Most Important Aspect Of Training? – Mental Fortitude

For this article, I thought I’d write about something a little different. Nothing to do with how to play badminton or strategies but more the mindset of your approach to badminton training. If two badminton players are physically equal and consistent in every way, the only variable is their Mental Fortitude.

Human psychology is such a big part of sports. That’s why professional sports teams, including badminton associations, will hire Sports Psychologists. These professionals evaluate the psyche of athletes in their command and analyse their performance from a psychological point of view.

Mental fortitude is one of the hardest things to train. It’s not simply thinking you can do something. It’s changing your whole state of mind to consistently give your best to every aspect of your game. Which is definitely exhausting and why it is so difficult!

Most people think high-pressure situations is when mentality really matters. While this is definitely the case, I would argue that the most important scenario to apply this mental fortitude is in training.

A Quick Analogy Of Mental Fortitude

Let’s assume there’s a group training session and your coach asks you to run 3 laps. You might get a mixture of the below outcomes

1. People who complete the three laps no problem
2. People who do not attempt to do it because they think they can’t
3. People who are only able to run two laps before becoming exhausted but they walk the third lap.

Mentally, who did best? Obviously, group two did not even attempt it. Group one accomplished the task no problem so this task was not challenging enough for them. Group Three, however, were only able to run two laps, but they had the mental fortitude to carry on and complete the task.

And this is the crux of training. It’s not about your ability to do something. It’s how far you’re willing to push yourself to achieve your goals and improve.

Your mind will often give up before your body, thinking you’ve done enough. Let’s say you’re doing push-ups as part of your training, and you do ten. You feel pretty tired so mentally you think that’s enough. But if somebody held a gun to your head and told you to do one more, you damn well would do one more!

This sounds a little extreme, but if you can train yourself psychologically to push past these mental barriers, you’ll find you’re achieving more in training and therefore getting much more benefits when this is transferred to match days. It’s this attitude in training that creates champions.

Improving Your Mental Attitude To Training

Ultimately, you are accountable to yourself. Only you will know if you are giving your best effort. However, I have tried to list some points below which help try to improve your mentality in approach to your training.

• Set Achievable Targets
• Keep A Training Diary
• Understand Why You Are Doing A Certain Drill
• Have a Training Routine
• Take Breaks

Set Achievable Targets

If you set too lofty goals, you’ll become demotivated when you don’t achieve them as quickly as you would like. Instead of having 1 big target, try having a few smaller more achievable ones. Then focus on one target at a time. As you achieve each one you’ll get that feeling of accomplishment to motivate you to keep improving. Ultimately these smaller goals will feed into your bigger aspirations as a player.

Keep A Training Diary

A training diary will show you how far you’ve come. Similarly to the above, seeing your progress will keep you motivated to continue improving. It’s easy to forget what stage you started at. By keeping tabs on this you’ll know when you started, what point you’re at now and motivate yourself to go even further.

Understand Why You Are Doing A Certain Drill

Sometimes your coach will ask you to do things which you might not understand. Perhaps it’s something you would not do in a match. Although you might do the drill, it’s much more motivating when you understand why you are doing them. Don’t be afraid to ask if in doubt. A good coach will always explain why they are asking you to do something and it’s relevance in a match situation or to your conditioning.

Have A Training Routine

When you have a routine you’re much more likely to stick to your training. If you decide on the fly whether you want to train or not you will not improve. You’ll pretty much just stagnate because you won’t get enough consistent training in order to see real change. By having a routine you’re much more likely to commit to your training and combined with the points above, will ensure you work towards constantly improving.

Take A Break

It’s important to take breaks when you feel you need to. All of us become burnt out or disenfranchised every now and then. If you feel like this you’re unlikely to really give 100% to your training. It’s important to take breaks in order to reset, perhaps do something completely different. You can also use this time to reassess your training and analyse where you are and new goals you’d like to set yourself when you get back to training.

Conclusion

Most people don’t like training. At least they don’t like some aspects of it. Even Liliyana Natsir, Olympic gold medalist doesn’t like training. The thing is, you don’t have to enjoy training but in order to be the best you can be, you should commit yourself 100% to it. We don’t like exams, but we enjoy the results that come with success. When you bare in mind the ultimate goal, to be a better player and achieve more in your playing career, you’ll only be as good as the effort you put in in your training.

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