Thanks for watching our table tennis transformation video. If it's inspired you to try your own "Expert in a Year" challenge then please visit www.expertinayear.com for some tips on how to get started!
Idk if i've ever received 1k likes on any RU-vid comment! This is a great day in my life...i'd like to thank my mom my dad my friends...just everyone that made this possible. I've finally made it
Seriously. He didn't just "play" every day, he *trained* every day, probably for at least an hour. While I have no doubt he'd be pretty good anyway just playing every day, I feel like this is completely different. You need a lot of resources or a lot of friends with a lot of time and patience.
Some people seem to get caught up in how "they've done better in less time" or "LOL! Table tennis' isn't a real sport!" and seem to miss the point. The point is if you put your mind to it and practice even a little bit every day, you can surprise yourself with the strides you can make. Think you're better than this guy at table tennis? Then practice a little bit each day for a year and become an amazing player. Think table tennis isn't "a real sport?" Then go a practice a sport that interests you a little bit every day and see how you improve. And try it with a skill you don't think you're good at. Drawing, a musical instrument, a second language, something you think you suck at. Then practice it a little bit every day for a year. And then look back at the progress you've made. ...Well? What are you waiting for? Go and do it.
+workoutfanatic I saw that and felt sorry for the guy. I don't think this is an actual job (more like volunteering or just a gig for the duration of the tournament) but sitting there watching the tiny ball going back and forth back and forth... kill me already.
+nikosxi Between matches you have to keep the score, usually you play 2 matches then Keep the score for one, as the tournament goes on and you win, you usually don't do it as much.
WeAreTHe Arc Didn't know that WeAreTHe Arc and United so thanks for the info. But still isn't it incredibly boring? Especially for players who go from actual playing and the thrill of it, to this...
Unless the matches are with people worst than you its not bad to watch, it can get à bit Boring because you have to pay attention. Tournaments are generally fun so its all okay :)
After all the blood, sweat, and tears of training all year, Sam had finally built up the courage to ask out the girl of his dreams on a date. Congrats Sam.
His work out seems a bit thin...... Where is the jogging through the poorest section of town? Or the one handed pushups? Or traveling to Philly and run up the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps?
Yes, you cannot say how good is someone unless you play with him. You can meet 40+ year old man with a big belly and no condition and you would think you can beat him easily but in a tenis table you can be surprised often how much you were wrong judging people by their apperances.
Very true. As a football/soccer player, I seen fat strikers and I thought i'd easily beat him with a tackle. He ended up owning me. That was like in my teen years. Never judge a person on their appearances.
@@truthspeaker6689 it looks, but it's not. The learning curve is huge. It happens so fast that to react, think, play the shot and control the ball in a fraction of second takes a long time to learn
To me... this is one of the best videos on youtube.... it proves that you really can do amazing things with focus and hard work.... no cheap talk.... this is the real deal...
why y'all givin this hate just bc he had a teacher? the best way to learn is from others. i think it's great. you set out to do something and did it. i'm 15 with a lot of life to go but i can already feel it slipping away and there's still a ton i wanna do and get good at. congrats on your accomplishments bro
15? And you feel you have alot of life missed smh. Best advice from a 27yo. Take college seriously. Those grades will follow you for the rest of your life. Also you don't need to go an expensive University to get a great education. Girls are awesome but very emotional. Love them hard but take their counsel with a grain of salt. Respect your parents. You cost them ALOT of money. If you want anything materialistic in life. Make the money. Save the money. Then spend. In that order.
Young King Charles That’s great advice man! Good of you to take the time to write that for the young lad! I’m 25, I couldn’t really put it better myself, let’s just hope he takes it! Those words could really help him!
This video was and still is so inspirational to me. I first saw this back in 2014. I was working in the coffee industry as a barista, and knew that I had to get out to make more money. So I decided to self learn (I was poor) software engineering (web development). It was very tough, often get frustrated/angry/defeated and get lazy. But this video was one of the things that showed up at the right moment and was one of the things that gave me the motivation to keep going. Eventually I got into tech in 2016. I loved the background song a lot, so I saved it and listened to it every so often. And each time I listen to it, I would like: "oh yeah, that guy who spent a year learning ping pong." This video has a different layer of meaning now because I recently learned and practice a new idea: "focus on the journey, not the destination". Some of the goals take a long ass time, and each time you look at the destination, you will end up getting reminded of the fact that you are still not there, you still don't have what you are after, and that's painful. But by moving your attention to the journey, or focus on the process/system and keep going, you can avoid that pain and can actually make a lot of progress. You can easily experience that idea by running for a long distance: if you keep on thinking about the destination, you gonna get frustrated by the fact that it's far away, but if you just focus on the journey, and keep on putting one foot in front of another, by the time you know it, you have made a lot of progress. I am gonna need to save this video as a reminder to keep my focus grounded on the journey. Thanks buddy, hope you get whatever you are after.
