At different levels, players need to focus on different things to improve. Here's a rundown.

• Beginners: Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals! I can't get any more specific than that. Develop those fundamentals until you can do them in your sleep –strokes, footwork, serve, and receive. Work with a coach to develop them, find players to practice with, and drill, drill, drill!
• Advanced Beginner: Playing Style. At this point you have at least semi-mastered the basic fundamentals, and should be looking to develop a playing style. But keep harping on those Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals!
• Intermediate: You now have a playing style and have somewhat mastered the fundamentals. Now you should be really honing your playing style, as in what shots you should do and when. Your serve and receive game should directly be setting up your game. You should be figuring out what you win and lose on, and work to get rid of weaknesses while making your strengths overpowering. But guess what? You still are not advanced, and so you need to continue to focus on those Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals!
• Advanced: You have mastered the fundamentals, though (brace yourself) you should continue to work on them as long as you want to improve – the more consistent they are, the better you will be. But you also need to really develop all parts of your game so that you are the master of any situation and against any style. You need to constantly examine your game and your matches and figure out what you are winning and losing on, and train to overcome any weaknesses while continuing to develop overpowering strengths. You have fewer rivals now – you've left most past ones behind – so at this point you should be studying rivals to find specific ways to defeat them. 

These days many players try to receive these with their backhands, often using a backhand banana flip. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. However, you'll run into problems if you can't also flip return these with your forehand – an opponent might use the same motion and either serve short to the forehand or long to the backhand, and unless you have world-class feet, you aren't going to be covering both with your backhand. So learn to return these shots with your forehand as well, with flips and pushes.

The key is stepping in properly. For right-handers, that means stepping in with the right foot as far in as needed. Balance is key, so keep your left arm out in the opposite direction, like a fencer doing an "en garde."

But you can't really learn this just by doing it when it's needed; you need to systematically practice it. This means:

• Shadow practicing the shot until it's second nature. Perhaps even put a mark on the floor under the table where the right foot should go, and another where it should be in your regular stance, and then move back and forth, while also shadow-stroking a flip or push when you step in.
• Practicing it with a partner or coach. Have him serve short to your forehand, or you serve short and he drops it short there, and then you can step in to practice the shot. Even better, do it with multiball, where the coach/practice partner alternates one ball short to the forehand (usually backspin or no-spin), another somewhere else (either random, or perhaps long to the backhand).
• Then do it in game situations. Perhaps play games where both players have to serve short to the forehand, so both get practice on this.

Once you have confidence in receiving short balls with the forehand, you can do so either forehand or backhand, depending on the situation. And if you have a good forehand, you'll find that you might even want to receive with the forehand sometimes against short balls to the middle or even backhand, as it puts you in perfect position to follow with a big forehand!

Many players lose power on their forehand because they contact the ball too much in front of the body. This means they aren't really rotating into the ball with maximum efficiency – instead, as they are about to contact the ball, they are using mostly arm, which is moving forward while the body lags behind.

Instead, try contacting the ball more to the side of the body, by your right leg (for righties). Imagine there's a rod going through the top of your head, and circle the rod, as Ma Long does in this 48-sec video. By doing this you'll naturally rotate into the shot, getting maximum power and efficiency. This is true for both looping and regular drives.

Note that the goal here isn't just to get lots of power; it also leads to better control since you'll be getting the same amount of power (speed and spin) but with less effort. The more effort you have to put into a shot, the less control, so develop efficient shots where you minimize effort while maximizing power.

Here are the forehand contact points for these players – or choose your favorite player and Google that player's name along with forehand loop pictures.

• Ma Long
• Xu Xin
• Fan Zhendong
• Zhang Jike
• Dimitrij Ovtcharov
• Timo Boll
• Joo Saehyuk
• Liu Shiwen
• Ding Ning
• Zhu Yuling

When trying to serve shorter, many players slow down their swing, and when trying to serve long they speed up their swing. Both are mistakes – that's not how you control depth or even ball speed.

"Serving is a violent motion," said two-time (and soon to be five-time) U.S. Men's Champion and future long-time U.S. Men's Team Coach Dan Seemiller at a training camp in the late 1970s – and those words have always stuck with me. If you want to maximize the spin, you maximize the racket speed. (You do this with smooth acceleration, but that's another topic.) If you want to maximize the speed, you also maximize the racket speed (at least as fast as you can make it and keep it on the table).

So how do you adjust the depth? Not by changing the racket speed, which should always reach a maximum around contact, but by three things: the grazing contact; where the ball bounces on your side of the table; and the spin.

If you barely graze the ball, you get two things: more spin and less speed. This means a shorter serve (i.e. one that would likely bounce two or more times on the far side if given the chance). As you sink the ball a bit more into the sponge, you get more speed and so the ball goes deeper. You also lose a little spin – though not as much as you'd think. More of your energy now goes into speed and so you lose some spin, but you also gain some spin from the rebounding of the sponge, since you've sunk the ball slightly into it at an angle.

And so you can control the depth primarily by how much you graze the ball. Want it to go short? Graze it finely (and get more spin as well), and the ball will travel slower, and so land shorter. Want it to go longer? Sink it a bit more into the sponge.

You also control depth by where it bounces on your side of the table. If the first bounce is near the net, you'll tend to get a shorter serve. If it's nearer your own end-line, then the ball has a long way to go to get to the net – 4.5 feet – and so will likely bounce deeper. Most top players like to serve the ball so the first bounce is as close to their own end-line as possible while still barely going short (with the second bounce on the far side, given the chance, right on the end-line or sometimes just a touch past it).

You also control depth with spin – backspin will make it bounce shorter, topspin longer. A good sidespin serve can also make the ball go shorter as it curves the ball sideways, keeping it over the table rather than bouncing out.

You also can keep the ball shorter by serving it low over the net – but that's a given. Always serve low to the net. You also can get a "shorter" serve by serving crosscourt, where you have more table, instead of down the line. 

So learn to serve with that "violent" motion, and vary the depth with your contact, first bounce, and spin. It's easy to remember – Contact, Bounce, Spin = CBS! (After practicing your serves, you have my permission to go watch TV.) 

A common problem when blocking (both forehand and backhand) is to cover the wide angles by stepping (or worse, reaching) sideways, and letting the ball come to you. While you do, of course, have to move sideways to cover these shots, a key part is moving in, and catching the ball off quick off the bounce. By moving both sideways and in, you can do the following:

• Catch the ball before it has a chance to move even wider, which would force you to cover even more court;
• Make a more aggressive block, which is easier to do when moving in than when moving sideways;
• Stay in position since you don't have to move as much sideways, so you will be more ready for the next shot;
• Rush the opponent by taking the ball quicker;
• Angle the opponent right back. And since you have the potential for this wide angle, if your opponent over-reacts to cover it, you can go the other way, forcing your opponent to cover a lot of ground.

How do you do all this? By stepping in and sideways with the near foot. On blocks to your left (the backhand for a righty), step sideways and in with your left foot. On blocks to the right, step in and sideways with the right foot. In both cases recover quickly by stepping back.

So when your opponent is attacking at wide angles, learn to cut off those angles by stepping in, and turn a potential weakness into a strength as you turn the tables on the opponent with your own aggressive, quick-angled blocks.