Do you need some good ideas on great alternatives to wasting your time on the couch on a rainy day? How about finding something that combines exercise and fun at the same time?

It doesn’t take a lot, a couple of paddles, a white little ball and a table. That’s it! Table Tennis is a great sport that everybody can enjoy. I started playing seriously when I was fifteen years old, so I do have some experience by now.

I joined a club and caught fire. That was over twenty years ago. I am a registered USATT member with a current rating of 2150.

You probably noticed, that I use the term ‘table-tennis’ and not ‘ping-pong’. Well, even though the basic concept of both variations is the same, there is indeed a huge difference. If you go on Youtube for instance and search for table tennis videos, you will find thousands of snippets or even whole matches illustrating what a powerful and strenuous sport it is.

If you didn’t focus too hard on the ball, but rather the footwork, you will have noticed that playing table-tennis seriously requires you to move around a lot and quickly. That little ball can pick up speeds up to 100 mph and believe me, that is FAST.

And that’s the difference between ping-pong and table-tennis. The good news is: you can start at any age to turn this fun sport into a serious work-out regime. You will have to take it easy though, especially in the beginning.

Okay, to get you started, try the following with your partner: 20 shots without any miss-hits back and forth. Focus on consistency, try to avoid mistakes. Pros and advanced hobby players do the exact same thing, however, just more like a 100 shots and obviously at a much higher frequency, in order to get warmed up before a match.

And that’s it. As I said, everybody follows the same warm-up routine. But in order to get there, hitting the ball at that pace without making any mistakes, it requires a lot of regular practice. Ideally, every day for a few hours. But anyway, everybody has to start slowly, there’s no way around. Try to do 20 hits in a row with your partner, that’s your first milestone before you move on to the next step.

Forget about the speed. Do as slowly as you can, but with the best possible precision. Speed comes automatically as you get more consistent and confident. Once you can do 20 times, step it up to 50 times. That will take you some time to get there and that’s normal. And then the next milestone would be a hundred times. I will talk about exercise variations a little later to give you some ideas.

But first things first: Now, just grab your paddles and get started with indoor table tennis. It is fun and workout at the same time!

Tony Ulrich writes articles about Table Tennis and features a mini-series on Table Tennis Rules on his website.