PONGFU
NEW-AGE KUNGFU
Joe Ching （郑佐）
李佳敏 （Jamie Li）
OCTOBER 2018
CONTENTS
PONGFU - THE NEW-AGE
KUNGFU
HOW PONGFU WAS
ALMOST NOT BORN
PONGFU - THE NEW-AGE
KUNGFU
Just like robacus represents
scholarship, pongfu will represent
the new-age kungfu. Robacus can
train and measure a person's
soundness of mind. Pongfu will
train and measure a person's
righteousness of character.
Although soundness of mind is
desirable, the righteous of
character is a must. Historically,
the mind has been the cause of all
humanity's evil doings, while the
righteous characters of a handful of
good men has sustained our
civilization until now.
In the land of the dragon, that is
Asia, we have the feudal system on
the top and kungfu land on the
bottom, with each have their own
favored peculiarities.
Asia culture's two major
components are scholarship and
kungfu. The 200 years ravaged by
the West has left scholarship on
hold and kungfu completely
diminished to the stuff movies are
made of. Now that Asia is again
providing her people with the basic
necessities of livelihood and is
starting to salvage her scholarship,
she must also find a replacement
for kungfu.
Naturally, that should be the most
popular sport in Asia, pingpong. The
undefeated spirit of Asian Pingpong
will transcend Sun Tzu's Art of War
to let its enemies see the potential
of what it takes to truly win -
without bloodshed. When pongfu
bears the burden of war, it also
represents our kungfu today.
But pingpong has two major fatal
flaws in term of becoming a
universal sport. First, it favors
men over women. Second, it was
been hastily put together "on the
street", rather than thought out in a
research setting, like a computer
laboratory.
This is where Pongfu comes in.
Pongfu, or pingpong kungfu, is
designed in the most advanced
software automation laboratory，
the very same one that created
robacus. One of its chief
objectives is to make it a speed
game for women and other
physically weaker players, to
overcome the power game mostly
played by men.
Being arguably the most difficult
sport in the world to master,
pingpong mechanics has also defied
explanation even by the best
players and most experienced
coaches. To date, the best players
are the ones who train the most.
Good techniques don't go very far.
All the how-to books, that promise
to take a player to the next level,
succeed only by getting him
permanently stuck in the levels the
book prescribed. In a way, Pongfu
is an experiment to break out this
dead end loop.
The kungfu in Pongfu is a cross
between robotics and magic. The
robotics is characterized by
consistency, and the magic,
deception. But robots do not
react well and magicians have to
work in controlled settings. This is
where Pongfu diverts from
conventional practices.
A Pongfu player is, therefore, a
control freak. He must dominate
the play. Pongfu is premeditated
to win. Both the serve and return
of serve must be designed to gain
enough advantages that they
directly lead to a winning point.
The serve is a fast ball that should
be delivered from the center with a
centralized pre-swing that would be
twisted at the moment of contact
to either the forehand or the
backhand corner on the other side
of the table. The arm is swung
upward along with a upward flip of
the blade. This is to produce a
downward rebound to generate
power to the ball.
This serve is supplemented by a
double motion serve to either side
by faking the other side first. But
double motion would not be fully
effective unless there is another
triple motion serve that fakes to
the same side. To complete the
repertoire, in order to keep the
opponent from taking a chance at
attacking the serve, a spiny short
serve should also be used
occasionally.
The feet are positioned on a line
perpendicular to the table's edge,
with the leg on the same side as the
serving hand at the front. This leg
should step hard before contacting
the ball to produce power.
The most important part of the
serve is to contact the ball as close
to the table as possible. This is
designed to ruin the other player's
effort to time your shot.
The return of serve is a twisting
angling shot with varying speed.
Invariably, however, it is always
returned right off the bounce of the
ball to cut off the reaction time of
the opponent. The ball should be
hit with an open paddle with a
sidespin and the contact point must
be the corners of the blade on the
right and left sides, respectively, for
backhand and forehand.
The most important aspect of the
serve return is timing. The front
foot should kick backward to
initiate a back foot kick
immediately followed by the front
foot. The paddle arm should be
swung upward with paddle in
horizontal closed position to reach
its highest point at the touchdown
of the front foot. The paddle then is
hammered downward with a
upward flip of the blade right
before hitting the ball.
It is important to initiate generating
force from the body, and then
transmitted through the shoulder
and arms, keeping everything loose
so that there should be a natural
delay for the paddle to catch up,
which turns out to be the most
effective way to preserve all the
power all the way into the paddle
while hitting the ball.
During the time the ball is traveling
over the net, the player should
come over the ball and rebound
back the blade of the paddle to
snap downward into the ball, while
making another backward-forward
combo step, exactly at the point of
its second bounce.
Here we come to the theory that's
most critical to pongfu's success.
That is, in any paddle-ball
interaction, the faster moving one
gets to control the direction of the
out-going ball. Also implicit in this
theory is that the paddle and ball
do not need the hand to be
interfering in any way. And as
mentioned above, it's vitally
important that the ball was hit by
the corner of the blade.
