — but whoever only returns to the same place after every loss is, deep down, standing still.

A little more Taleb

Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist and former financial trader who has spent his life studying uncertainty, risk and chance. He is the author of The Black Swan and Antifragile (2012), the book where everything I’m using here comes from. Nothing in it is about sport — and, at the same time, almost all of it is useful for anyone who trains.

Damocles, Phoenix and Hydra

The Hydra: for every head cut off, two grow back.

Taleb uses three mythological figures to explain the triad:

Fragile — Damocles: lives with a sword hanging over his head by a single horsehair. One shock and it’s over.
Resilient — Phoenix: dies and is reborn from its own ashes, but is reborn the same.
Antifragile — Hydra: the serpent of Greek mythology: for every head cut off, two grow back. The attack makes it stronger.

Think of how many athletes you know who are Phoenixes: they lose, they suffer, they come back to training on Monday exactly the same. Resilient, yes. But the same loss will happen again at the next tournament, because nothing changed.

Hormesis: the dose makes the medicine

Antifragility doesn’t mean “the more suffering, the better”. Taleb relies on a concept from biology called hormesis: small doses of a stressor make the organism react and get stronger; doses that are too large, or continuous with no rest, break it.

Any coach knows this under another name: it’s the basic principle of training. Load, recovery, adaptation. The muscle doesn’t get stronger during the workout — it gets stronger afterwards, in recovery, as a response to the stress it went through. Without stress, there is no adaptation. Without recovery, there isn’t either.

And here comes the part many people ignore: depriving a system of stress also makes it fragile. The player who only does comfortable rallying, only plays people he already knows, only enters the tournament where he knows he’ll do well, is protecting himself — and getting more fragile every week.

The three players at the table

Picture the scene: fifth set, 8-9, you’re serving. Your opponent’s ball hits the edge of the table and goes off. 8-10.

The fragile player explodes. He complains about the edge, looks at his coach, slaps the racket against his thigh. The point is already over, but he keeps playing that point in his head. He serves fast, in a hurry, with no plan. 8-11. On the way home, it’s the edge’s fault, the ball’s, the table’s, the umpire’s, the new rubber’s.

The resilient player breathes, accepts it, goes back to his routine. He keeps his head up and plays the next point well. He may even turn it around. But, winning or losing, he leaves the match the way he came in.

The antifragile player does everything the resilient one does — and one more thing: he turns what happened into information. That edge teaches nothing (it’s luck, and luck can’t be trained). But the previous point did teach something: the opponent returned my short serve to the forehand with an aggressive flick (what Brazilians call a harau) twice in a row. So the next serve will be different. And after the match, win or lose, he leaves with a new note for Tuesday’s training.

Brazilians have a great expression for the fragile type: the “Gabriela syndrome” — from a famous song by Dorival Caymmi, for people who think they were born one way and will die that way (“I was born like this, I grew up like this, I’ll always be like this”). And there is also the antidote, sung by Raul Seixas: being a metamorfose ambulante, a “walking metamorphosis”. The American psychologist Carol Dweck, of Stanford University, arrived at the same place by another path, researching how people deal with failure: in the book Mindset (2006), she separates the fixed mindset — “my talent is what it is” — from the growth mindset — “my talent is the starting point”. Gabriela is fixed mindset. Raul is growth mindset. Taleb goes one step further: the antifragile doesn’t just believe they can grow — they use stress as fuel for it.

Which level are you at today?

Read the table below honestly. There is no pretty answer: most of us are fragile on some lines and antifragile on others. The goal is to know where you stand, so you know what to train.

