Playing badminton is a fantastic way to stay fit and healthy. It requires a tremendous amount of cardio stamina, speed, agility, flexibility, and strength.
On top of all the physical requirements, it takes immense concentration and mental toughness. In elite badminton, a rally can last at a high intensity for 6-8 seconds, in a movement pattern that is unique only to the sport of badminton.
Like tennis, badminton is a great racquet sport that gives participants an impressive amount of benefits. Whether in doubles or singles, badminton is a fun and thrilling game to pick up if you require an activity that boosts your mental, physical, and social health aspects.
How to Keep Fit All the Time?
Run, leap, stretch, and lunge: Good old badminton serves up a calorie-burning cardio exercise. Badminton has become popular among individuals of all ages in recent times. It is easy and fun to play with or without a court.
When you pick up a sport, it is easy to stagnate at a specific point and resign yourself to the fact that you will never be astounded by it. Why? Because numerous people do not understand how to improve, so inertia takes over. Don’t let that happen to you!
One of the most important moves in badminton is the lunge. This is an action where a player must bend down, putting extreme pressure on the quadriceps muscle to retrieve a shot. Other areas that need to be conditioned are the wrist, elbows, shoulders, neck, chest, abdomen, back, thighs, knees, and ankles.
All fitness conditioning should be gradual and increased over time. This will improve the player’s overall stamina and endurance to play an hour match at the intensity needed. It also decreases the risk of injury by doing too much or too fast.
If you are capable of mastering the fundamentals, you will also be capable of mastering the more fundamental skills. Here are some exercises you can begin to add to your training schedule to keep playing badminton and take it to the next level.
Since footwork is a vital part of badminton and directly influences your strokes, the first half of these workouts are dedicated to refining your footwork.
Helpful Footwork Exercises
Badminton needs the most patients. These exercises are intended to aid you in enhancing your health and levels of capability.
Variation is also the key to keeping interested in a training schedule. For instance, jog one day and swim the next day to keep your body and muscles reaching optimal performance.
In strength training, because the rallies are so short, there is no need to be doing intervals of 30 seconds. You should be training in the same manner in which your body will be reacting on the court. So quick, short intervals to get the maximum result are recommended.
Speed and footwork are the keys to becoming a successful badminton player because it is an explosive sport, which requires good hand/eye coordination.
Because the badminton court is smaller than a tennis court, players do not have enough time to get their maximum speed. So jumping, turning, lateral movements, and agility will play an important role in staying ahead in the game.
Skip
Skip for almost 10 minutes during the day. This will harden you to be more comfortable on your toes, aiding in keeping your feet nimble and light.
Jog
Make an effort to jog for three days a week for 30 minutes. Endurance is a vital factor in badminton, and the more stamina you partake, the better you are to recover shots without tiring out continually.
Silent Footwork
You can measure your footwork quality by observing how little noise your feet produce when moving and landing. The slighter the sound, the better you are at engrossing the pressure, the weight of your body, and maintaining your balance.
Before and After Match
Before beginning your match, you should be well warmed up by either jogging or skipping around the court. Then it would help if you focused on stretching the core muscles you will be using, such as your shoulders, back, and legs.
After the match is over, you need to cool down your body. A gentle walk around the court and light stretching on the same muscles will help cool down. All stretches should be held for 10 seconds and should be held steady with no bouncing or movement.
Four Easy Stroke Exercises
1. Play Half-Court Singles
This is a common exercise among players letting you concentrate on your performance as an alternative to footwork endurance. Both of you ought to make use of the first half of the court while reconvening to each other.
Because half of the court is eliminated, limiting the kinds of strokes you can use, lessening the movement needed. Play half-court singles is a face-stridden exercise in a restricted area that teaches you faster reflexes during the game while focusing on specific strokes.
2. Play Rear-Court Singles
Instead of remaining at the front half of the court, both of you will stand in the second half of the court simply before the last backline. Begin a rally hitting the shuttle to each other as high into the air as you can. This simple exercise allows you to advance and clear strokes. It familiarizes you with the most appropriate skills used when contacting the shuttle and the energy needed to hit the shuttle high in the air to the back of the court.
3. Work on Your Weak Strokes
Have an instructor or friend continually serving shuttles to you until you can easily recover and switch between strokes. The coach or friend must note to serve the shuttle to you at all sections of your body, forcing you to use different strokes to return the shuttle.
After which, he can concentrate on the strokes you have most struggle with. Numerous new players incline to have weak backhands, so if you realize you have a challenge in that section, spend the whole session returning shuttles exclusively with your backhand.
4. Train Your Smashes and Lifts
Being capable of executing an appropriate smash and smash defense are the capabilities that distant the serious and the casual players. For this advanced activity, one player earlier behaves as the lifter, continually lifting (and afterward defending) the shuttlecock high in the air into a smashing location for the other. The other player continually tries to smash the shuttlecock back downwards. This exercise allows players to practice two very explicit strokes – their smashes and their lifts. After a while, switch positions.
Finally, badminton is not simply an exercise but a game that you may want to play competitively or even impart to your children one day.
Improve your badminton fitness
Badminton is a very physically demanding sport in many ways. It is a sport that requires players to perform repeated explosive movements, shows great endurance over the course of a match, and have incredible flexibility and strength to reach difficult shots and return them with power.
Whilst the length of a typical rally is often quite short. This means that they are highly intense, which takes its toll over the course of a match. Long rallies are also not uncommon and are no less intense, however.
With matches often lasting at least 45 minutes, the endurance component of fitness is an important one and should be addressed in your badminton training.
So what are some of the best ways to train to improve your badminton fitness and skills? Here are some ideas.
