A New Ready Position

 I want to make a pitch for a better ready position.  

The current accepted position is where the paddle is upright, held in both hands, and centered on the body.  Then the player will rotate the torso to always face a potential shot.

This is a good position, but not perfect.  We need to think about which shots we need to hit, and what shots we'd like to hit.  And how those shots are divided between forehand and backhand.

The traditional shot lends itself to a backhand shot.  It's easy to move the paddle face towards the approaching ball for almost all shots.  But when the ball comes towards the dominate side, problems start to arise.  Note that the backhand can be used to cover a larger area in front of the body than the forehand.  And it makes some sense to favor being in a backhand ready position.

Then there is the "cross over" point, where the paddle is not in a backhand nor forehand position and a ball that comes right at that area is very difficult to hit.

What pros do is to lean their body to a side to create room for the paddle.  Note that the further you have the paddle in front of you, elbows extended, the more room you will have to move the paddle to cover this cross over point.

The traditional ready position being centered, makes it harder to get ready for a forehand shot.  The forehand is usually the scoring shot for most of us and when we make it hard to use, that seems inefficient to me.  You will see this "problem" most often in kitchen battles, where a ball is popped up, but it doesn't get the forehand "love" it deserves, and the usual stroke in this situation is some kind of backhand push or flick rather than a full blooded forehand.

So let's think about a better ready position.  Face the ball, elbows out, and maybe one hand on the paddle, and the paddle raised straight ahead of the dominate shoulder.  This puts the paddle at the cross over point.  You can get ready for a forehand as easily as a backhand.   This should look like you are pointing the top of the paddle at the ball.  From this starting point, it's very easy to hit a downward forehand or shift a bit to hit some kind of backhand.

What you gain from this position is better forehand response.  However if you need to hit a backhand shot, then it will take a little bit more time to get the paddle in front of your body.

I played with this new position today and while I had to concentrate to get into the position, it felt very comfortable as I played.  I wasn't in any very intense games, so I'm not ready to change my form yet, but it seemed to work well.