Situation	Fragile	Resilient	Antifragile
Training	Prefers what he already knows how to do; avoids drills where he makes many mistakes	Completes the proposed training with discipline	Looks for the drill that exposes the weak spot
Uncomfortable opponent (pips, chopper, left-hander)	Avoids; “I don’t like playing against that”	Plays when he has to, no drama	Asks to train against it
Net and edge	Complains, gestures, carries it into the next point	Accepts it and moves on	Accepts it and moves on — luck isn’t analyzed
Your own bad point	Berates himself out loud; the mistake lasts several points	Returns to the routine quickly	Returns to the routine and extracts information from the mistake
Opponent’s good point	Gets rattled, changes the plan in desperation	Acknowledges it and keeps the plan	Asks “what is he seeing that I’m not?”
Defeat	Blames something external (table, ball, umpire, equipment)	Accepts it, rests and comes back the same	Leaves with 1 or 2 concrete adjustments for training
Equipment	Changes rubber after every loss	Keeps the equipment	Keeps the equipment and only adjusts with a reason and a deadline
Between points	Serves fast, with no plan; the heart races	Has a routine and follows it	Uses the routine to read the game and decide the next point
Inner voice	“It’s not working”, “today’s not my day”	“Calm down, next point”	“What did that point teach me?”

Tip

If most of your answers landed in the first column, start with the basics: a between-points routine and stop changing equipment. If they landed in the second, you already have the foundation — the next step is turning every match into data. If they landed in the third, watch out for the trap in the next section: even the antifragile can get hurt by too much intervention.

Between points: where antifragility really happens

All the reasoning above fits into 8 to 10 seconds. That is roughly the average time between one point and the next in a match — and it is there, not during the rally, that it’s decided whether you’ll be Damocles, Phoenix or Hydra on the next point.

In the post Your heart lost the point, I talked about the physiological side of this: how a racing heart steals decision-making clarity, and how breathing between points helps you regain control. Here, I want to show the other side: the mental structure of those seconds.

The model I use with my athletes — adapted for our table tennis — comes from the work of Hungarian-American Dora Kurimay, a former player and sports psychology specialist, in the book Get Your Game Face On Like the Pros!, which in turn draws on the research of psychologist Jim Loehr with professional tennis players. It has four steps, the 4 R’s:

Reaction — the first 3 seconds after the point ends. Firm posture, head up, no “celebrating the lost point”.
Recovery — breathe, step away from the table, drop your shoulders. Give your body and your head a real pause.
Readiness — two questions: What is the situation? What is my job? Which serve, where, and what I do after it.
Ritual — the fixed gesture before serving or receiving, which tells the body: “now it counts”.

One reference I love from this method is the 80-10-10 rule for reaction: in 80% of points, a neutral reaction (anyone watching can’t tell whether you won or lost the point); in 10%, an energetic celebration on the points that change the momentum of the match; and in 10%, a defiant response after a mistake — a “let’s go!” that pulls you up, instead of a “how awful” that pulls you down.

Between points: 8 to 10 seconds that decide the next point.

Notice how the 4 R’s fit the triad. The fragile player jumps straight from the stimulus to the uncontrolled reaction. The resilient one masters Reaction and Recovery — he returns to normal. The antifragile uses Readiness to turn every point, even the lost ones, into information for the next.

Note

I have a much more complete material on this, which I use in talks and hand to my athletes, with exercises to build your personal between-points routine. It will become a post of its own soon.

Iatrogenics: when the remedy becomes the problem

Of all the concepts in the book, this is my favorite — and the one I see happening most in table tennis.

Iatrogenics is a word from medicine: the harm caused by the treatment itself. Taleb defines it as the harm from a treatment that exceeds its benefits. The classic example is bloodletting, which doctors used for centuries to treat almost everything and which, in many cases, killed the patient faster than the disease. Taleb extends the concept to any field: whenever someone intervenes in a system without knowing whether the benefit will outweigh the damage, they are practicing what he calls naive interventionism.

In table tennis, iatrogenics has a name, a surname and an address:

1. Changing equipment after every loss. It’s the most common case. The player loses a tournament, concludes that “the rubber isn’t working”, and switches. Three weeks later, still adapting, he loses again — and switches again. Technique and muscle memory take, on average, 60 to 90 days to adapt to new equipment. Whoever switches before that never gets to play adapted to anything. The treatment (the switch) became the disease (the inconsistency).

2. Tinkering with technique on the eve of a tournament. Fixing a stroke is necessary — but the week before a competition is the worst possible moment. The player goes into the match thinking about his elbow instead of thinking about his opponent.

