Good news for players who don't like running training

I was already not a big fan of running training for badminton players and now there is good news for players who hate to do outside running has condition training. It is really remarkable to find that by far the most badminton players don’t like running training outside. Has a coach I never liked to do long distance running with/for my players, the longest distance we did was 400 meter interval training and than only in the summer period when there are no games to play. 

So even outside I try to do physical training that looks like the ralys we are playing in a badminton game, players and coaches who have been to the Orø Badminton Academy know all about that. The thing I like most for outside running training is the whistle interval training. The players jogging easy around a football field and when I blow the whistle they run as fast as they can with the focus on speed in the start and rapid stops at the end, they sprinting until I blow the whistle again and they will start jogging again. The time between these two time blowing the whistle is flexible between 5 and 15 sec. After every time I blow the whistle I call out the points (like if we play a game), depending on how good the players are running I make them win or lose the rally by giving a point to the group or to the opponent I have in my mind. If the running is extremely good, I only have to blow the whistle only 11x and it will be 11-0 (no need to tell you that is almost never happened). At 11 I blow the whistle in one long toon now the players can have 2 min rest and take some water just like in a real game. This running program you can make has long has you want, I use it normally for one hour, that is the same has a good long game.

But again this is for in the summer, and that maybe very long in Asia but it is very short in Europe and because of this difference I will call this running program the “off season running”. But now the big challenge is coming, what should we do for physical training in the hall while we are in the competition period of our training? I do core stability and ultra short interval running, and ultra short is max 5 sec full sprint. I had a discussion about this with coaches from the coach education, they told me that I was wrong because the rallys are getting longer and longer in top badminton. And they are right we see rally up to 1 min sometime, but you should not look at the length of the rally in total but at the time of max performance within the rally. So we looked at a couple of long rallies and we did some timing of the running in this long rallies that was higher than 60% of the max. We did not come any higher than 5 sec and most of the time it was far below that. So also within the rally we have restitution time and that has great consequences for the way we have to do game realistic physical training in the competition season. 

When I say ultra short interval running training then 5 sec. Is the max and a break of 6 to 8 sec is fine (it can also be done shorter) if you want to do it perfectly you fit direction changes in the 5 sec running or stops and two steps backwards running always done with a split-step before the direction change. The whole change of thinking with this coaches in education with us was coming from detail analysing what was really happening in a game and translate this to consequences it may/will have for training outside the court.

For the most complete and detailed coach education that will change your way of thinking about our sport forever you want to do the International ORØ/DGI Coach Education in Denmark or Asia. Write for more info to: [email protected]