TPM #345: Ping Pong?

A developmental tool disguised as fun.

Sometimes the simplest activities can be the most engaging and fun. Tag, dodgeball, street hockey, wiffle ball, a tennis ball and racket + a wall, a bike ride, skating, a golf club and a bucket + a driving range.

Noticed I said “simplest” and not easy. There is nothing easy about hitting a moving ball with a stick, or even a ball that is not moving. Ask someone not used to it, to balance on a small blade across a frozen surface and watch their heart rate go up.

These activities are foundational and too often forgotten in this modern age, yet bring with them training of the body and neurological system that can provide a host of benefits.

Ping Pong, also known as table tennis is one of those activities. When you think of activities that can make you more athletic, you may not think of ping pong, but it checks so many boxes.

As a kid, maybe you were the same, I had access to a ping pong table. My best friend across the street had one and we played for hours in his basement. We were competitive and evenly matched, so it made for some great afternoons and evenings when we did not play outside.

The local health club had one when I started working there many moons ago, and the members and staff often engaged in some friendly games.

It was social and fun, we never thought of it as developing some important physical and mental skills. Is that not what some of the most beneficial activities do however? They have skill development built into a fun activity just like the ones mentioned above.

In table tennis, hand eye coordination, quickness and reaction time, not to mention strategy and competitiveness are all foundational to enjoying the activity.

If you watch the highest levels, the athleticism is next level. For us average folk and our kids, the beginner level has plenty for us to benefit from .

How about mindfulness?

Maybe did not think of that benefit!

Table tennis, he told me, could change my life.

“It really helps you with your mindfulness”

Alan Chu, a sport psychologist and associate professor at UNC Greensboro feels strongly about the activities’ benefits.

Chu, 37, grew up playing in Hong Kong, where tables are everywhere, and competed collegiately at the City University of Hong Kong. For Chu, table tennis remains the fastest portal into a state of flow, a type of hyper focus coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, an idea not all that different from mindfulness.

“I’ve lost family members or I’ve been rejected for jobs or grad school,” Chu said. “But once you’re playing table tennis, you’re in flow and you forget everything else.”

From a recent article in The Athletic, which states that Chu is an unabashed evangelist for the sport who has long believed in its ability to improve mental health and psychological well-being. But in the last decade, an avalanche of research has pointed to something deeper: Table tennis may have the power to alter the structure and function of our brains.

It could even make us live longer.

Photo by Farès Ben Hamouda on Unsplash

While our kids may not be thinking about living longer or mindfulness, the benefits are worth getting yes?

Anything mindful is worth exploring for any of us, regardless of age.

How does it relate to sport performance?

Well, anecdotally you will find ping pong tables in many professional and college sport team locker rooms.

Steve Nash, Patrick Mahomes, Clayton Kershaw are just a few of the athletes known to be outstanding at ping pong. Many of these athletes use ping pong to kill time, but what if there were more going on there from a benefit side?

From The Athletic:

What if table tennis were a simple hack to improve performance, an easy way to sharpen mental processing, aid in injury rehabilitation, or — for the aging generations — stave off the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and dementia?

The science suggests it could be all four.

If nothing else, proponents of the sport have focused on the mounting body of research.

In late November, the International Table Tennis Federation held the World Table Tennis for Health Congress in Helsingborg, Sweden, where scientists presented their findings and Petra Sörling, the organization’s president, made the case for the sport.

“Table tennis has the power to change lives,” she said. “We know that our sport can support physical health, mental well-being, rehabilitation and social connections.”

In the United States, it would be a stretch to say that table tennis is having a moment. However, in December, Timothée Chalamet starred in “Marty Supreme,” a new release loosely based on the life of New York table tennis legend Marty Reisman. The film, an Oscar hopeful directed by Josh Safdie, offered some of the most mainstream exposure in years.

For Chu, it feels like an opportune time to make the case for why everyone should be playing more table tennis.

“It’s like doing a hundred-meter sprint and playing chess at the same time,” said Matt Hetherington, a professional coach and former member of the New Zealand national table tennis team.

This is where it gets a little surprising, at least to me:

A group of Chinese researchers sought to understand better what was happening in the brain. To do so, they recruited 20 competitive table tennis players in their early 20s who had been training for at least six years and 21 healthy non-athletes of comparable ages and genders. The subjects underwent a series of brain scans using an MRI machine and were tested on cognition and attention.

The sample was small, but the findings indicated that table tennis players showed enhancements in brain structure and function, likely leading to increased neural efficiency — or greater flexibility in communication between different parts of the brain.

What if playing table tennis pushed us to be quicker and more attentive thinkers? Making optimal decisions in split second decisions ?

There is a growing body of research that is revealing interesting findings to the impact on the brain in playing table tennis.

The Athletic article goes on to document:

One study, published in 2024 in the journal “Brain Sciences,” found that table tennis improved “cognitive inhibition,” or the ability to filter out conflicting or irrelevant information. Another study, conducted at Paderborn University in Germany, found that table tennis led to increased processing and increased workload in the frontal areas of the brain compared to cycling or a standard cognitive memory test.

Then there are the benefits to athletes recovering form injury. More science: Daniel Büchel, a postdoc at the German Sports University in Cologne, said table tennis could be most beneficial for athletes recovering from knee or foot injuries.

Imagine, for instance, an athlete who suffers an with an injury, removing them from competition for close to a year. They don’t just lose physical strength and speed. They also lose the mental processing that happens during the unpredictable nature of competition.

“When you step back from training, it’s not only the (physical) motor load which is missing but also the load for your brain,” Büchel said. “The muscle gets weaker, and the brain gets slower when you have some long-term absences from training.” The Athletic

And, certainly don’t forget how social and fun it can be.

So let’s get this straight : Social, fun, relieves stress, develops the brain, helps with hand eye coordinate and concentration, helps with mindfulness.

Mmmm..

Time to pull that ping pong table in the basement out for a spin tomorrow with my son!

Have a great week everyone!