5 Ways To Improve Your Agility and Speed In Badminton

Agility and speed are critical to your badminton success. You’ll need speed and quickness to react and get to the shuttle. Otherwise, it’s going to land on your side, and you will lose. That’s pretty obvious but how do you actually improve agility and speed? In this post, I will talk about 5 ways to improve your speed and agility for badminton.

Jogging

The first one is jogging. This one is mainly here to boost stamina which is one of the critical things for any sport. With increased endurance, you can generally play longer and outlast your opponent.

But one of the things with jogging is how light your footsteps are. Pay attention to how much sound is produced when your feet hit the ground. The louder the sound, the heavier your steps are. This means on a court, you will be terribly inefficient with footwork.

Try to make your footsteps as light as possible. Jogging helps you with this because unlike a sprint, you’re not pushing off the ground as hard and it’ll increase your ability to move around the court continuously.

If you can, get a 30-minute jog every day, it’ll boost your stamina lots, and you’ll generally feel more uplifted!

Skipping

Continuing along with the idea of light footsteps, skipping helps give you a bounce kind of feeling that enables you to move around the court.

Skipping also improves how fast your feet can move and gives you good calf muscles to aid in getting to the shuttle.

You can get out a skipping rope and just skip like that, but there are also multiple variations you could try out.

To improve your agility, try skipping side to side and forward and backward with different timings. So like suddenly accelerate and slow down. This will simulate a real badminton match where you accelerate to hit the shuttle but slow down when moving back to the middle.

Shuffling

Shuffling is absolutely crucial to good badminton footwork.

When you move around the court, you’ll be shuffling most of the time so practicing shuffling outside of playing will help you improve your speed and control over the court.

With these drills, we need as much variation as possible. We need to shuffle backward, forwards, with jumps, etc.

Practicing shuffling in all forms will help us react in badminton and move more stable.

One of the things to remember when shuffling is to keep low and move your feet fast. Don’t do the slow shuffles. They won’t increase your speed. Focus on moving your feet quickly and keeping a low center of gravity, like you’re in a badminton rally.

Sprinting

Ah sprinting, the most known way of increasing your overall speed. This one is mostly common sense. Measure out 50 to 100 meters and dash that. Then take a break and do it again until you can’t do it anymore or you finished your set amount.

Another method is interval training. With this one, you would sprint for 5-10 seconds and then walk for 5-10 seconds and then sprint again. And you would do this continuously for a few minutes. Again it’s designed to simulate a real badminton match where you’re going to be in fast rallies for some time but and then a little bit of rest before another rally starts up.

Suicides are also great drills to do to increase speed and agility. Run back and forth and touch down on lines will help speed you up and increase the rate that you can switch directions at.

Combination Drills

The final method is to put all of these together. You can really do them in any combination you like, but I’ll give you a few that I like.

One drill I like is sprinting forward for 50 or so meters and then shuffling or jogging backward. This drill is excellent at increasing your speed and balance. It includes constant movements that are used in badminton matches.

Another drill you could try is the zig-zag run with skipping and suicides. In a gym, you should set up three stations. In the first station, put 5 to 10 pylons in a line. Set up the second station by leaving a skipping rope there. And the third station will not need any equipment.

With this drill, you’ll run through the stations starting with running zig-zag with the pylons. Then you’ll skip a few times. Finally, you’ll end off by doing suicides. Do this drill at max speed.

Conclusion

There are definitely more drills out there designed to increase your agility and speed. Let me know of any other ones down in the comment section!

The critical points of these drills are speed and pacing. Many of these movements are used in a real badminton game which is why practicing these movements isolated can help you speed up and stabilize your court footwork.

Then when you put it to max speed, you’re building speed and stamina. You should also check out drills for improving badminton footwork as well.

I hope you enjoyed this post on 5 ways to improve your speed and agility for badminton!

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below. As always, go out and play some badminton and have a great day!