Because RU-vid recognized that you've been browsing the internet for too long, best option for you would be to exercise more in RU-vid's opinion! And I bet he/she is not the only one thinking this. (This also goes to all the 625 likes to your comment, exercise is important!)
not jumping over a skyscraper, not turning into a car, not growing tree trunks out of your ass, not running faster than a car, not eating 300 pounds of meat in 10 minutes so shut up be realistic.
kit p you can create technology that lets you jump over a skyscraper, and run faster than a car, you can try to eat 300 pounds of meat and die, you can grow tree trunks out of your ass surgically implanting them (but who tf would want to do that, be realistic) you can turn into a car maybe by mech suit or take the right kind of drug and you will think you are anything.
you cant grow tree trunks out of your ass dumb ass. implanting it in your ass would mean its implanted not growing so what kit p said is factually correct ur wrong and just look stupid
I used to have a neighbor / friend that did it in 4 months. We were a group of four. 2 of us were competitive players that represented the school. 1 was a serious hobbyist. The last one was a fat guy that was not into sports and was a total NOOB. That fat guy played with his dad every night for 2+ hours. 4 months later, he joined us for a game and gave us real hard work, and managed to beat us in a few games. We stopped making fun of him.
+Khairul Hussain What's "rekt"? Anyway, that was half the "Ping Pong story". The serious hobbyist had a girlfriend that played for a club. She went for ping pong trials to represent the country, but failed to get in the A-team. (Got in the B-team) She trashed ALL of us... My ego was hurt. Man... I couldn't remember her name, but we always addressed her as "that ping pong girlfriend of yours" in all our conversations. A few years later, I went to the US for college. And so I played competitively. And lo and behold, I met a BLACK guy that trashed me. As an Asian, that shooked my world. Turns out, he had a coach from China that if I remembered correctly was some sort of champion (national? I don't know) that taught him the game. He spoke some basic Chinese. Very educated guy and very well spoken. I had so much respect for him. His name was Bradley. I never forgot that. He invited me to travel with him to Michigan to compete in some tournament. For some reason, I didn't take up his offer. Ping Pong memories.
+Gan Rekt=wrecked. You're a hater. I've seen a lot of them in my lifetime. It means people like you are envious. Word of advise: don't be a hater, you'll languish in inferiority forever, while the others challenge themselves to greater things. Your world is small. This is just a ping pong hobby from my childhood. I just want to share the story so people can be inspired and motivated to achieve what they want in this sport, or anything else. You can be a scrub, but with CONSISTENCY and PATIENCE, and with the right coaching/training methods you can become good. Always believe you are going to be the best. It's not arrogance. You need to believe and see yourself winning tournaments. Secondly, it doesn't matter if you are a girl or what skin color you have. Erase all stereotypes in your head. What counts is skill. Train and you shall win.
Of course unfortunately table tennis also requires someone who is willing to pratice with you or teach you. So not everyone gets the chance to improve that much in a year as an adult.
+ScumOfTheEarth So did I dude! I went from Silver 4 in November 1st 2014 and achieved Supreme master first class October 22nd 2015. Practice really does make perfect.
Man becomes a ping pong pro after a year of playing then came a 7 year old Asian kid holding his pad upside down, year passed he is still on antidepressants.
if the progress - just take only the first month - there is such a huge progress, that if he should be able to do things he is doing here in February compared to beginning of January, that would need over 10 hours a day
+im_haikal019 Instagram he almost is... He has the table in his kitchen....all the people surrounding him are table tennis players, he's exercising and training probably with those same people.
+Bryan Chung practice makes permanent, therefore perfect practice makes perfect. Some people who practice without understanding only make bad habits permanent.
+drobb42618 I was about to say this. Practice does make permanent - you repeatedly practice the skills that you believe will make you a better player. Imagine a poor player who has bad form and is not corrected. A year later that "bad form" (posture, movement, etc) - if not acknowledged - is only going to be more entrenched and harder to break. Realistically, most laypeople do find out about mistakes as they compete with others, but a competent coach will provide the path of least resistance.
Yeah.. If he only would have committed to something else he might have learnt a lot. I mean in the beginning he's obviously faking or not even trying and he uses pretty much only topspin which is the easiest spin to learn and which you can pretty much "master" within few months, even faster if you play daily... His backspins were very poor considering he trained for 1 year every single day... He didn't have any goal to become good, just to play daily... He wouldn't stand a chance against pro's so pretty much only point of this video is that he proved that he can commit to do it? Yay? Quite pointless video if you ask me...
PapaKay bro you're a dumbass, the point of the video is that just doing something even once a day will turn up good results. And I'm certain this guy could beat you, but by all means please keep talking trash
+Christian Sanchez I have to disagree with you after few years of experience while I played only 1-2 times a week and got much better result in that time + I was a kid back then... He didn't learn even proper backspin and he is obviously faking in the beginning or has just no sense at all how physics and table tennis works...
Nice, you really made improvements over the year, a lot in the first month. Table tennis is a great sport. I only play recreationally but hope to get into it more. In college some days I'd play 6 hours straight, met alot of players and made friends with people from around the world. Keep playing, would be cool to have a match someday.
Accountability is key. Sam wanted to quit plenty of times during the year but he felt like he couldn't because he would be letting me down. After finishing the year and seeing this video go viral I'm pretty sure he's glad he didn't quit halfway through!
