Exercise, Train Your Brain and Have Fun With Just a Ping Pong Racquet and a Ball!!

More than ever, we’re hearing about the benefits of exercise for our brains and its importance for our overall health and well-being.  However, if ping pong isn't on your radar when it comes to "brain work," it should be!  Did you know that even if you don't have a partner or access to a table,  you can still enjoy the many benefits of ping pong?  We’ll show you how in this video.

Playing ping pong can improve your brain's cognitive functioning and help keep you sharp! Ping-pong, with its fast pace and quick thinking skills required to return the ball, is an excellent way of keeping those neurons active.  The brain is a very learning organ and hopefully, this may even translate to improving your ping pong performance or even better improving your quality of life, your cognition, and or your motor ability in your everyday life.  This could be disease-modifying, such as in managing the symptoms related to Parkinson's disease or it could just be in the context of normal healthy aging. 

We’ll show you drills that include ball balancing drills, the ball bouncing drills will move with our lower body having to do with static and dynamic balance.  You’ll be able to mix and match these drills to create a challenging workout for whatever works best for you.  

We’ll show you progressions as we go along and how you can increase the challenge.  Be patient and know that the more you practice, your skills will increase and get better!   You’ll want to make it not too challenging and not too easy so you can optimize the benefits and get to that nice flow state and balance of challenging skills. 

There's a lot of different ways to incorporate this activity into your life. For example, if you're going to be playing ping pong, you can use this as a warm-up.  If you have a 30-60 minute workout, you can use this as a 5 to 30 minute component of your workout for a  neuromotor coordinative aspect of your exercise.  You can even do it throughout the day. For example, while you’re on a phone call or while watching tv,  just for fun  - it’s a great way to keep yourself engaged.  

Wherever you are, be sure to make sure that the area around your feet is clear and that you have something to hold onto or are standing near a wall.   Of course, checking with your doctor and physical therapist before beginning or participating in any of these exercises is recommended.  Use your best judgment, don’t be too competitive or hard on yourself. Take your time to incorporate what we think would be beneficial for you and let us know how it goes!  We want to hear about your progress. We’ll think you'll be pleasantly surprised! If you stick to it, the brain learns! 

Exercises include:

Ping Pong Exercise summary:

1. Basic hand, eye coordination drills with just a ball (2:04)

2. Drills with Paddle & Ball (2:46)

3. Ball Balancing  - Static and  with postural instability  (3:02)

   1. The Cage

   2. With feet apart

   3. With  feet closer together

   4. Feet together

   5. Semi tandem stance

   6. Full tandem stance

   7. Single leg supported

4. Ball Balancing - Dynamic (11:37)

   1. With Marches 

   2. With Turns 

   3. With Stepping/Baby Lunches 

   4. To Failure 

5. Ball  Bouncing - Static (18:12)

   1. Increasing # of bounces

   2. Bounce, catch, flip

   3. Bounce, flip, bounce, catch

   4. Bounce until failure

   5. Feet together, semi tandem, full tandem

   6. Single leg

6. Ball Bouncing - Dynamic   (22:39)

   1. Stepping in multiple directions 

   2. Marching in place

   3. Marching with turns

   4. Marching ambulatory