Watch as this Guy Gets Much Better at Table Tennis Over the Course of a Year

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Table Tennis 365
Brit table tennis coach Ben Larcombe had a simple concept: With daily practice and dedication, a mediocre ping pong player could be transformed into an excellent one, inside of 12 months.

To illustrate this belief, Ben enlisted as his guinea pig a friend named Sam Priestley. Sam played table tennis with friends recreationally, but he was mostly inept.

In January of 2014, Larcombe and Priestly embarked upon the “Expert In A Year” challenge. The goal was to turn Priestly into a legitimate, top 250-ranked player in England in one year’s time.

Table Tennis 365

In Priestly’s blog he explains, “I spent the next 12 months training hard. On top of the daily coached sessions, my ‘holidays’ for the year involved intense training camps in Hungary, Denmark and Middlesbrough.” Adding, “As time went on the intensity ramped up and by the final 8 weeks I was sacrificing every weekend to travel and play in tournaments.”

While at the end of the year Priestly did not even come close to the U.K.’s top-250, he did get much, much better; as you can see for yourself in the excellent video compilation below, featuring one second of play from each day during the experiment’s duration.

“I learnt a lot from the challenge,” Priestley elaborates. “Not just about table tennis, not just about myself, but I think most importantly I learnt that there are no shortcuts to mastery. You need to put in the work. But if you put in the work, anything is possible.”

To learn more about the experiment, as well as Ben Larcombe’s other table tennis triumphs and exploits, visit Ben’s PeekYou profile by clicking his highlighted name above. From there you will be led to home pages, social pages, an array of articles and videos, and much more of the sorts of things PeekYou profiles provide.