3. The coach who corrects everything at once. I include myself here. The wish to help makes us point out ten things after a training session. The athlete can’t process ten things. One or two at a time, at most.

4. Volume without recovery. Training more is the automatic answer to any loss. But, as we saw with hormesis, stress without recovery doesn’t strengthen — it breaks.

5. Changing tactics after every lost point. It looks like flexibility, but it’s anxiety. Adjusting the plan because you read something in the game is one thing; abandoning the plan because you lost two points in a row is another.

Notice an apparent contradiction: in the previous section, I argued that the antifragile changes, adapts, moves on. Now I’m telling you not to touch anything. It’s not a contradiction.

Important

The antifragile changes based on information; the iatrogenic changes based on anxiety. The filter question is always: “am I changing because I learned something, or because I’m uncomfortable?”

Via negativa: improving by subtracting

Taleb defends an idea he calls via negativa: often, the way to improve is not to add something, but to take something away. When in doubt, don’t intervene.

Applied to the table, this becomes three practical rules:

One change at a time. If you change the rubber, your backhand technique and your training time all at once, you’ll never know what worked.
With a reason. Every change needs a motive you can explain in one sentence.
With a deadline. Decide beforehand how long you’ll give the change — and don’t reassess before then.

And sometimes the best change is to stop doing something: stop berating yourself out loud, stop looking at the coach after every point, stop reading rubber forums every night.

Antifragile training: stress in the right dose

If hormesis says that small doses of stress make you stronger, training needs to have those doses — on purpose, controlled, with recovery afterwards. A few ideas I use:

Start the set behind. Play sets where the opponent already starts with a 3 or 4 point lead. You train exactly the situation that scares you most in competition.
Multiball with random placement. Instead of a predictable sequence, the feeder varies without warning: one or two balls in one spot, then another elsewhere. He decides the location; your brain learns to decide under uncertainty.
Look for the style you hate. Pips players, choppers, left-handers, blockers. If you avoid it, it becomes your Damocles.
Vary the conditions. A different table, a different hall, a different ball brand. The fragile depends on ideal conditions; the antifragile gets used to not having them.
Play points that count at the end of training, tired. A controlled dose of the fatigue you’ll feel in the fifth set.
Treat competition as a dose, not as a final exam. Every tournament is a stressor that brings information. The result matters, but what you learn from it matters more.

And remember: after the dose, recovery. Sleep, rest, hydrate, eat well. That’s where adaptation happens.

Waldner, Manchester, 1997

In my 2021 text, I said Jan-Ove Waldner had been “crushed” in the team event at the 1997 World Championships in Manchester, and then became champion in the singles. I researched it again for this rewrite — and the real story is even better.

A parenthesis: you’ve probably noticed I quote Waldner a lot — and there’s a reason. Table tennis is divided into before and after him. If you never saw him play, I can only feel sorry for you.

Waldner’s Sweden had been three-time world team champion in 1989, 1991 and 1993, and runner-up in 1995, losing the final to China. In Manchester, the campaign fell apart early: in the group stage, Sweden lost to Belgium, with Waldner beaten by Philippe Saive in the deciding game. In the quarterfinals, they fell to China — even with Waldner beating Kong Linghui. For the first time in years, Sweden went home without a team medal.

And it didn’t stop there: in the doubles final, Waldner and Jörgen Persson lost to Kong Linghui and Liu Guoliang in five games.

At 31, with all of that on his back, Waldner entered the singles tournament and did something that had never been done at a World Championships and probably never will be again: he became champion without losing a single game. In the final, he beat Belarusian Vladimir Samsonov 21-12, 21-17, 21-13. It was his second world singles title, eight years after the first, in Dortmund.

That is not a Phoenix, reborn the same. That is a Hydra. And all of Sweden seems to have learned the lesson: three years later, in 2000, it became world team champion again.

