Life wasn’t the easiest during the coronavirus pandemic and it was no different for sportspeople around the world. Without too much training for months because of the rules surrounding lockdowns almost everywhere, the realization which dawned upon many of the players at every level from beginner to professional, was the need to get into shape and get some practice going.
Pandemics come and go but there could be different reasons for badminton players to be stuck at home, unable to use courts or practice against opponents at different times in life. How does one, then, remain attuned to one’s badminton practicing needs without having an access to either courts or players to play against?
Here’s our exhaustive guide on how to practice badminton at home. If you are a tennis fan too, we have another guide on how to practice tennis without these accesses here.
Table of Content
Improve Your Footwork
Nimbleness and dexterity are the names of the game in badminton and improving your footwork is an absolute necessity as a result. The good news is one can do that even without access to a court or rackets, and from the confines of one’s home.
There are different exercises and methods you can use to improve your on-court footwork and movement.
First, try and improve your stamina with regular jogging. Do spot-jogging for 15-30 minutes a day to help build your endurance, something that is much needed in badminton.
Try your hand at skipping to help you loosen up and become more nimble on your toes. Three sets of 100 apiece on a daily basis should do the trick.
Look at shadow badminton, which is a popular method among badminton players to get used to quick movements on the court. How you do this is by imagining yourself in a game and the shots you and your opponent plays in it.
Keep moving on your side of the ‘court’ while shadow-practicing and it would go a long way in helping improve your feet movement.
You can also improve your footwork with an exercise known as Fast Feet. Fast Feet involves the badminton player having to do a quick on-spot sprint or even move in a direction with a quick motion of feet but without too much displacement from the original spot.
The important thing to note while performing the Fast Feet exercise is the feet shouldn’t rise more than 5-10 cm and the feet should touch the ground in their middle – not on the heels or toes.
There are some other exercises to improve your footwork like speed footwork but that needs some more space or even a badminton court to be able to practice.
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Physical Training
This forms an important part of your sports practice but even more so when you cannot actually play the sport or don’t have access to courts for one of the many reasons mentioned above.
Go for long-distance running to improve your stamina. Running is the easiest exercise you can perform, at least in terms of its technical requirement, and a regular run will help improve your strength and stamina, not to mention fitness.
Squats are another way to increase the leg strength and you can also look after your upper body with push-ups. There are truckloads of YouTube videos explaining the right way to go about your physical training, but if you are a badminton player, then this is an excellent video you can use as a starting point:
Practice the Kill Shot
Badminton players typically play the kill shot from the net where the reaction time is very low and the need to finish the point is contrastingly high.
As a result, the racket swing while playing that shot, whether off the forehand or the backhand, is a short one but at the same time, the art is to generate high power without too much of that racket momentum.
This is one shot which can be regularly practiced at home. Just have someone, anyone throw shuttles at the desired height and keep using minimal racket-swing to try and generate maximum power.
At first, this would be difficult to achieve but as you keep working on it, you will get your most optimal point of connect – the best power extracted on the shots with minimal swing – and you can practice that over and over again.
One of the best ways to practice this is to do five sets sets of five for forehand and backhand net-kills every practice session. You can keep repeating this exercise twice a day.
Work on Your Wrists
As a corollary to the aforementioned point, most of the power required to smash the shuttle away from that close to the net is generated from your wrist. There are some excellent exercises you can perform at home to strengthen your wrists as a badminton player and some of them are mentioned below.
This is an indicative list of wrist exercises for badminton players and individual needs might vary, so it’s best you speak to a fitness trainer before deciding what’s good for you.
Some of the wrist exercises you can attempt include the Dumbbell Wrist Curls, Wrist Extension with Dumbbells, Hand-Gripper Exercises and a few others like the ones mentioned here.
Improve Arm Power
Sure there are exercises you can do for this too but to be able to work on your badminton at the same time what you could do is to stand about five feet away from the wall and keep hitting the shuttle at it.
Avoid using a lavish swing obviously because you want to do this continuously without missing any of the shuttles that come back at you. With a shorter swing, and with an attempt to add more power, you would be adding to your arm strength too.
The other takeaway from this is the need to focus like you would in a match, especially if you are aiming to hit 50-100 such shots at one go. Decide on whatever number you are comfortable with in each set, take a minute off between sets and try and complete as many sets as you can.
Practice Your Deception Skills
There are two kinds of deception which need to be honed in badminton; direction and speed.
The short-arm jabs mentioned in the first point mentioned above is also a form of deception as you look to play the smash with a shorter swing. Similarly, you can change down the pace of the shot or give an impression of playing the shot in one direction and end it in another.
How to practice deception at home? Get someone to throw shuttlecocks at you and instead of hitting them with the side of the badminton racket you are expected to, use the opposite side to change the direction.
The other way to do this is to play the slice instead of a flat-batted smash to take pace off the shot. You could do this by changing the pace of your swing at the last moment before hitting the shot.
Again, look at doing, say five sets of 20 shots apiece here for both, changes in direction and speed.
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Precision Serving Practice
Serving forms a valuable component of most racket sports and badminton is no different. Unlike in tennis where serving power is as important as, if not more than, the precision, badminton serves need a lot of precision.
You can practice this at home but you would need some sort of room – a length of about 13 feet from where you are standing to where the serve needs to land.
Use a thread or a string as your net, at a height of about 5’1″ from and parallel to the ground and tie it at the two ends. Stand at one end of the net between 6-7 feet away from it and keep a box at the other end, also at around that distance.
Now aim to put the shuttlecock into that box with every serve.
If you can practice 100 serves consistently on a daily basis, this would soon be ingrained into your muscle memory and when you get out for actual play, your serve could get a lot sharper than usual.
Train for Lifts & Smashes
This needs some a space with higher ceilings like a garage or you could do this outdoors on a non-windy day if you have some space outside your homes.
Have a mate throw the shuttlecock up to a height in front of you in order to allow you jump high up or lift and then play the smash. Do this 20-30 times and then shift positions with your mate, or take a break. Rinse and repeat for 3-5 sets daily.
This will not just improve your smashes but also your jumps, which form the main part of the jump-smash. In turn, it would also help strengthen your leg muscles.
Mental Training
The difference between two similarly-ranked players at the highest level is often mental. Their game might similar and there might not be much of a difference in the skill-set but how tuned one is mentally on the day could dictate the result of the encounter.
Even at the beginner or intermediate level, it makes sense for players to think about the mental aspect of their games. And what better time than when one is indoor-bound and without access to courts or coaches or opponents.
The one way to help oneself mentally is to think back to all the experiences in matches or match-situations one has encountered and what would one have done differently. Think of the wins and what was going one’s way and defeats and what went wrong.
What about the effect of external elements on one’s games. Even with all factors remaining constant, the same aspect could have a different effect on different players – court lighting for example.
Or the kind of floor on court.
Crowd noise.
Even shuttlecock behavior.
The possibilities are endless and there is always a chance one encounters events one hasn’t prepared for.
The art, therefore, is to get into the sort of groove where these things cease to matter beyond a certain point. The art of remaining calm when things go wrong and to quickly regain control of the situation is a skill by itself and something one can garner with practice.
There are mental conditioning coaches available but even if you haven’t reached that level yet, you could use your time away from a badminton coach to research for ways to regain your calmness when the pressure is on.
Conclusion
There’s a lot one can achieve even without access to badminton court. The improvement in your game would be immense if you can show consistency in the aforementioned practice. Even if you cannot manage all of it on a daily basis, try to aim at 4-5 days of the same per week with a day of total break.