In my last post, we talked about bodyweight exercises that can be done to help improve strength for badminton. While these exercises are a great starting point and an ongoing necessity for strength development, weight training for badminton using equipment is really going to be the bread and butter of your strength gains.
Bodyweight exercises are great, but you simply cannot provide as much weight to them as you can with additional weights. Adding additional weight, as with barbell squats, helps to overload the muscles and force them to grow in strength.
Like always, before doing any exercises, make sure you warm up! Weight lifting puts a significant strain on your muscles so you do not want to be doing them when cold.
If possible, it’s always good to have a workout buddy who is able to spot you and ensure you are performing the exercises safely. Somebody with weight training experience is ideal.
Terminology
When weight training there is some terminology flying around that you may or may not be familiar with. I will clarify them below:
- Rep: Short for repetition. 1 rep is successfully lifting the weight through a full range of motion.
- Set: Is the total number of reps performed for that exercise. A set can be any number of repetitions.
- Half-Rep: only moving partially through the range of motion in an exercise. This is something we want to avoid!
- Rest Period: The period of rest time between sets.
Weight Training For Badminton Strength
When we train for strength, we have to be clear on our goals. The exercises we perform need to be challenging enough to force our muscles to adapt and grow in strength. Therefore, if you can lift an amount of weight 20 times, it’s simply not heavy enough to develop your strength effectively.
Image: Facebook
For this reason, strength training is normally limited to an exercise where the weight limits you to 1-5 repetitions per set. If you’re not sure what weight would limit you to this range, you need to determine your one-rep max. This is the heaviest amount of weight you can lift for one repetition. Then take about 85% of that weight.
This should roughly be the weight which will give you the 1-5 rep range. Here is a guide from barbend.com which helps you find your 1 rep max based on whether you’re a beginner or a more experienced gym user.
Remember to include the weight of the bar. A standard Olympic bar is about 20kg (44lbs). So if you can lift two 10kg plates, the total you are lifting is (10kg x 2)+ 20kg= 40kg.
As you get stronger over time, you need to
The rest period between sets should be between 2-3 minutes. This is to allow adequate recovery of the Creatine Phosphate system so that you can produce your maximum effort on every set.
Form
The form is a very important part of weight training. Performing these exercises incorrectly can lead to injury. Particularly when training for strength as the weight is significant.
For this reason, it’s important not to let your ego overpower your common sense. If you lift more than you are capable of with poor form, this is dangerous and could end very badly. Instead, focus on good form the whole way through the movement. Even if this means lowering the weight.
If you are unsure of how to perform an exercise safely, definitely seek a professional to show you. There are also many Youtube videos and websites which offer similar guidance.
Exercises
Squats
- You will need the squat rack for this exercise, so you can have the bar at the appropriate height. About middle/lower chest height is good. Too high and you won’t be able to lift it off the pegs.
- Set up the safety bars as appropriate (particularly if you don’t have a spotter).
- Load the appropriate weight onto the bar.
- Find your comfortable hand position on the bar. This will vary between people. Some prefer a narrower, and some prefer a wider grip.
- Keeping this hand position, come under the bar and bring your shoulder blades back. This will create a cushion of muscle for the bar to rest on just below the neck.
- Once the bar is in position, using your legs, lift the bar away from the pegs. Do not tiptoe to get it off if it’s too high. Better to remove the weights and lower the bar.
- Your feet should be shoulder-width apart or a little wider with toes pointing slightly outwards. Keep your chest out and your butt back. This helps protect your back and stops you from leaning forward.
- Tense your abs and keep them tense for the duration of the set.
- Lower your body as if you were to sit down, driving your hips back and bending the knees to a 90-degree angle. The back should remain in a neutral position and not overly arched.
- Push up through your heels, until you are at the starting position again, maintaining form throughout. Do not bounce up from the bottom of the movement. Everything should be controlled.
- When finished your set, safely walk back to the rack and place the bar back on the pegs.
