Look at this video, please do:
I could never move around like this, of course, but I did play well enough to disassemble my joints with the help of ping f…ing pong. Nowadays, I’m happy that I can walk up and down mountains—again, as I might add. I stopped playing table tennis at the age of twenty.
The first mountain hike happened five years of very focused training later.
The morale of that story: The Magnus effect in how the ball flies is one (off the charts physics-y!) thing. The way the players contort their bodies quite another. Look closely and remember what you know of the human anatomy.
Nope, those movements ain’t good for you, at all. They are impressive, though. Very.