Your lungs are fine, they always are, but your legs are screaming. Not screaming like a marathoner’s legs after mile 22, but a dull, insistent ache that makes every pivot feel like dragging a 42-pound block of concrete. The ball flashes past, a blur you saw coming but couldn’t reach, not quite. Your opponent, who seems to do nothing but bounce on the balls of his feet, still looks spry, while you, the one who just crushed a 5k last Saturday, feel like you’re slogging through quicksand. You wonder, with a rising tide of frustration, why you’re so utterly gassed after just one competitive match.
General Cardio
(e.g., 5k run)
Table Tennis Explosiveness
(e.g., rally)
It’s a deceptively common trap, this belief that general fitness translates seamlessly into match fitness, especially in sports like table tennis. We lace up our running shoes, hit the pavement for 22 minutes, feel the burn, and tick a mental box: ‘Fit.’ But that 5k, that steady-state cardio, is training for a marathon. Table tennis, my friend, is a knife fight in a phone booth. It’s not about maintaining a moderate pace for an extended period. It’s about hundreds of tiny, explosive bursts of anaerobic power, followed by split-second recovery, repeated over and over again until your central nervous system just throws up its hands and quits.
Sustained Effort
Explosive




