Badminton Training at Home

Coach Ching

February 5, 2022

Training

Gym space can be hard to come by, especially in places like Arizona where badminton isn’t quite as popular as a lot of other gym sports. While most people don’t have the space much less an indoor gym at home to practice, there are still a number of things that you can do to keep your skills sharp when you can’t get to the gym or gym time is simply not available.

General Conditioning

There are tons of great videos and guides out there for general conditioning at home. While the COVID chaos threw a twist into everyone’s life, one good thing that came out of it was that there were tons of people who became content creators and/or published materials for staying fit at home with limited space and equipment. Here are some great general badminton conditioning videos that all badminton plays should do to stay in shape.

Footwork

Aside from a racket and good shoes, the only other piece of equipment that I require my students to bring is a good jump rope. A jump rope is a mandatory training tool to build fast footwork. Here are a few different drill shown by the Coaching Badminton channel that I think are great and easy to do at home.

After a good jump rope warmup, practice some technical setting (split step) footwork with Tobias Wadenka. Tobias has a number of “at home” videos he made during lockdown that I think are exceptional. In this video, he guides you through a number of drills you can do in a really small space in your home. Most of these are great as starting maneuvers to train your body to react quickly and get your legs into position to start movement to the shuttle should you be in a real match. It’s a perfect 15min workout!

After all that split step work, close out your workout with some quick feet drills from Tobias again. These seem more like dance moves (hah) but are surprisingly effective. These are very similar to agility/ladder training which would also be super effective to look up!

Racket Drills

There are a surprising number of racket drills that you can do at home in a small space. To start with, let’s join Tobias again in some basic racket movement drills that focus on techniques you can do in your room. These actually feel a bit yoga/tai chi-like which I think is a nice change of pace. When doing these, I think it is super important to mentally engage with the movements you are doing. Put on some headphones and play some trace or meditation music! While doing the fluid motions, close your eyes and visualize hitting different kinds of shots at different points of the movements. To me, these are more mind-body exercises that can be quite effective at passively training your body through reinforcement movements. I don’t think this was Tobias’ intention but it is a nice byproduct if you follow my advice above!

In another great home practice video Tobias gives a number of great ideas for shuttle practice. Some of these might not be practical as they require someone to feed you the shuttle but pay attention to his serve practice at about 7:50min. This is one that I used to a lot early in my badminton career. I liked to do it in a garage and simply put some painters tape on the floor to mark a small service T and then another piece of tape on the garage door at 5′. I would serve 50 shuttles on each side and continue until I was tired.

One thing to note if you do some of Tobias’ drills, I would recommend using nylon shuttles. Hitting feature shuttles that close to a feeder and/or a wall will typically kill feather shuttles very quickly as the chances of a feather-first hit are extremely high. Plus, there’s no flight concern to worry about so there’s no real need for feather shuttles here.

Next, we’re going check our one of my favorite badminton channels, Badminton Insight, and let them walk us through some at home net play drills. I really like their take on returning a net cord at about 4:20min. Using the towel and table to tip the shuttle simulates a cord shot very well is easy for a friend to help you with.

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