SouR Graphics nobody is given anything... you need to work hard for what you want in life. And what I listed above are one's Principles to greatness, not talents that one has.
+VNT Nah. He was gifted. All you need to see this simple fact is see how on day 1 he was already better than the majority of average casual ping-pong players. By day 7 he was already as good as a start-up employee who plays a lot of ping pong in their spare time. The god part is indeed bullshit though.
+VNT He was gifted with the material and people needed to train. Ok, I love basketball, but I have no place to practice. It's not always as easy as determination. Not for everyone at least
+Lewis Pena Bet you searched alot for it judging by your comment. A tip for you til next time look in the description ;) " Musik”Fifteen (feat. Chela)” av Goldroom ()KategoriSportLicensStandardlicens för RU-vid"
+Oscar Vega These players are obviously good but they aren't amazing or anything… My friends and myself are all easily above this level but we are also nerds and have played tennis for 15 years before picking up pong and that was 4 or 5 years ago that we picked it up lol
+Olivier tran There's a japanese (I think) kid who's like 11 years old. He's beaten some of the best players in the world and is one of Japan's best table tennis players.
Usually, these things are way early in the morning on weekends, you have to get up, but don't play, so you're kinda "whatever" and don't go to bed early.
Matthew Stonebraker Couldn't you just google part of the lyrics? I heard "We were only fifteen" and googled that, first result was the song :) One of my most used phrases: "Google is my best friend, he's always there for me! ;)"
There are different types of people. If holding to something for a year is too hard for you, you should do everything by little. Enjoy different things. You'll be more successful and much happier this way
I had a table and I got really good playing all my friends almost every day for a couple years, then my table broke and we never got another one. A year or two later I went to school and there was a ping pong table and I played someone and I fucking sucked. These kinds of skills go really fast.
yeah I guess your brain sees them as useless so kinda starts to forget them, but I'm sure if you were to play regularly now you would pick it up real quick!
+Lucas Carman You can get them back extremely easily though, just a few days after you start playing again, if you have decent competition, you can go back to nearly how good you were.
+Lucas Carman It's different to get good playing friends, verse what he did. He learned the proper techniques and form that the best players in the world used and practiced them for a year. What you've learned is how to perfect techniques that work on your friends (however big that pool is) which inevitably leads to encouraging shots that work on your friends but could actually not be that good of habit to have. Hence when you go to a ping pong tournament you'll get wrecked (even in your prime). You'll probably have some shots that surprise them and score but there will be a different level of fundamentals at play (because they've practiced with a bigger pool of players, aka the mainstream ping pong community) When you practice with a bigger group of people your weaknesses get exposed, you get to fix them, theory crafting also happens, and people start really practicing the shots and techniques that work. Not to say you were bad, you'd likely beat anyone that wasn't a tournament player.
I played table tennis with my friend in college almost every night my freshman year. Whenever we needed a break from studying (both of us were engineering majors), we would go to the basement where there was a table made by previous tenants of our dorm. I lost every match (won a game every now and then but never a best of three) I played against him. He had been playing for 5+ years. Then there was a tournament that we decided to go to and we both made it to the quarterfinals. Lo and behold, that was when I finally beat him in a match. I felt so proud and he looked proud as well (of course, not excited that he lost but still cool about it). I lost to an Asian guy the next round (more like slaughtered) but it was still cool that I beat my friend on the semi-big stage.
I know that feeling, I'm playing table tennis in a Club, I train 5-6 times a week together with my father, and he usually always beat me, I get a few sets, but in a best out of 5, he allmost always beat me. But in a tournament a few months ago, I finally beat him. Such a good feeling.
was he playing against an expert every day? I think that would be the critical part. My brother and I played every day for a long time, and we got better initially but then we just plateaued. When we started I was a lot better than my brother, and he quickly rose to my level, but then we were just stuck there.
+RonMD not in my experience. I've noticed this in other disciplines as well, such as soccer, basketball, drawing, etc. You have to be able to compare yourself with and associate with an expert to be able to rise to that level.
Roescoe1 I can't believe you actually think a 80 year old gramma that literally cannot move around could win against a young guy that has been practicing for a few months too.
This totally deserves 10 Mil views. He put a lot of effort into making this video. the filming in this video, the cuts (your eyes are automatically moved to the part you should be focusing on) , the camera angles, the song sincing with the video, etc... Like ngl you're pretty good at film making.👍
Did you accomplish your goal of getting in Top 250 in England? I am avid player and you have inspired me. How many hours per day did you play? I see some of the off court (table) training, but can you expand on the exercises that you do? What is your name? Thank you for sharing this! BG
Brandon Garr Hi Brandon. Sam didn't achieve the goal of top 250. He did about 500 hours of table tennis during the year, which now we realise is simply not enough to reach that kind of level. You will find loads more information at www.experttabletennis.com/expert-in-a-year
+Expert Table Tennis Interesting, as I was doing the math in my head during the video, thinking of how it is estimated that you reach expert level in roughly 10.000 hours of practice.
Bruce Lee used the figure 10000 when he said: "I fear not the man who has practised 10000 kicks once but I fear the one who has practised 1 kick 10000 times".
