The Effect of an Exergame on the Shadow Play Skill Based on Muscle Memory for Young Female Participants: The Case of Forehand Drive in Table Tennis

TL;DR

This study evaluates an exergame designed to improve forehand drive skills in young female novice table tennis players by enhancing muscle memory and reducing faulty techniques, showing significant short- and long-term benefits.

Contribution

The paper introduces a skeleton-tracking exergame supporting shadow practice for young girls, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving table tennis skills over traditional methods.

Findings

Experimental group showed greater improvement than control in both short and long term.

The exergame significantly enhanced muscle memory and skill retention.

Long-term skill retention was observed 10 days after training.

Abstract

Learning and practicing table tennis with traditional methods is a long, tedious process and may even lead to the internalization of incorrect techniques if not supervised by a coach. To overcome these issues, the presented study proposes an exergame with the aim of enhancing young female novice players' performance by boosting muscle memory, making practice more interesting, and decreasing the probability of faulty training. Specifically, we propose an exergame based on skeleton tracking and a virtual avatar to support correct shadow practice to learn forehand drive technique without the presence of a coach. We recruited 44 schoolgirls aged between 8 and 12 years without a background in playing table tennis and divided them into control and experimental groups. We examined their stroke skills (via the Mott-Lockhart test) and the error coefficient of their forehand drives (using a ball machine) in the pretest, post-test, and follow-up tests (10 days after the post-test). Our results showed that the experimental group had progress in the short and long term, while the control group had an improvement only in the short term. Further, the scale of improvement in the experimental group was significantly higher than in the control group. Given that the early stages of learning, particularly in girls children, are important in the internalization of individual skills in would-be athletes, this method could support promoting correct training for young females.