TAKING OUT THE POWER

Technical training is all about taking the power out of the stroke and let the flowing motion take over. So here you are with a player that can not play a BH where do you start? The pull BH is the easiest BH stroke from the backline but to do it right you have to be able to apply the right technique, players at the backline always feel they need to hit the shuttle hard to get it over the net this way it will be very hard to let the soft technique for the pull BH  ome into the stroke. So what I do is let the player start 5cm from the net and I do the feeding just over de serviceline the return shot have to be ½ court (60 to 100 cm past the service line) any power used will send the shuttle way over the target arial. The player will now only use the soft technique to play the pull BH, has a coach I can now start to work on the details in the stroke and the footwork starting with the preparation, split-step step over with right, right foot pointing to the BH corner, racket all the way to the left shoulder pointing upwards, let the racket follow a long circle movement starting by taking the elbow up and let the racket flat out, then making a supination movement with the underarm this will take the racket will now go upwards to the hitting position, keep supinating the underarm and point to the place where you want to play the shuttle. Your right foot has just been set down a fraction of a sec before the shuttle is hit, you use rapid deceleration and let the right foot follow the shuttle, this is almost at the moment of hitting the shuttle. You can use a recovery-step if you are not to deep down (or made a too big step) or you just use the rapid deceleration to make a first step following the shuttle. From the whole process that I just wrote down you can see that timing is of the essence, if something goes wrong it is 90% sure that it is the timing that is to blame. Taking the power out of the stroke makes it a lot more easy to get the timing right, has the technique improves you can move your player further to the back and introduce gradually just enough power to get the shuttle in the target arial. There naturally more details you can focus on when the timing, footwork and stroke technique is in place and that is to relax the left arm and hand and let the hand not get into the “fingers all stretched out position” . You can make the left arm and hand more relaxed by just holding something in this hand, the player will now start to use the left hand for balance and not pull the left hand into the body anymore. One more detail is the breathing in and out in this whole process, an easy way to do it is to make the player say something in the first step a short “Yes” and when hitting the shuttle a long “over there” The short and fast outspoken “ Yes”  is to get started fast, it gives action, power and speed in the footwork, and the long and slowly outspoken “over there” to get the relaxation in the stroke movement. 

In some of the reactions coaches and players are asking for videos to show what I write, I find videos a shortcut without details, when you go over the process of writing things down or reading them there is a different process of understanding inside your head, many times I caught myself making the movement when I write something down to see if I forgot something. And when I look at instruction videos I see many mistakes and even top players like Victor Axselsen say something in his video and show something else, it is so easy to miss some details and in this way you have to think to understand it while in videos you think you understand it but mist most of it.

I would like to thank all the people who are following my articles and especially the people who also write back and start discussions with me, your reactions keep me sharpe so please keep on doing that.