Badminton training is one of those things many players love to hate. It’s difficult, tires you out almost more than a real game and sometimes you’re questioning the relevance of the exercise you’re doing. Add to that the fitness element that almost gives you a cardiac arrest every time you do it – it doesn’t sound very attractive.
But we all know from our own experiences, coaches, other players and general common sense(!), to be the best you can be, training is essential in your development as a badminton player!
But are there times you don’t understand why you’re not improving? You play for hours every day and yet seem to be stagnating at the same level? There might be some simple answers here which we’ll explore below!
Quality Over Quantity
You’ve probably heard this phrase many times before and it’s as true for badminton training as it is for anything else! Becoming a better player is not about practising something over and over again for the sake of it. It’s ensuring what you are practising is of good quality! The best way to ensure good quality training is to train with a qualified coach because they will generally have more knowledge to enable you to train with that quality.
You can practise a net shot for 100 hours but can only get one in every twenty over the net, something is very wrong. You need to stop, assess what you’re doing wrong and correct your mistake. That’s why I advocate a coach because even with all the online research in the world, it’s much easier to be shown your error than self diagnose it. If you’re shown the correct technique from the start, it’s easier to learn than trying to break an old habit! Once you have the correct approach, you’ll achieve so much more in half the time.
Generalising Your Training
You want to be a better player. But you want to be better at everything! A commendable attitude but how often can you train? Most people can’t train every day due to life’s commitments and maybe only have limited time a week.
Let’s say you have two hours a week to train and maybe an additional session for games. In that training time, you focus on your overall game every session, every shot, footwork, fitness etc. How much progress do you think you can really make? Still productive but probably minimal.
Image: Ali Bharmal / Red Bull Content Pool
However if one week you focus on a specific area of your game for the full two hours, and reinforce this learning in the games session you have, you might find that you start to develop much quicker! Training all-around simply doesn’t provide the specificity you might require in your game.
If you choose a focus every week, then within a month you’ll have covered maybe two or three aspects of your game in much more detail and these individual attributes would have increased much faster than the approach you may have been taking before. Therefore over time, you’ll find your overall performance improvement as you continue to train each area and reinforce this training in a game situation.
Focusing On Your Strengths
On the other hand, maybe its the case that you’re only focusing on your strengths because you’re more confident in those than your weaknesses. Typically, people like to stroke their egos and what better way than doing something you’re good at. But practising your strengths while ignoring your weaknesses is a recipe for stagnation.
You find this in many amateur players who want to have a big smash so sontinuously practise this over and over again. Then they end up with a big smash, but not much else. You just become specialised at one thing. This will not make you a better player overall. Besides, have you seen how hard the professionals smash the shuttle and it still comes back?!
Don’t neglect other aspects of your game for exponential growth in one area. Make sure you target your weaknesses first and foremost as these are the areas that will be exploited by astute opponents. This will make the biggest difference to your game and your improvement. Of course, it’s important to maintain your strengths – but this should be secondary if you have very obvious weaknesses.
Not Moving The Targets
If you set a target and work towards it, that’s already miles ahead of a lot of people looking to improve. However, how often do you move those targets? For example, if you’re training for endurance, do you just run the same distance or same length of time? If so you’re shortchanging yourself! If you want to improve you have to be constantly moving the goalposts, aiming for better times or further distances.
I’m not saying run a marathon here, but sports specifically, you need to be pushing yourself. If you run 5k every day at the same pace, you’re just practising something you can already do effectively. If you aim to run it just a little bit faster every time, you are aiming for constant improvement. This is the same for your other aspects of training.
Professional sportsmen and women, including badminton players, are constantly trying to push their boundaries to be the best they can be. If you’re serious about your badminton improvement, once you hit your targets, advance them.
Physical/Mental Fatigue
Sometimes you just need to take a break. You can’t keep pushing and pushing every day. You need to recover as well. It’s like when you’re strength training – the muscle doesn’t grow in the gym, it grows at rest. Likewise you need to just take your foot off the break, even for a day. Your body won’t be able to train constantly without rest effectively or efficiently.
Likewise, mental fatigue can change perceptions of your actual fatigue level. If you have low mental energy, you’re less motivated and more likely to not commit to your training. In fact, it can be demotivating in otherways because your performance suffers as a result, you feel like your progress has halted or even gone backwards. Therefore it’s important to make sure you’re in the right mindset every training session and you’re excited to be there! This might mean taking breaks every now and then to improve your focus at a future time.
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Very true and practical. This is the basic problem which most players face.