Developing your table tennis game is a steady progression from the simple to the more complex. Many players, however, get stuck at the beginning or intermediate stage, and never move on toward developing the more advanced parts of their game. It's a common syndrome--players spending year after year trying to completely perfect their most basic shots, and refusing to learn anything more advanced until the basic shots are (in their mind) perfected--and so they never improve as fast as they should. It's sort of like a sprinter spending all his time trying to perfect his walk while his rivals are practicing sprinting. Decide for yourself where you fit in the following six steps, and work your way toward the final step. It's not an exact thing--even when you are doing drills from Step Six, you should still be doing some of the drills from all five earlier steps.
Although most of the drills given below are simple rallying-type drills, as you get more advanced, you should begin many drills with serve & receive techniques to simulate game situations. For example, rather than have your partner serve a simple topspin serve to start a drill, have him serve deep backspin, you loop, partner blocks, and the drill continues. Or partner serves short, you flip the short ball, and continue the drill. Or partner serves backspin, you push, partner attacks, you counter-attack, and the drill continues.
In all drills below, whenever your forehand or backhand is mentioned, that means either a drive or a loop – you decide. If you're a beginner, mostly drive. As your loop becomes more advanced, use the loop more often. However, make sure you can do each drill competently with a drive before doing it with a loop. I'd recommend using your forehand loop in as many of the drills as possible as soon as possible. Depending on your style and level of play, you may also use the backhand loop in many of the drills. (Drills are written as if there were two righties; lefties should adjust.)
Step One: Stroke & Stroke Before you can run, you have to learn to walk. In table tennis, that means you have to learn the strokes before you can use them in more advanced drills. In practice, this means:
A common mistake is to over-practice the strokes by doing simple forehand to forehand, backhand to backhand, etc., over and over, session after session, sometimes for years. You have to start out this way, but don't spend too much time each session on this. Once you can hit 20 in a row with good form, you can start doing drills from Step 2. However, you do need to make the strokes automatic--which means you should start most sessions with the basic forehand to forehand or backhand to backhand for 5-10 minutes until you can consistently get 20-100 in row. As the shots become more instinctive, spend less and less time doing forehand to forehand, etc. Think of this as a simple warm-up, and do no more than 2-5 minutes each session as you warm up each shot. Use the more advanced drills to fully warm up your shots.
Step Two: Move & Stroke Now it's time to add footwork to your strokes. You have to learn to move to the ball.
Step Three: Different Strokes Now it's time to combine your forehand and backhand strokes. Here are some drills you can do:
Step Four: Choose & Stroke Now it's time to add some randomness to your drills. This is the step that many players never get to as they spend eternity trying to develop the perfect forehand or backhand. The key thing in this step is to keep it a simple choice between only two possibilities. Here is the key drill:
Step Five: Choose & Move Now it's time to combine decision-making, stroking and footwork. Don't just use the drills given below--make up your own! There are an infinite number of potential drills.
Step Six: Whole Table Now it's time to pull out all the stops and most of the rules and play almost like you were in a match.
And now you can do Step Seven, the ultimate random: Matches!