MHTT World Champs Buildup Diary: Day 5

Today was my rest day from my morning workout so I took the opportunity to sleep in a little bit. Woke up and weighed in as usual and watched some table tennis videos from the Chinese National Team trials. I always find watching matches helps with motivation and with picking up ideas and tactics to use in matches.

I had a short training session with Judy, focused mainly on forehand opening and forehand movement. I had a second session with Lily Yip which was really tough.

Lily Yip

Lily was the top player in the Guangdong team in her prime and was one of China's best. She was a 2 time Olympian for the USA and has an incredible passion for table tennis. Lily has been a great coach for me so far and her club really is my home! www.lilyttc.com check it out for more info!

Lily being penhold and short pips has been really good for my game as you need to focus more on spinning the ball and in order to do that your movement and positioning need to be of a really good standard. I did the falkenberg drill and with the short pips blocking (dead ball) it proved to be much more difficult than ever before! By the time I finished I was drowning in my own sweat.

I also focused on dealing with service returns and not always preparing for attack after serve, mainly that I need to build more stability into my game, especially in the early stages of the point. That was something I worked on last night and am trying to improve on throughout the weeks ahead.

Reached 4000 followers on Instagram @mhtabletennis

We have a tournament here tomorrow so I'm just playing one event to try and hopefully get into a match mentality and stay in it. Hopefully I can just remain confident and focused no matter what happens in my games.

So far I'm happy with the progress and the routine, I've already come a long way since Day 1 especially with my mentality and my motivation/confidence.