With paddles, you must first understand your playing style and experience. Nothing is worse than spending money on anything only to find that it does not fit what you need. There are a lot of great ping pong paddles on the market, but what is important is understanding what will make the best product for you.
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How to Choose the Perfect Ping Pong Paddle (Including for Beginners)
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Here are their recommendations, which include recreational paddles and professional blade and rubber combos for when your game is ready for a stage a little larger than your basement.īeginners will want to start out using the same rubber on each side of the blade. To help you sift through the myriad options, we spoke to O’Neill and three other experts about the best paddles for every level of player. “No other sport has this level of customization,” he says. O’Neill says there are over 1,000 types of rubber to choose from. Competitive players typically have specific rubber styles for both the front and back of the blade, depending on their play style (e.g., fast, all-around, aggressive, defensive). A paddle has two components: the blade (the wood base of the paddle) and the rubber that’s secured to it. But once you get good enough to worry about things like backspin and drop shots (and, you know, winning), those hard-plastic paddles that came with your table will need to be upgraded. When you first start playing Ping-Pong, any paddle will do. When people don’t have disposable income, they don’t go out but they still want to have some fun.” All you need is the right table, a ball, and two paddles.
“We’ve always said table tennis is a ‘recessionproof sport’ because it allows you to play at home. Otherwise, you’d go crazy,” says Sean O’Neill, two-time table-tennis Olympian and USATT high performance director. You’ve gotta do something where there are two people involved. “Everyone is trying to figure out what they can do at home, which involves more than their NordicTrack or rowing machine.
Many of us may still be stuck inside, our activities limited and our desperation for new hobbies at its peak, but there is at least one sport that a worldwide pandemic can’t limit: Ping-Pong (or, to the purists, table tennis).