Similar to the post on physiological elements in badminton, I’ll address some common misconceptions that would be best classified within the technical element.
Physiological Components in Badminton
I'll be discussing each of the major elements in badminton, but the focus is more on looking at common myths or misinterpretations, rather than what to do instead. This isn't the most effective way of doing this, but discussing what doesn't work point us in a better direction. It's hard to really know what's the
I would further classify both physiological and technical elements as foundational, whereas the tactical and psychological elements would be for performance. I’ll probably find a better way to name them in the future, so don’t get too attached to the terminology. Or of course, you can make up your own.
The main idea here is that the foundational elements allow for training as general exercise. There are some people that enjoy training, with the focus on doing drills as physical activity. The goal in these cases is to execute the drill as is, or to simply run around and hit the shuttle. There is no need for winning or losing, and even rallies may not necessarily be played. Therefore, tactical and psychological elements are not required.
I would further argue that having worse technique forces a greater physiological load overall. For example, bad footwork requires more running, and bad technique requires more energy to return the shuttle, especially to the back of the court. Although this sounds great for exercise, do take care as the intensity is quite high while sprinting around the court chasing the shuttle. Maybe I will unpack more to this in a future series of posts on badminton for fat loss someday.
Generally, physiological and technical elements serve as a substitute for the other, but being good in both is necessary at higher levels of competition. For example, having good technique should replace brute force or endurance, but if you happen to be really strong or fit, then that might offset a technical weakness at lower levels of play. This is most apparent in the younger age categories of junior badminton, especially at ages around puberty.
Again, to reiterate, this is not to tell you what to do, but rather to question certain practices that should face more scrutiny.
Footwork is TECHNICAL
This is one of my pet peeves. Doing footwork for fitness leads to a degradation of form. What is form? TECHNIQUE. How do you build habits? Cue -> Routine -> Reward. How do you break bad habits? The trick is actually to build a new habit and to reinforce that more. In sport, you would be replacing one motor pattern with the next, and then add reps to reinforce it (but not excessively!).
By practicing footwork to the point of fatigue, what are we trying to do? Think about it, do sprinters ever go to the point of exhaustion because the coach says they need to be able to run when they’re tired? The more strict the technique, the less I would want my athletes to be tired. Don’t go do a full upper body workout and then try to practice doubles serves.
The problem is that it looks like it works. If we see people moving fast in their footwork, then they can move that way in a game too, right? Does that mean we know where our opponents will hit to? Are we also playing aggressively as possible to match the pace of our footwork? No! However, we’re bordering tactical elements. Again, know that there is a lot of overlap and that we can often substitute strength in one element for a weakness in another. That’s what makes each player unique.
Another issue I see is where athletes often look when they do footwork. Watch it the next time you see someone practice. Where are their eyes? What are they looking at? I learned this from Kim Dong Moon, who pointed it out the first time we did footwork (and KDM has largely influenced my badminton thinking).
He said (paraphrased), “Look forward when you do footwork because you want to see what you’re doing.”
The interpretation is that you should be visualizing what kind of shot to hit and where, based on your opponent’s position. Adding this layer of detail to your footwork will significantly elevate it because you are creating context, which transfers better to game situations.
Moving Individual Parts vs. Full Movements
I often made this mistake earlier when coaching, as I was obsessed with technical detail. However, from coaching, I learned that people often learn best with external cues during skill execution. Telling people to move through individual parts is often too much to deal with when learning new skills (i.e. internal cueing). External cues are better, as they direct attention to the movement within the environment.
For example, with the typical beginner stroke for clearing, we often might teach:
Racquet up
Turn your body with elbow up (a different problem)
Extend your elbow and snap your wrist (another different problem)
Follow through (the stroke)
Whereas with external cueing, it might be like:
Pretend you’re trying to throw your racquet into the ceiling on the other side
BUT DO NOT THROW YOUR RACQUET 😐
Of course, obvious assumptions apply. If the kid doesn’t know how to throw, then that wouldn’t be an appropriate cue and we would need another workaround. I’m not saying that you can’t use internal cueing, but the more parts an athlete has to put together, the more difficult it will be. I’m not sure if there’s been direct research on this, but it could be similar to the concept that the thinking part of the brain is overriding the automatic part.
This is often why some people have trouble serving in doubles, because their conscious thinking is overriding their automatic processing (which use different parts of the brain). It’s also more difficult after a service fault, when you have to consciously adjust your serve based on what the umpire has said.
Most of this comes from the work by Dr. Gabriele Wulf and Nick Winkelman (check out “The Language of Coaching” for more information).
Use My Wrist?
It kind of depends. We can break down the overhead stroke a little more to discuss the other problem: “Elbow up” (not to be confused with the Canadian slogan “Elbows up”).
