A Counterintuitive Fact: Tense Muscles Are Slower

Start with a basic finding from exercise physiology: muscles can only contract quickly when they’re relaxed.

The reason is simple: a tense muscle is already half-contracted, like a rubber band pulled taut with no slack left to stretch. A relaxed muscle is like a fully slack band — pull it and you unleash all of its elasticity.

That’s why you see this everywhere:

  • The harder you try to power the ball, the stiffer you get and the less punch it has;
  • The more relaxed you are, the smoother the motion, and the faster and heavier the ball;
  • The bigger the point, the tighter the hand, the more likely the error.

Relaxation isn’t a lack of effort — it’s a technical ability that requires its own training.

The Cost of Tension: An Invisible Chain

When you tighten up, three things happen:

① You get slower. The agonist and antagonist muscles tighten at the same time and fight each other, dragging the motion down.

② The stroke breaks down. The parts that should stay loose — shoulder, wrist, fingers — lock up, so the body has to swing with the big muscle groups and the whole frame drifts off.

③ You burn twice the energy. Muscles held tight build up lactic acid faster. One tense match leaves you more tired than two relaxed ones.

Worse, tension spreads: a tight hand → a tight shoulder → a tight neck → the whole body locked up. By the end, what you think is focus is really just rigidity.

The Right State: Loose but Not Slack, Tight at One Point

The point isn’t to stay relaxed the whole time — it’s to distribute looseness and tension correctly.

What should stay loose (almost all the time):

  • Shoulders: hang down, don’t shrug
  • Arms: hang naturally, with a sense of weight
  • Wrist and fingers: relaxed, but still in control of the racket (never a sense of losing your grip)
  • Face and jaw: don’t clench
  • Breathing: smooth, never held

What should tighten (for a split second):

  • At the moment of contact: a slight core engagement and a light squeeze of the fingers (grip tension)
  • Right after contact: release immediately, back to loose

Summarize the rhythm in one line:

Relaxed is the default; tension is the instant.

Almost every amateur problem comes down to the same thing: not loose when you should be (tense the whole time between shots) and not tight when you should be (floating at the moment of contact).

Dividing the Work: Tight in the Core, Loose in the Wrist

“Tighten where you should tighten” is too vague to be useful — follow it and you end up going tense all over at the first sign of pressure. The body actually has a clear division of labour.

Only one place should be tight: the core, the band around your waist and abdomen. Its job is to steady the torso so the power coming up from the legs doesn’t spill. It doesn’t take much — about thirty percent, the feeling in your abdomen when you cough lightly, and you should still be breathing normally.

What should stay loose is a whole chain: shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, fingers. Whether power becomes speed depends on that chain accelerating link by link as it’s carried along. Lock up any one link early and everything after it stops accelerating.

Here’s a check that works in reverse: look at your shoulders. If they stay hard while you play, the tension is in the wrong place — the real tightness is in the abdomen, and the shoulders should be soft. The hand has its own rhythm of tension and release: see The Three Stages of Grip Tension and Wrist Relaxation Is Not a Limp Wrist.

Breathing: The Most Overlooked Relaxation Switch

Emotion and breathing are tightly linked. Get nervous and your breathing turns shallow and fast; conversely, deliberately slowing your breath can relax the body.

The recommended breathing rhythm for table tennis:

  • Inhale on the backswing (the body opens and air comes in naturally)
  • Exhale at contact (short and forceful, matching the effort)
  • Breathe naturally during recovery

Never hold your breath. Holding it hardens every muscle in an instant, slows your movement, and tires you faster.

Here’s a genuinely useful trick: after every point, take one deep breath — inhale for four counts, exhale for four, repeat twice. It flips you from tense mode back to relaxed mode quickly, and it pays off most on big points.

Four Practical Relaxation Drills

① Arm-shaking (2 minutes before each session) Let the arms go completely limp and swing them like empty sleeves — side to side, front to back. The goal isn’t stretching; it’s recovering the feeling of an arm that isn’t working.

② Progressive muscle relaxation (5 minutes before bed or after training) Starting at the toes, work up through the body: tighten hard for 5 seconds, then fully relax for 10, all the way to the shoulders and face. This trains the ability to tell tension from relaxation — many players have no idea when they’re tense.

③ Loose-grip hitting (during multiball) Deliberately hold the racket very loosely — almost to the point of dropping it — and hit forehand drives to a fixed spot. This forces you to abandon arm tension and strike through body rotation and natural swing.

④ Breath-and-stroke binding (no ball, 3 minutes) Shadow-swing and consciously bind the inhale and exhale to the backswing and the strike. Drill it until it’s automatic, and in a match your breathing will follow the stroke on its own.

Self-Check: Are You Relaxed?

Check 1 · The hand-shake test. After a shot, can your hand go loose immediately, even shake a little? If you stay clenched shot after shot, you’re substituting tension for technique.

Check 2 · The shoulder feel. Between points, touch your own shoulder — is it hard or soft? A hard shoulder is the first sign of tension.

Check 3 · The jaw test. After a match, does your jaw ache? If so, you’ve been clenching through your hits — proof of tension right there.

Check 4 · Video. Watch your face and shoulders on video: is your expression strained, are your shoulders raised? Strong players usually look relaxed, even smiling, when they play.

A Training Note

Relaxation is a perceptual skill — you can’t relax just by telling yourself to. So the point of practice isn’t to “try hard to relax,” but to first learn to recognize tension, then learn to release it the moment it appears.

Do progressive relaxation 2–3 times a week, shake out your arms before each session, and take two rounds of deep breathing after every point. After three weeks, you’ll clearly feel more slack in your hands.

A Quick Self-Check

Sink the shoulders, loosen the hands; tighten only through the hit; inhale on the backswing, exhale on the strike; loose is the norm, tension is a flash.

One Reminder

The biggest improvement an amateur makes is often not learning a new stroke — it’s finally letting go of the extra tension.

You already have enough power; tension has half of it locked away. Let it go and you get that half back.

The part that benefits most from relaxation is the wrist — loosen the wrist and the whip effect finally happens. Further reading: Wrist Relaxation: Where the Whip Comes From.