Finally, thinking the interaction as
more a hammering event than a
knife-cutting one is the difference
between a winning and a losing
shot. The hammering should be a
largely open-paddle contact with
the ball hitting as close to the
corner edge as possible, followed
up by a sideward spin of the ball,
always going from forehand toward
the backhand. So, in terms of
hitting, it would help to think it as a
cutting act.
Now we have come to the pongfu
pointer! It says all the hammering
of the blade is in this one direction.
That is to use the natural backhand
way, hitting from the forehand side
to the backhand side, for both the
backhand and forehand.
Why? It's because that's how the
human body is built to do
hammering. And that turns out to
be the life saver for pongfu to
overpower any spin or speed in
returning a coming served ball.
Yes, this is the by far the most
difficult stroke to master, but
mastering it could be the biggest
breakthrough in pingpong's history.
HOW PONGFU WAS
ALMOST NOT BORN
Pongfu should not be born.
Pingpong is just too complex a sport.
So let's see how it was not born.
After two decades of dead ends,
and 3 years of intensive
improvements, now it's clear that
the birthday of pongfu will be on
the day it breaks into the Olympics
pingpong competition by some 80
year-old man. Now, do you
believe it's never going to be born?
The original inspiration to create a
new style of play was that to
directly use the hand, instead its
extension of a blade with a stem as
the handle. So, we need to use a
stemless paddle, with the handle
attached to the back of the blade.
And later on, when it was found
that only 3 fingers on our hand, the
thumb, forefinger and index finger,
do all the work, while the other two
might even been a hindrance, the
whole futile concept become even
more tantalizing.
Ultimately, it was another new
discovery that finally established
the new paddle is really the central
piece of the new style. The
discovery is that pongfu should be
played by having the paddle
independently colliding and
bouncing against the ball. That
means the all three fingers have to
let go upon paddle ball contact.
Well, it so happened the handle has
been designed so that it would not
leave the hand when the fingers let
it go.
Another potential advantage of a
centralized handle behind the blade
is its ability to rotate and wobble.
So now the dimension of the game
is five - x,y,z,time and ball's own
dynamics. The paddle is in
constant rotation while wobbling.
And to compensate for the
gravitational pull on the bouncing
ball, the paddle is also moved from
high to low in hitting the ball in
order to stay ahead of the ball in
term of speed and energy.
In fact it's a hammering and flipping
motion. This has something to do
with the notion of the "time
constant of our senses". The
theory is that in order to sensing a
ball slower than it really is, the time
constant of the player must be less
than that of the ball. Everything
would be in control, if the energy,
kinetic and potential both, packed
in the paddle's blade is greater than
that of the ball.
A centralized fencing stance is used
to correct the flaw in the
no-backhand style that everybody
else's playing with. And since the
balsa wood paddle is about 3 times
lighter than a normal paddle and a
long-pip rubber with super-light
sponge is used, it is possible to get
to every ball and attack it.
However, since it was found that
the serve might very well be the
easiest ball to attack, and also could
be made to be the toughest ball to
return, pongfu is basically a
two-shot game, return and serve.
That sure saved a lot of practice
time.
Another major feature of pongfu is
that, like kungfu, it's self-trained.
A playback board of various
surfaces is placed at one end of the
table and the net is taken down, so
that the player essentially practice
most of the time in returning of
serves, in which the ball is made to
jump twice before being hit.
As for the serve, it's the same
stroke but is hit as hard as possible
and also deceptively as possible to
both far corners.
Skill-wise, the high-tech nature of
pongfu take us to specific
considerations in the formations of
a 5-dimensional nerve network
coordination system in our body,
directing the nutrients transport
and muscle contract and relaxing
timing during the execution of a
stroke, paying special attention to
the forehand downward chopping
muscle. They should be
programmed out as a piece of
computer software that can always
guarantee the expected outcome.
So, here comes the true innovation
in this world's most advanced
computing laboratory, the birth
home of world's destined ultimate
brain.
1. The initial downward scooping
of the paddle should be at as
fast as the small time constant
associated with the rebound of
the ball out of the board, or
the opponent's blade.
2. The motion of turning and
whirling should be as
vigorously as possible to twist
back the body as a spring.
Here is the only chance in the
stroke to store up as much
potential energy as possible.
3. The stroke should continue on
but the release of the energy
must restrained and to be
synchronized with the
hammering and chopping of
the ball.
Oops, one more thing. Every ball
should be hit out with only the
rubber and sponge, rather than
their wood backing. The ball
should always be rubbed, rather
than bounced out straight.
A future plan is to shrink the table
to two pieces of boards of one
meter square each placed so that
the original dimension of the
pingpong table is preserved as
much as possible, but the net is out.
Such a table should be affordable to
all and can be placed in homes and
used for other things. The
important thing is that it should be
able to help train the skill almost as
good as the standard table.
Pingpong is China's national sport,
we want to turn it into a home
sport for all nations.
One day we may even see a
tournament whose large number of
entries would rival that of a
marathon, though most players
would have to do the playing
outdoors.
Finally, it turned out, in the top
echelon competitions, the deadliest
shot in pingpong is the earliest shot,
and it just happens that the shorter
the stem of the handle the easier to
hit the ball earlier. So in pongfu,
the ball is hit at it earliest right off
the bounce. The stemless pongfu
paddle should be a real winner.
But why I can't win?