The effect of age and practice order on the timing of table tennis serve

• Main Authors: Kuo-Liang Chuang, 莊國良
• Other Authors: Yeou-Teh Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/23128362717848062169

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 運動科學研究所 === 98 === Each rally of a competitive table tennis game is unpredictable and complicated. A good service in the table tennis game would help the player to generate more score opportunities. The fast no-spin serve of table tennis is a basic but important skill in table tennis. It often occurs to the players that while perfect in practice, the fast no-spin serve fails at the critical match play. What was affected in the table tennis match? From the perspective of motor development, children have less control of muscular strength and poorer perception of movement than adults. It is possible that there may be an age effect on the performance of table tennis serve under different practice order. The purpose of this study was to investigate the timing of table tennis serve in different age groups and practice order. Eight male amateur table tennis players (19-22 yrs.) and eight children (9-10 yrs.) from an elementary school table tennis team all with two years of table tennis experience (3~5 sessions/week) attended the experiment. The participants were required to make 80 forehand fast, long no-spins and 40 Forehand short backspins serves. Two different experimental conditions were as follows: 1. Blocked condition with a consecutive 20 fast, long no-spin serves to the right and left corners. 2. Random condition with a schedule of no-repeat 20 long and short serves to each side of the target area (30cm*30cm), resulting in a total of 80 serves for each participant. Two high speed cameras (200fps) and a 3D motion digitizing system were used to capture the ball/bat kinematic data. The data were submitted to the three way (2 direction X 2 condition X 2 age) mixed design ANOVA. The results showed that, 1: Adults and children reduced the velocity of bat at the ball-bat contact in the random condition, but the reduction of accuracy only occurred for children; 2: Children were more variable in the timing performances than adults, adults were able to decrease the variability of the height of ball toss under random condition.