One of the things I’ve noticed from playing so much badminton is that the internal rotation in my racquet arm is much worse than my non-racquet arm. However, this difference is compensated in the additional external rotation I get instead. The amount of shoulder rotation is individual, but for me, the range of motion is the same—just at different starting and end points depending on the arm. Yes, there’s an imbalance. And yes, it has impacted my life:
I play badminton much better on one side.
That’s all (for now).
When I was a beginner coach, I often taught a style of overhead stroke which involved the elbow pointing up, and extending the arm to get maximal reach. I would remember this because I also said that the arm should be close to the ear. I no longer believe in that anymore.
Due to the mechanics of this swing, it’s natural to use the wrist to snap down (wrist flexion), which requires the same forehand grip. There really isn’t any other way to hit. This maximizes one’s contact point height, but it also makes the stroke extremely predictable, because you essentially have to face where you want to hit. This might be fine for beginners, but if you start competing, you won’t get very far if your opponent can read you like a book. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing anymore, considering the many people that don’t read (but not you of course, dear reader 😉). I digress.
The alternative I use now is more forearm pronation, and using more of a throwing action. The elbow shouldn’t be as high, but to compensate for reaching, one simply can tilt their body, so that the racquet-arm-shoulder is higher than the non-racquet-arm-shoulder. Compared to the other stroke, both shoulders are more or less the same height. With this pronation stroke, wrist flexion isn’t needed, and I always love using the 2014 World Championship Men’s Doubles Final to demonstrate this. I know it’s an all-Korean final, but since my style of play was heavily influenced by the Koreans, think of it as a hat tip.
Agree to Disagree
Speaking of different playing styles, we would agree that some of the top countries produce players that are more similar than different. What comes to mind when we think about technical components of players from Denmark? China? Korea? Indonesia?
What about Canada or the USA? It’s kind of like asking ChatGPT to give us a recipe to make cookies. Without getting into the technical details (i.e. breaking down the prompt into tokens, using a encoder-only model for text generation, etc.), a rough analogy is that based on the data the model has trained on, it may end up combining things to create an original recipe.
The recipe may seem reasonable, but once you test it out, there’s a chance it could be a disaster. Instead of using ChatGPT for a cookie recipe, it’s better to search up a recipe that was actually designed and tested. I’m not saying that it will never work, but sometimes it’s better to follow something that has evidence of success.
That’s how I see North American badminton: we take the opportunities we have an we do what we can with it, and that’s highly respectable. Given enough time and resources, I think this might lead to great advances in the sport. BUT, since we don’t have those conditions, it becomes a struggle for many athletes.
Considering the top badminton countries have top players coming back to coach the next generation, we often don’t see that as much in North America. In fact, we tend to prefer athlete coaches from the top countries, even though they may not have found the same success as our top athletes. This is comparing apples to oranges, but I would strongly recommend you at least reflect on this. Context is absolutely critical to consider here.
So is there a best technique? What do you think? It really is whatever you think it is, as in you can do whatever works for you. If it isn’t working, then you need to figure out what needs to be tweaked so that it might work for your own purposes.
Again, I still like to think of each system having their pros and cons, much like in a video game. When you consider a certain technical style, you also have to factor in how much of the “build” you can get to. An incomplete build may be worse than something you develop on your own. Unless you commit to investing the time to complete the full build, perhaps we’re better off with something we can manage. Once again, we’re at a place where we have to choose the tradeoff between shorter-term benefits and longer-term gains.
Let’s use an example from Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, which I recently played. It’s a “Soulslike” game, with a higher difficulty level in the style of Dark Souls games. If you don’t play video games, just consider that there’s a high failure rate in the game, and some bosses took me more than 20 attempts (fortunately, no controllers were thrown but some words may have been said). Here’s a simple overview:
You play as Bai Wuchang, a female pirate, and start the game with no memories. She also only speaks like three lines at the beginning of the game, and then no more voice acting for her character!? Sad.
You pick up different weapons and spells on the journey and as the character “levels up”, you must choose which weapons or spells to upgrade on her skill tree. This is the core of the analogy. Do I want the character to use dual blades, a longsword, a spear, an axe, or a one-handed sword? If I can equip two weapons, do I want to use the similar weapons that have unique properties, or split my build across two weapons? Or do I opt for a magic build to enhance spell casting?
The cool thing about this game is that it allows you to “respec” (re-specialize) your upgrades without an additional cost. Clearly, this is something that only happens in video games. Real life doesn’t have undo buttons. Choose wisely, or make decisions that can be reversed with minimal cost.
Different styles have strengths and weaknesses against different bosses and enemies. Having more technical skills allow for more tactics, as each opponent has different strengths and weaknesses.
That final point is critical, where more techniques lead to a greater variety of tactics. However, not all tactics are equal, nor are they all necessary.
We will dive deeper in that next time. Thank you for reading!
*Note: I was not paid to endorse the game. I was using the most recent game I played for an analogy. If I wrote this earlier in the year, I would have used Final Fantasy VII: Remake and the same analogy works too. Both games were very enjoyable!
