GGAB Fitness Training Regime - Day 2

Second day of the GGAB Fitness Training Regime! Today we focused on leg work as the legs are one of if not the most crucial part of the body for badminton. This is because footwork relies on the legs so if you want to be good at badminton, you will need strong legs to keep you going as well as be fast enough to get to the shuttle.

Make sure you check out GGAB Fitness Training Regime – Day 1 as well as Badminton Training Regime #2 – GGAB Fitness Training to catch up if you don’t know what is happening in this blog post.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

The Exercises

Like mentioned in the introduction, today was leg day, so the entire day was mainly focused on working different muscles in the legs. Here are the exercises we did:

Quick jog and stretch
5 sets of 20 pointing footwork (Last set, focus set, I explicitly worked on frontcourt defense while my brother worked on contesting the net with a follow-up smash)

3 sets of 20 squats with hip rotation
3 sets of 20 squat jumps
3 sets of 20 calf hops

3 sets of 20 calf raises
3 sets of 20 lunge jumps
3 sets of 30 second regular fast feet

3 sets of 30-second side fast feet
3 sets of 30-second front and back fast feet
3 sets of 10 laps up the stairs

Cooldown and stretch

Once again, doing all of these exercises took a bit less than 2 hours.

With these exercises, I wanted to work out calves and other muscles in the thigh area in hopes of strengthening the legs to last longer during badminton games as well as build power for speed and vertical jump.

Most of these exercises are included from research as well as personal experience from club training. During my past week with training at a specific badminton camp versus my usual club that I play at, I noticed a few differences for leg training between the two training schedules.

The badminton camp was much more focused on “static” exercises such as squats and jumps while the other club focuses heavily on fast feet exercises.

What both camps did similarly, however, was running. Which may bring you to ask, why is there no running in today’s training?

What I did was combine the squats and fast feet into today’s exercises and then save running for the next few days. Stay tuned for those days. I’m pretty excited to test myself and see what I can do.

If there are any other questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section down below as well. I didn’t give any of the exercises any explanations on how to do them, but I can help you the comment section if you want to try this training.

Diet and Sleep

I slept around 11:00 PM on the first day and woke up around 8:00, which gives me about 9 hours of rest. That is quite plenty!

It is still something I need to improve on as I’m not quite sleeping or waking up early enough. The goal is always to sleep at around 9 to 10 PM and then wake up at 5-7 AM. And like mentioned on the first day of training, it is meant for me to build good habits of getting up early to get more done.

For today, I felt more hungry, but not necessarily because of the workout.

My brother and I ate way too little for what we were doing. We only ate a small brunch of a few buns and found ourselves starving in the afternoon. Luckily for dinner, we had much more.

Dinner consisted of rice and curry and a few other vegetables. My brother and I had about two bowls.

I definitely believe I should increase the amount we eat as we are not necessarily trying to lose weight, but become stronger and more fit for badminton. And that probably means increasing the amount of muscle we have, and thus we need to eat more to combine with these exercises.

Noted for next time…

Thoughts and Feelings

A lot more ideas and feelings for today.

First, a little more about day 1: day 1 was upper body exercises, and I felt the training was okay. It made me sweat and feel like I’m really pushing myself, but I felt like I could have been pushed more. And it’s true.

Today morning, I was barely sore. Only my wing muscles next to the pec were sore, and those are a result of the push-ups. So for the next time, I do the upper body exercises, I will probably increase some of the sets and/or reps of some of the activities and possibly add in things like pull-ups and weight training as well.

On the other hand, today’s leg exercises felt a bit better than what I did on the first day. The activities felt more towards the sweet spot of pushing myself just enough. However, it still isn’t there, and I feel like I could probably push myself a little more. I’m thinking of increasing the reps just a little.

We’ll see what happens though.

The exercises that I liked in this workout were the squats, squat jumps, calf raises, and lunge jumps. I felt like these exercises had the most effect on how much strength I was building.

The fast feet exercises and running up the stairs were still functional, though. I just found it hard to build the discipline needed to push myself to go as fast as possible without someone like a coach yelling at me to go more quickly.

So that’s something else I will attempt on improving.

Overall, the training was pretty good, but I have to wait until tomorrow to give some more information just like what I did here with the day 1 exercises.

Progress

As expected, there are minuscule differences between the first day’s images and the second day. The weight did not change for myself at all, but it did change for my brother even though he did not participate in the workout, so I’ll pass it off to measurement sources of error.

Person 1: