INSTANT IMPROVEMENT

INSTANT IMPROVEMENT

This is something coaches hear a lot when we do coach education in our Badminton academy, but not everybody understands what it means. People who know me also know that I never stop talking about the things I see on court, good or not so good I try to follow every movement of both racket and feet.

Training can be so much more effective if players and coaches have more focus on several simple things. In a normal club practice there is often one player who is doing the work and the other one is feeding,  I like to think and work on that both of them are working. Specially has a feeder you need to do it game realistic, not like most of the time standing still and doing the feeding. Make your footwork moves away and to the shuttle, start with a split-step and do it deeper than what you normally would do, make willingly a split-step with the wrong foot in front so you have to practice your correction-step. Let one time follow your feet follow the racket and the other time let the racket follow the feet, have your racket arm hanging down and practice the fast movement to get in attack position very fast. There are hundreds of ways to make the work has a feeder a lot more effective. Has a coach ask the players what they can do better instead of telling them what they should do better, if you ask it and they tell you what they can do better they also tell you that they did not do it good enough in the first place. When you do it this way it is not you have a coach that has critics on the way they do the training, but the players have critics on themself and that works a lot better.

Players tell me sometimes that the feeding is the break they need after the hard physical work they have just been doing, well good for you but would it not be perfect training to do correct footwork and technique especially when you are tired? These are the moments in a game where you are most likely to make the mistakes which are going to cost you points. We do training in our academy where we have between 8 and 12 focus points in a practice, we don’t start with this the first time but we build it up to this number. When one of the focus points are more or less automatically done we drop that one has a focus point and bring a new one in the practice. The one focus point that we have been dropping becomes now a focus point of the opponent, I would ask them to have a look if he is still doing it automatically and if he is not take advantage of it and use it in your practice. This way two players are working on focus points and also on tactical elements in the game.

Instant improvement is something that costs very little time to explain and put into practice, and it can be done on all kinds of levels, I have given some examples which I use on relative high level, but you can bring this down to club level or up to International top 100 level. What is is doing for the club, coach and players is giving an increase in efficiency up to 25% of your training time in the hall and that is a lot in countries like Holland, Belgium and even Denmark so it is a very good argument to start to do this. I have 30 hours hall times a week in our academy, I don’t need this efficiency I simply doing it because it makes my players better in general. Everything that makes my players think more or better on court I will do because playing good badminton you need to be able to think better, faster and smarter than you opponent.