get good at badminton

Hey everyone! If you’re keeping up with the GGAB Fitness Training Regime, you’ll know that I missed a day. Today’s post was supposed to be written yesterday! I will be talking about yesterday’s activities; however, as they are rather unique.

Instead of writing about rest and what I did for rest, it’s going to be a little different. You see, the reason I didn’t get a post out yesterday was that I was tired from training and playing badminton in my club last night. It was somewhat surprising that I didn’t have the energy to keep going. More on that later.

First, you should go check out the Badminton Training Regime #2 – GGAB Fitness Training post if you haven’t already so that you can get an overview of what we are doing in this training.

Like mentioned in the title, today’s a particular day. I’ve got a lot to share about this training regime and playing badminton.

The Exercises

Because I was training with my club, I wasn’t following my regular training. I will still list down the things we did during my training, though.

1. Rally with a partner and then quick jog around the courts for warm-up
2. Court running. Across the span of three courts, do 4 of each of these exercises in a circular motion: run, shuffle sideways, shuffle sideways with a jump, shuffle forward, shuffle backward, high knees, sprint
3. 5 sets of 20 seconds for each pattern: smash net-kill right side, smash net-kill left side, smash at the back side to side, front net-kill side to side, smash at the middle court
4. Consistency drill #1 (A: straight clear, B: straight clear back, A: straight clear again, B: straight clear back, A: drop shot anywhere, B: net shot, A: net shot, B: lift, A: smash, B: block, A: net shot, B: lift, A: smash, B: block, A: net shot, B: lift, and restart). Do this for 7 minutes and then A and B switch and then switch sides after one. So basically, 4 sets of 7 minutes.
5. Consistency drill #2 (B hits the shuttle back to the front right side of A while A can hit anywhere, but if A plays a straight net shot, B will lift/push the shuttle and then B has to hit everything to the back unless A smashes, which B blocks and restart at the front). Do this for 7 minutes and then A and B switch and then switch sides after one. Same kind of thing as the first drill.
6. Badminton matches against other players
7. Stretch

These exercises were challenging. Surprisingly challenging.

Even though they were more intense than many of the exercises we have been doing ourselves, I didn’t quite expect it to be this difficult.

After all, I was training for about three weeks before so I only expected to be semi sore. But here I am the day after, having multiple sore areas in the calves, ankles, quads, and arms.

It isn’t as bad as the summer training camp that I did where I could barely walk at all. The blisters aren’t as bad either with many that hurt but not to the point where I have to limp.

The main thing I have deducted from this increase in intensity other than an increase in the number of drills, but rather, the pressure to do the exercises faster generated from coaches and other players watching.

In the court running, when the lead person and the rest of the group are keeping up the pace, it’s embarrassing to slow down as you don’t want others to make fun of you either directly saying it out loud or even thinking about.

It’s the same thing for the 20-second footwork drills. You never want the coach to be calling you out for going too slow.

It really pushes your limits, and in that way, it’s good.

An analogy for this kind of pressure is like a monster chasing you down. You start pushing yourself to run faster than you ever thought you could because the adrenaline pushes in from the fear of being caught.

And that really is the difference between training with others and by yourself. One holds you accountable while the other one you go at speeds more suitable to feeling good.

The very aftermath of both training methods is entirely different. Training with others makes you feel tired and sore while practicing by yourself makes you more refreshed.

But after learning about this, it only means that I have to be able to discipline myself to go even harder despite what I’m feeling so that I can replicate the kind of training I experience in a group.

If I can master pushing myself, I can ultimately master badminton as well.

Diet and Sleep

Our diet has remained pretty much the same yesterday as the other days. For breakfast, it was some Chinese bread. Then for lunch, we had noodles with some beef stew. Since the training was from 5 to 8 PM, we actually had a snack in the form of a poutine and some ice cream from McDonald’s.

Maybe not the best idea for an athlete…

My brother and I certainly both felt like throwing up, but luckily, we didn’t. Next time I will try something much lighter.

Then for dinner, at around 8 PM, we had Peking duck, duck soup, soup dumplings, and some fried rice. Pretty filling and definitely satisfying after an intense session of training.

Sleep definitely improved yesterday. I slept at 11 PM the previous day and woke up at 8 AM. A good 9 hours of sleep. I’m particularly proud of sleeping earlier and waking up earlier. The two hours that I get instead of waking up at 10 AM certainly means a lot.