Almost three decades later, the China of 2026 repeated the script, only from the other side of the table: it lost to South Korea and to Sweden itself in the group stage, finished third in the group for the first time in the modern era — and left London as champion, with Liang Jingkun turning around a 3-8 deficit in the deciding game of the final against Tomokazu Harimoto. I told that story in detail in the post about the antifragile China.

But Auad, what about SpongeBob?

Remember that Bob is a sea sponge, not a kitchen one?

The kitchen sponge is resilient: you squeeze it, it returns to its shape. Until the day it tears — and then it goes in the trash.

The sea sponge is another story. Marine sponges are animals, and they are among the living beings with the greatest regeneration capacity on the planet. If a piece breaks off, that piece can become a new sponge — the farmers who grow sponges at sea do exactly that: they cut pieces and let them grow. In 1907, the American biologist H. V. Wilson ran a famous experiment: he pressed a sponge through a fine cloth, separating it into loose cells, and watched those cells regroup and form a sponge again.

Cut a sea sponge and you may end up with more sponges.

In other words: cut a sea sponge and you may end up with more sponges. That is Taleb’s Hydra, in real life, at the bottom of the sea.

And there’s one more detail I ignored in 2021: a sponge doesn’t just serve to return to its shape. A sponge absorbs. When it is squeezed, it lets go of what no longer serves — and gets ready to absorb again. That is exactly what the antifragile player does with every loss: squeezes, lets go of the frustration, the excuse and the blame on the edge, and absorbs what that match had to teach.

How about being a SpongeBob athlete — the real one, from the bottom of the sea? Or, if you prefer, a Hydra athlete: every loss cuts off a head, but what matters is how many grow back.

So, have you ever had a loss that you squeezed until you got a lesson out of it? Tell us in the comments — let’s swap ideas. I’ll read and answer every one.

Your heart lost the point. And it wasn't nerves...

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:58:00 -0300

As many of you already know, since my hip replacement I haven’t gone back to coaching table tennis. I keep studying and advising players, friends and a few coaches, all informally, just to help out, pass on knowledge and learn a bit more. Every time I teach, I learn.

On September 26 and 27, 2026, a stage of the state championship took place here in Belo Horizonte. I went to support the tournament and see my friends. At one point, I saw from a distance a 360TT player losing the first set by a wide margin, already close to the end, against an experienced and good penhold player. I got up and went to try to help. What happened next seemed important enough to become a post.

TL;DR: nerves speed up your heart and your breathing, and the player loses precision even with the right plan in hand (what happened in the match and why). Above a certain heart rate, which is yours alone and changes with your fitness, the easy-ball mistakes begin. You can find your threshold with a smartwatch, use the 8 to 10 seconds between points to breathe, and train this away from the table.

The match

I got to the table practically on the last point of the set, and our player lost it. For context: both are right-handed. Our player is very tall, almost 2 meters, always plays close to the table and uses OX long pips on the backhand. The penhold player uses a square-headed racket and, although he has a rubber on the backhand side, he practically never uses it.

When he came over to me, I asked how the match was going. He said he was far more tense and nervous than usual and was trying to calm down. He was sweating a lot and was quite out of breath. I gave him a simple strategy, with only 3 instructions:

On serve: use a single serve, short backspin to the forehand, because the penhold player was expecting a very wide serve to the left, almost off the table. If the ball came back to the forehand, attack the third ball down the line. If it came back anywhere else, push with the pips to his backhand, as wide as possible. That would be the serving plan until the opponent adapted.
On receive: if the serve was long to the forehand, attack with a topspin. In any other case, receive with the pips, pushing to the opponent’s backhand, even if the serve was short to the forehand.
In the rally: if the point went on, always play to the penhold player’s backhand, except when attacking.

He went back to the match breathing better, calmer, and quickly built a lead by following the plan to the letter.

When the plan started to slip

Suddenly, a serve that was supposed to be short went long. The penhold player, who was behind on the scoreboard, attacked and won the point. On the next point, the penhold player served long to the middle, angled toward the backhand. Instead of following the plan (pushing with the pips to his backhand), our player did a half pivot, tried to attack and missed. The lead shrank.