Specific power training
A key part of your badminton training can actually take place off the court and in the gym. This involves increasing your strength and power in a specific way that mimics the movements and demands of badminton.
In light of this, great choices of exercises in the gym for badminton fitness include walking lunges, squat jumps, and side lunges. You can add weight to these exercises as appropriate, but remember to start slowly if you’re new to this type of badminton training.
Specific fitness training
Not only requiring strength, but badminton also requires players to have great endurance and aerobic fitness, so this is something that you should address in your training to improve your badminton game. Again, if you are new to this type of off-the-court training, you must ease into the training and progress slowly.
Great choices of exercises for badminton fitness include jogging and light running for up to 1.5 hours to improve aerobic endurance and sprints to improve anaerobic fitness needed in short, intense rallies. Other aerobic sports such as swimming and cycling are also great choices to improve your fitness.
On-court badminton drills
Of course, you should also develop badminton fitness on the court through drills specific to what you’d experience in a game. This should focus on movements related to both the legs and the movement of the racquet, starting without a shuttlecock so that you can focus on the correct badminton techniques before adding a shuttle.
Badminton drills that are great for improving sport-specific fitness include shuttle runs across the court, alternating back and net shots with a feed from a coach, and random shuttles, where a coach directs sets of serves to different parts of the court.
Warming up and warming down
When performing any badminton training or playing any matches, it is vital to warm up and down to avoid injury and perform at your best.
The warm-up’s job is to do exactly that, warm the body’s muscles up, which allows for better contraction and blood flow from the heart. It ensures that muscle tendons do not pull as easily and that the player has a full range of movement.
Players can warm up for a match or training session by doing 10-15 minutes of light aerobic exercise like jogging and specific movement patterns.
To warm down, a player should also perform a light aerobic exercise to return the body to normal and also take advantage of stretching when the muscles are warm to avoid excessive tightness as activity intensity decreases.
Related Questions
Will playing badminton reduce weight?
It is the most direct approach to cut weight. Taking part in a Badminton game for nearly an hour aids in cutting off 480 Calories (the utmost in any sporting), and if you create a custom of it, you can lose a bare least of 4 Kg in a month.
Is Playing Badminton a Good Workout?
Playing badminton increases muscle tone. It shapes and tenors the calves, quads, glutes, and constraints. Besides, your arms and back muscles obtain exercises as well. Workouts raise endorphins that are the brain’s feel-better neurotransmitters and have been found to enhance mood and sleep.
Who Found Badminton?
It was founded in India in an approach called Poona. British army officers studied the game around 1870. In 1873, the Duke of Beaufort presented the sport at his republic estate, Badminton, from which the game stems its name.
Why do you Play Badminton?
Playing badminton allows you to move your joints in a healthy approach- the shoulders, neck, and back as well. Since the sport keeps the bodies in constant motion, the player’s eyes do the same. It benefits in protecting a healthy vision, whether the player is old or young.
Is Badminton good for the Heart?
Playing badminton constantly can aid strengthen the heart muscle and bound the danger of blood vessels clogging, lessening your menace of CHD. It also amounts to a moderate-intensity action, so it’s an excessive approach to get some of your commended minima 150 minutes a week.
Mental Benefits of Badminton
- The social interaction of the game aids shape confidence and results in positive feelings after a court session.
It helps lessen anxiety, stress, and depression by taking your mind off everyday life. - Enhances attention levels and helps you be more focused, agile, and alert. If you play doubles, you require good teamwork and consciousness of what is happening around you.
- Playing badminton involves your brain in a positive approach by having to contemplate about what you’re doing – whether it’s determining where to serve, responding rapidly to a smash, or where to stand on the court.
- Playing badminton raises endorphins that are the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters – you feel this after winning a predominantly long convention, and of course, it’s always pleasant to win a match!
- People who play the game for an hour daily are more observant, accustomed and have more active cardiovascular and neuro-humoral reactions to mental stress.
Best Time to Play Badminton
There is no appropriate time to begin playing. Any time is necessary as long as you are interested in the game. Starting young always, aids and then you can chase your interest with devotion and commitment.
Importance of Badminton Sports
Playing badminton has numerous significances as you can imagine:
- Physical fitness: Between lunging, running, the ball hitting, and diving, playing badminton burns fat at roughly 450 calories every hour. This type of cardiovascular exercise can aid keep you in tip-top shape, particularly if you’re looking for a good alternative cross-training exercise.
- Increased muscle tone: Playing badminton forms and tones the calves, glutes, quads, and hamstrings.
- Psychological benefits: Since badminton enhances physical fitness, it aids in lessening anxiety and stress.
- Social health: You’ll require at least one opponent, but you can similarly play with a colleague and two other challengers. The social interactions of a game will lead to positive feelings after the game. Joining the league can be important to you since it will enable you to join a community.
- Good for overall health: As it is for all sorts of physical exercise, badminton can lessen or eradicate your danger for numerous health problems, for instance, obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. It can also decrease your risk for coronary heart illness by dipping your triglyceride levels and raising your “good” cholesterol.
Badminton Benefits for Weight Loss
Due to the intensity of play, the number of calories burned during the game partially inclines upon the intensity of Play. For social badminton, a player weighing 150 pounds will burn almost 272 calories during an hour. In a competitive game, the same person will burn around 500 calories in one hour.
Disadvantages of Playing Badminton
Even though badminton isn’t a dangerous sport, some precautions should be considered when playing it. Some disadvantages of playing badminton include knee injury, tendonitis, sprained ankles, wounds, and shoulder or deltoid pain.
A Final Word
Badminton is a great game, both recreational and professional. It needs not just skill but similarly great body movement that helps to keep you physically strong and fit.