- Provided you have watched the ball up until it is a couple of feet away from you, the ball shouldn't be changing in its direction or flight enough to matter.
- It is more important to be watching the opponent and what he is doing, in order to plan where you are going to hit the ball.
- Your peripheral vision is good enough to keep track of where the ball is, and allow you to make contact.
Seeing what the pros do got me thinking more about whether my reasons were as good as I thought. With further analysis, I came up with the following counter-arguments to my old way of thinking.
- A table tennis ball is a light object, and it's flight is easily affected by gusts of air or the spin on the ball. Watching the ball onto the bat is the best way to make sure your bat goes to exactly where the ball is, not to where you think it should be!
- The sweetspot on a table tennis bat isn't all that big - you need to be watching the ball closely in order to make sure you hit the ball in the sweetspot and not the edges of your bat.
- Professional table tennis players do it, so if they need to, we probably need to as well!
- Your peripheral vision may not be all that good for watching a fast moving table tennis ball onto a relatively small racket head.