And since I’m writing about September 1 stuff on September 2, I get to also talk about how I was able to sleep at 11 PM and wake up at 8 AM again.

Hopefully, I will still be able to maintain this kind of sleep but finishing the blog posts earlier. The eventual goal is to be able to wake up at 6 AM consistently without an alarm.

Wish me luck on this goal!

Thoughts and Feelings

Contrary to the other training days, I was quite disappointed with my performance. Usually, I’m always talking about how the training makes you feel much happier, productive, and relieve you of the negative emotions.

This time, I’m going to talk about how I wasn’t able to achieve such high expectations.

First, a little about actual badminton skill. It seems like without actually playing badminton on a real court with a real net, our badminton skills have gone down significantly.

It took about 1 hour of rallying and playing a few games for my brother and me to recover some of our skill. Our shot quality was absolutely horrible when we were warming up.

Our clears kept going out, we missed every single drop, and our smashes had no power despite doing all of the upper body training. As I said, much of this was recovered, but more practice with consistency is definitely needed.

So next time I prep up a training regime, I’m going to have to include badminton playing. It’s an absolute must if you want to maintain and increase skill.

However, I did expect our skill to drop a bit because we didn’t spend much time playing any badminton. What I didn’t expect was for our fitness and footwork to fail on us.

Even though like mentioned in the exercise session about how intense the badminton training was, I honestly thought our fitness could withstand it pretty well.

Footwork was even more surprising when I was playing my matches. Even though I won all of them, I shouldn’t have taken so long or have had to work so hard to beat any of the players I played against.

My footwork wasn’t light enough. I wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t endure long enough. It was quite demotivating to see me play as I did a month ago even with all this extra footwork training outside.

This expectation wasn’t just a dreamer’s expectation either. The reason I thought the footwork training outside would improve myself so much is that when I was training once a week a few months before, whenever I did a little bit of extra footwork on my own, my progress spiked and I played much better.

So when I’m on the pavement feeling my footwork go faster, become more efficient, and become more stable, I really thought I could apply it inside of my club. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

When I looked at my brother, however, things were much different.

Yes, he had the same experience as me with the inconsistent and low-quality badminton shots, but he was completely different when playing matches.

His speed has increased a lot, and he’s much more aggressive. Every time I look over, I see him attacking at the net rather than playing defensively like he used to. He still has his ways to go, but he’s getting better now.

Being disappointed like this won’t stop me from continuing, though. I will adjust the training a little bit and try to focus on specific aspects that will make me a better player.

Playing at the club again certainly helped me identify many of my weaknesses which I can go focus on now. There are 5 aspects of my game which I will put heavy focus into when I go play some more badminton:

1. Responding to net and drop shots toward my backhand side. I’m still having trouble moving to this side so I will definitely spend some time analyzing pro players move towards that side and practice it myself.
2. Responding to flicks. The main reason both my opponents I played that day was able to get points on me was my failure to respond to flicks. Otherwise, the game probably would have ended a lot sooner. To respond to flicks, I will likely spend some time intercepting flicks and increasing my smash power to scare them off of flicking.
3. Responding to push shots. I actually switched to a forehand long serve during my two matches as it made it much easier to win. When I served short, my opponent’s push shots put me in tight situations where I would trip up on footwork and be unable to respond to the next shot. Practice on this during footwork will be needed.
4. Playing longer rallies. I was actually testing this out during my games by switching to long service and focusing on making them move rather than attack, which I usually did. It worked. I beat them in the stamina and consistency game, but I was exhausted as well. I think this will be what elevates me to the next level though so I will probably do some consistency drills such as only clearing to one another and such.
5. Building a stronger mentality. One of the common things that would hurt my game was thinking about the point differences and losing hope. I’m going to consciously try to get rid of these thoughts and add a bit of a more for fun element to my head when I play so that it becomes much easier for me to win.

Despite being all disappointed, playing badminton again was fun and helped me understand myself even more. And it’s going to help me bring better content to you as well!

I am looking forward to the next time I play, which will be Thursday.

Progress

I didn’t actually get to take any pictures or measure anything yesterday, so you will actually be getting today’s photographs and weight. Here you go:

 Person 1:

Weight: 150 lbs

 Person 2:

Weight: 128 lbs

Conclusion

Yesterday was a great day. I got to see so many weaknesses and new methods to train myself so that I can get better but also help you with your badminton too.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below, and I will be glad to respond. As always, good luck in your games and have a great day!