Squats are the king of exercises for leg strength development and are quite demanding on the body. Therefore, if you find that you are not completing a full range of motion, chances are the weight is too heavy. Put your ego aside and lower the weight a little so you can complete the exercise properly.
As badminton players, this is a fundamental weight training exercise we should all be doing in order to develop our game and is perhaps the single most important exercise for the lower body. A good initial target to aim to achieve is being able to squat your body weight.
Image: LCW Twitter
Lee Chong Wei can squat over twice his body weight. This should give you an indication of how strong elite badminton players are.
Weighted Lunges
Lunges do not have the same strength-building capabilities of the squat. However, given how important this move is on the court, it should not be neglected in your off-court training. These are performed in the same way as the bodyweight lunges, however, you hold weights in either hand.
I prefer to lunge in
Bench Press
- Load the bar to the appropriate weight.
- Lie on the bench, eyes below the bar, place your hands in position on the bar a little wider than shoulder-width apart.
- Tense your abs and squeeze your shoulder blades together for the duration of the set.
- Lift the bar off the rests.
- Lower the bar to your chest so that it just about touches it. There should be a slight arch in your lower back.
- Do not bounce the bar off your chest!
- Drive the bar back up, pushing into the ground with your feet.
- After your set place the bar back into the pegs safely.
The bench press is probably the exercise you’re most familiar with. It is one of the best exercises to increase upper body strength and works primarily on the chest with secondary muscles including the triceps, shoulders and core. It will help develop power/strength in your attacking shots.
Deadlift
- Load appropriate weight
- Stand with your feet under the bar a little more than shoulder-width apart.
- Grip the bar outside of your legs. The most common grip used here is an under overgrip. See the first part of the video above.
- Look straight ahead and put your chest out with shoulders back.
- Drive your heels into the floor and lift the weight to your thighs.
- Lift with the legs, not the lower back. As you lift your legs will straighten, giving way to the path of the bar.
- Lower the weight again making sure the weight comes to rest on the floor before the next rep.
The deadlift incorporates more muscles than the bench press or squat, including the legs, core and back. Therefore, it really is great for developing overall strength.
Like all the other exercises, form is incredibly important here. Your lower back can really get hurt if you do it wrong. Lift with the legs, don’t pull with the back.
Military Press
The military press is an overhead press which works the core, shoulders upper chest and back. The nature of badminton means our shoulders are put through quite a significant amount of stress. Smashing, for example, is quite a violent action, throwing the whole arm through the shoulder to hit the shuttle. Consequently, this combined with a number of other overhead shots takes its toll on the rotator cuff.
Military presses help to strengthen the muscles surrounding the shoulder joint, helping to prevent injury.
Frequency Of Weight Training
Weight training for badminton is quite taxing on your body. It’s putting the muscles through its maximum capabilities. For this reason, I would only do this once a week. That might seem quite infrequent. Maybe weight training for strength 3 times a week is more appropriate if that was our only focus. However, badminton involves many aspects of fitness, not just strength. We want to be able to train all aspects equally. The important part is the quality of your training.
Remember, other aspects of fitness have secondary effects on other areas too. So though you might work directly on each aspect once a week, there will be a secondary effect from the other fitness aspects worked.
Please bear in mind, that there are so many exercises you could be doing for badminton which involved dumbells/barbells. Here I give you the best exercises that will grow your overall strength. There are of course other isolation exercises which target specific muscles which I will discuss in a future article.
Next Time…
In the next article, we’ll continue with some additional information on strength training. We’ve covered the main exercises now but I’ll be introducing the advantages of using dumbbells rather than barbells to perform these exercises.
I realise I have a few articles on strength. Actually, a lot of this information applies to power as well as it does also involve weight training. I want to make sure you have as much information as possible to perform these exercises safely and effectively. Everybody knows how to run, or jump so it was easier to write about endurance for example.
Weight training for badminton, however, can be intimidating, so by providing this additional information, I hope it helps you not shy away from the gym and incorporate these exercises (and other variations!) into your training schedule.
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