It comes as no surprise that a fast-paced sport like table tennis calls for a lot of agility from the players. If you are having an agility or reaction time issue, you can improve with agility exercises for table tennis.
Effective table tennis drills to improve your reaction time
Let’s have a look at the table tennis agility drills that can not only help you get better at table tennis but can also improve your reaction and response time in daily life.
1. Agility ladder drill
- Take an athletic stance and position yourself in front of the first hole in the agility ladder.
- Jump fast and land in a lunge posture so that you have one foot in the first hole and the other out of the ladder.
- Then, jump up and exchange the feet, moving the one inside the hole out of the ladder and vice versa.
- Now jump again but this time, land one foot in the next hole of the ladder and the other out of it.
- Repeat these steps on each hole of the ladder until you get to the end.
- From there, return to the start of the ladder after turning back.
The aim is to cross the ladder in this manner as fast as possible. Using an agility ladder is one of the best table tennis drills for improving agility in table tennis.
2. Speed cones drill
- Make a square with 4 cones, placing them 5 meters apart.
- Take an athletic stance in the middle of the square.
- Ask a friend to give you commands like ‘side shuffle to cone 3’ or ‘sprint to cone 1.’
- Your task is to execute the command shouted by your friend as fast as possible.
- Your friend needs to keep the motion and direction of the exercise as random as possible.
3. Reaction lights drill
- Place 5 to 10 light pods in a random manner on a wall.
- Connect them to your Blazepod app and set them to light up randomly.
- Position yourself in front of the pods and tap them as soon as they light up.
- As you get better at this drill, decrease the duration between pods to improve your reaction time significantly.
These table tennis speed training drills will improve your reaction time not only for table tennis but for other sports and real-life scenarios as well. All you have to do is to keep doing them regularly until you notice improvement.