Then the penhold player served short to the forehand. Our player pushed crosscourt with his inverted rubber, got hit by a third ball he didn’t even see go by, and the match was even again. Once more, he didn’t follow the plan.

Then came the 6-point mark, when players are allowed to use the towel, and the penhold player went to dry off. Our player didn’t. He got angry and shouted at himself to stick to the strategy. That only made things worse, as I explain below.

On the first serve after that, very short to the forehand, the opponent pushed short to the middle, our player pushed with the pips to his backhand and won the point outright, as he did EVERY time he used that play. On the next serve, the same problem: the serve went long, the penhold player attacked and won the point. At 9–9, with two serves in hand, the penhold player closed out the set.

Between sets

At the change of ends, our player came over to me out of breath, more than at the first break. I barely talked about technique anymore. I had identified that the biggest problem was the nerves combined with fast breathing through the mouth. I told him:

“Breathe more between points, always go to the towel so you have time to breathe and think. Don’t rush.”

He went back for the third set, and every time he applied the plan, he won the point. But his decisions weren’t always good: he attacked balls he shouldn’t have, couldn’t serve short anymore, lost his precision and started missing simple balls.

When the match ended, he was frustrated, because he knew he had lost to himself. The plan worked. If his breathing had been balanced, with oxygen and carbon dioxide at the right levels, he would have been thinking clearly, and following the plan would have been much easier.

The heart

We table tennis players say that big matches are decided “with the heart”, with emotion.

But the heart that lost that set was the muscle, the real one.

Nerves were the trigger, but what cost him the points was what they did to his body. Nerves release adrenaline, and adrenaline makes the heart beat harder and faster. That’s the first push. Along with it comes short, fast breathing through the mouth, and the whole thing turns into a cycle:

Breathing too fast flushes carbon dioxide out of the body. It sounds strange, but breathing very fast doesn’t “give more air” to the brain. The resulting imbalance reduces the blood flow that reaches the head. This is the most likely hypothesis for what I saw: I didn’t measure our player, but everything I observed is consistent with it.
The head pays the bill. The result shows up where the game demands the most from the brain: reading spin, precision of touch, split-second decisions.
Frustration closes the cycle. When our player gets on his own case, shouts or fills up with tension, more adrenaline comes, the heart speeds up even more and breathing gets worse. That is exactly what happened with his shout.

The result is what we saw: our player knows what to do, but loses the precision to execute it. A short serve becomes a long serve, a ball meant for a pips push becomes an attack, an easy ball becomes a mistake.

It wasn’t voluntary tactical disobedience, nor a lack of will. It’s the body sending the bill, and that can be trained.

Table tennis is like interval training

You could say table tennis is like interval training (HIIT): the effort lasts a few seconds and then comes a short break. The time between points averages 8 to 10 seconds, and in big tournaments it can be even longer. That interval is your greatest ally for the body to recover. But when your heart rate is already too high, 8 to 10 rushed seconds recover nothing, and the player goes into the next point already “in debt”.

A note so as not to exaggerate: a study of the sport’s demands showed that table tennis is mostly aerobic and that lactate stays low during matches. In other words, the problem isn’t always “tired legs”. It’s heart rate, breathing, brain oxygenation and tension.

Your threshold changes with your fitness

Since I started wearing a smartwatch in my matches and training sessions, I’ve noticed something: above 150 beats per minute, the phenomenon shows up in my game (I start missing easy balls and making worse decisions). Below that, I keep thinking clearly. That number is mine. Yours may be higher or lower, and it isn’t fixed: as your fitness improves, it changes quite a bit.

By the logic of effort, the less fit you are, the faster you get close to your limit at the same intensity of play, and the longer it takes to come back down. Studies on recovery show that fitter people have a lower resting heart rate and recover faster after exertion. It’s reasonable to expect the same in table tennis: fitter players tend to recover more between points.

Mini method: find your threshold with a smartwatch

The idea is to use a smartwatch (or a chest strap) as a training tool, to learn where your heart rate is when you lose precision. A chest strap usually gives a more reliable reading than the wrist, especially when the effort is high. The smartwatch already helps a lot to see the trend.

