What are the keys to preparing for a major event? How can you make sure you give yourself every opportunity to play your best table tennis when it means the most to you? These are the questions that any table tennis player who takes their game seriously asks themself on a regular basis. Not many put the time and thought into working out what the correct answers are!

-          Turn up fresh on the day. I make sure my body and mind are as fresh as possible when I step out onto the match court. My training dose gradually decreases in the lead up to comp which clears my head and makes me hungry to play. Ice baths work miracles – fill the bath half-full with cold water and put 7-10 kg of ice in. Go in for a couple of minutes and then get out for a couple of minutes. Do that 3 times and you’ll feel like new in the morning. It’s an acquired taste but, trust me, well worth the hassle.

-          Go back to basics. Work on what you do best – after it’s probably what you’ll be needing to work well if you want to win the match. For me, it is my serve, my short return, backhand flick and backhand topspin.

-          Get into the match rhythm. Get yourself ready for the rhythm of how matches are played. They are very methodical and broken up into segments. Hitting 100,000 balls the week before a tournament won’t necessarily do you any good at winning the few points needed to the win important match. I am more likely to just use one or two balls in my session when comp is approaching.

-          Play matches! Have a short warm up and then play matches for the whole session. One of my favorite preparation tools is to play 20 or more sets in a session and to just keep going when I feel my concentration is waning. Intense competition puts your mental state under a phenomenal amount of pressure and the better at controlling it you are, the more matches you will win.

-          Fine tune. The week before a big comp should be about fine tuning the details rather than catching up on the training you should have been doing. The lead ups to tournaments are of my lightest practice periods.

The Australian National Championships are on from August 27 – 30 at the Croydon table tennis centre in Kilsythe, Victoria. This one is a really big one for me personally. I’ve won the last four National singles titles and would extremely happy if I could win five in a row. I’ll certainly be doing all I can to prepare well!

Let me make it clear that there is no one-answer-fits-all solution here and anyone who tells you differently can go jump in the lake. Years of weekly trial and error forced me to keep searching until I found the most important factors for my optimal preparation.