This article is a guest posting by Nidhi Patel. An author of a variety of posts on Playo's blog, including badminton, fitness and nutrition articles.
Having strong forearms is very beneficial especially when you are playing a racket sport like badminton. Having strong forearms means you can send the shuttle back to the baseline of your opponent’s court without hesitation. The forearm also plays an important role in grip strength and finger power. This is something often overlooked by many badminton players. So it’s important to consider forearm training for badminton.
Training your forearms is something that should come naturally as a beginner. This is because you might not necessarily have used your forearms in a way that badminton requires before. Quite quickly, your body becomes used to wielding a racket but that is the minimum. There is certainly no harm in improving your grip strength in order to train your forearms beyond the weight of the racket.
Which Shots Require Finger Strength?
Every time you have to grip the racket just a little bit harder to play a shot, you are using your forearms to create finger power. This is especially noticeable with a backhand clear and a defensive drive. Almost all shots require the use of your grip strength with the exception of more delicate net shots. Even being able to change grips quickly between a forehand, backhand and bevel grip for example requires the use of finger power.
Strong forearms mean having good grip and control over the shuttle. Forearms are crucial in generating power while playing shots. Hence stronger forearm muscles mean more power. If you do any kind of upper body strength training, then indirectly you will be working your forearm strength as your hands are obviously required to hold weights.
How to train your forearms?
Dumbbell wrist curls
For this exercise, you need to take a very light dumbbell. Place your arm on a flat surface like a bench, hold the dumbbell in a manner where your palm is facing upwards.
Keep your arm in such a way that just your wrist is off the bench or your body but your full arm is resting on the bench. Use your other palm to keep your forearm secured. You don’t want to use too heavy a weight here. First of all your wrist probably isn’t strong enough to isolate with a heavy load and secondly, you don’t want to risk injury!
Now start by moving your wrist upwards and downwards. After doing 10-15 repetitions, switch the hand. Even though we only use one hand in badminton, we want to ensure that we are even on both sides.
Use A Hand Gripper
Hand grippers are devices that you can use anywhere and everywhere to strengthen your forearms. They often come in sets or some even come with an adjustable spring so that you can change the tension to suit your level.
The objective is to squeeze and hold the gripper as many times as you can or for as long as you can. Use this in both hands.
This is very easy to do and no other equipment is required and can be done anywhere. Like with any strength training, once it becomes fairly easy to do, you need to increase the resistance in order to make further grip strength progress!
Wall practice
Wall practice is one of the most useful things a player (right from the beginner to the professional level) can do. It helps in so many different ways. But it most definitely helps in strengthening your forearms.
Since you are playing with the wall, the shuttle will always come back. In order to get the shuttle to rebound off the wall, you need to put in more effort to get the shuttle to bounce back. By wall practising continuously, you train your forearms to work for longer periods (great for fast-paced doubles rallies) but also train how quickly you change your grip.
Use a training racket
A training racket is a heavier than usual racket. Standard rackets can weigh as low as 60 grams and usually at the top end around 90 grams, give or take a few grams. However, training rackets are much heavier and can weigh up to 180 grams!
This weight difference makes it harder to manoeuvre the racket and your muscles have to work harder to control it. This is not a racket you should be playing with as a day to day racket. It is only for training purposes. You can get injured using this for long periods of time simply because it will fatigue your muscles very quickly. You should find, however, over time that your forearm strength improves as a result of using a training racket. This strength can be translated into your game through increased finger power and control over your lighter racket.
You can either use the training racket by actually hitting shots or you can even pretend like you’re hitting shots. Alternate between forehand and backhand to make the best use of the training racket.
If you don’t have one, or simply do not want to buy one, you can achieve a similar concept by covering the head of your racket. The original cover you used to get on some older rackets is perfect. The air resistance acts similarly to the additional weight of the training racket, making it more difficult to control the racket and requiring more force to play shots. Of course, since you’ve covered the head of the racket you won’t be able to play with shuttles, but you can shadow your shots.
Gripping Weights
This is a very simple exercise where you take weight plates or dumbells in your hand and grip them, holding them in place (while standing). You will find that the forearms get loaded which is key to improving your forehand grip and strength. How long you can hold the weight is a test of grip strength. The same can be done on a pull-up bar, by gripping the bar and performing a dead-hang. A dead hand is where you simply hang from the bar. It’s a lot harder than it sounds but a great grip strengthener.
If you wanted to combine both grip strength and endurance training, farmers walks are a great exercise by which you grip two dumbells and simply walk up and down whatever space is available.
Conclusion:
You can incorporate these exercises during your training away from court. It’s important to be consistent with your grip strength training in order to see results. With the use of grip strengtheners that you can take anywhere, there’s really no excuse to spare 5 minutes working on your grip strength! Forearm training for badminton is something that should not be overlooked.
This article first appeared on Playo’s Blog on the 18th of April 2019. Any changes made on Shuttle Smash were agreed with the original author.
Check our some of Playo’s other badminton articles here.
Recent Comments