Record the session. In practice matches with a real score (sets that count), keep the smartwatch or strap recording.
Mark the moments you lose precision. Ask someone to note down, or note it yourself afterwards, the score when you missed an easy ball, when the short serve went long, or when you attacked a ball you shouldn’t have.
Cross-check with the graph. After the session, open the heart rate graph and see which range you were in at those moments.
Repeat over a few sessions. After 3 or 4 sessions, a range shows up. That is your alert zone.
Set your “yellow light”. Just before that range is when you trigger your between-points routine (below).

Once you know your limit, you can glance at your watch between points and see your heart rate in real time. Check first whether your competition’s rules allow it. In training, checking in real time is a good way to connect the feeling of fatigue to the number. For anyone who needs to keep their heart rate under control, it’s also a safety matter.

Without the watch, your body also warns you. Signs that your heart rate has gone too far: breathing through the mouth, shoulders rising, feeling your heart pounding, the urge to serve quickly and grab the ball in a hurry, hands tense on the racket.

Once you find that limit, you can play or train while monitoring your breathing and heart rate and, if you notice it getting out of control, trigger your between-points routine right away.

How to make the most of the 8 to 10 seconds between points

When your heart rate is racing, the break between points is your tool. A short routine that fits in the time:

At the start of the break: take a step back or look away from the table and drop your shoulders.
One full breath: breathe in without rushing, ideally through the nose, and breathe out slowly, longer than the inhale. A simple rule is to breathe out for twice as long as you took to breathe in. One cycle like that fits in 8 to 10 seconds. If two fit, even better. Also make use of the longer breaks, like when the ball goes far away or the umpire talks to your opponent: they’re extra pauses to breathe.
A mental cue, not spoken: talking uses up breath, so think it, don’t say it. A good phrase is “stick to the plan”.
Avoid: breathing fast through the mouth and grabbing the ball any old way. Rushing speeds up your heart. If you have to fetch the ball from far away, go slowly. Remember: not rushing also spares your heart.

At the towel, which comes every 6 points, use it without guilt and without skipping it: do 2 or 3 breathing cycles and pick ONE instruction from the plan. In the 1-minute break between sets, breathing comes first, and only then technique. Avoid drinking a lot of water at once: while you drink, you don’t breathe, and afterwards you’re out of breath. Drink in small sips.

An honest warning: breathing with a long exhale has been tested in studies of daily practice (about 5 minutes a day), and it reduced tension and improved mood. Using it between points is my own application, based on observation and experience. Test it and practice breathing this way before using it in an important match. If you’re not used to breathing through your nose under effort, you may feel short of breath at first, so build up gradually. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to keep thinking about controlling your breathing: with training it should become automatic, so you can focus only on the game.

How to train this away from the table

Fitness: the better your physical conditioning, the higher your threshold and the faster you recover. Work on it with table-tennis-specific sessions, like intense multiball with short breaks. A good strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer can help a lot.
Breathing: practice long-exhale breathing for a few minutes a day, ideally at a fixed time.
Match routine: practice the between-points routine in every practice match, so it becomes automatic when the pressure arrives.
Mindset: when you miss, focus on getting back to the plan and to your breathing, not on shouting. Getting on your own case out loud speeds up your heart and can release more adrenaline.

About shouting, from my experience as a coach, there are two kinds. The relief shout, which releases tension and can leave you calmer afterwards, is fine. The self-scolding shout, the “I have to make this!” kind, tends to speed your heart up even more. Use the first one wisely, so the effect isn’t the opposite.

Important warning

If you feel any chest pain, strong dizziness or unusual shortness of breath during exercise, see a doctor before you keep training. What’s here is table talk, not medical advice.

At the end of the day

The winner is whoever can keep a clear head under pressure the longest.

And the head only commands the racket if the body knows how to breathe.

Now I want to hear from you: what’s your routine between points? Have you noticed at what heart rate your clear thinking starts to suffer? Have you ever used a smartwatch to find out? Tell me in the comments: I’ll reply, and I’ll learn along with you.