All About Badminton

'Sinar Mutiara Shuttlecock' is well-known shuttlecock in Indonesia, and it's being used by Badminton Association of Indonesia (PBSI) for National Team's daily training since last year. Sinar Mutiara has also involved, as the main sponsor, in many "Badminton National Circuits" and most of badminton tournaments in Indonesia for more than 15 years.

Legend 1 (suitable for tournaments, leisure teams or any level)
Pack of 5 dozens
Promotion price: US$88.00 (inclusive of Speedpost Fee)

Gold 800 (suitable for school team, children training, etc)
Pack of 5 dozens
Promotion price: US$70.00 (inclusive of Speedpost Fee)

We only accept orders from Canada, US and Australia. Anyone who is interested, please drop us message with your order details:
1. Full Name
2. Country
3. Address
4. Item (Legend 1 or SM 800)
5. Email address (in order for us to follow up)

You may also want to send us an email at indoshuttle2008@gmail.com

This guide will teach you the best ways to hold a badminton racket, and how to switch to the right grip on different situation.

Why are Grips so Important?

If you don't hold the racket correctly, you will never produce good badminton strokes. Grips and footworks are the basis for all badminton skills. We will discuss more about footwork in the next article.

Using the correct grip is the key to mastering badminton. Here are some of the benefits you can expect after practicing every step given in this article:

Benefits of using the correct grips:
More powerful smashes
More accurate net shots and serves

Using incorrect grips will hamper your skills development. Here are some commons problems caused by incorrect grips:

Problems caused by incorrect grips:
Clears are too short
Smashes are weak
Limited choices for the direction of your strokes
Difficulty in defense, especially when opponent hits towards your body
Obvious strokes that can be easily predicted

More than one grip

Many players use the same grip for every badminton stroke. This will limit their style of plays, thus, can be easily predicted by opponent.

To play skilfully, you must learn the right badminton grip for each situation. For example, you need a different grip for a backhand serve than for a forehand smash.

Below are pictures showing old backhand grip and forehand grip.

                Backhand Grip                       Forehand Grip

Relaxed Grip

Badminton grips should be relaxed so that the muscles of the forearm can work effectively.

Many players believe that by gripping the racket tightly, it will give them more powers. This is definitely wrong! To generate power, the grip must initially be relaxed.

The Feeling of Relaxed Grip

As a test, you can hold a racket and ask your friend to take it from you. The racket should come out of you hand smoothly and effortlessly. Otherwise, you are handling racket too tightly.

Many players think that it's impossible to play while holding the racket this way. This is because their skills have developed over years of holding a badminton racket too tightly. New techniques always feel unnatural.

When you learn a new badminton grip, you must also learn how to use it.

A relaxed badminton grip is also more flexible: you can quickly change the angle of your badminton racket by turning the handle between your fingers. This is useful because:

You can change quickly between different badminton grips

You have finer control of the direction that you hit the shuttlecock

For some strokes, you can even turn the racket in the fingers as you hit

Badminton Grip Tightening

A tightening of the hand grip should only occur on impact with the shuttlecock because you can only make effective use of grip tightening if your badminton grip is initially relaxed.

For power strokes, such as smash, the tightening will be much greater to provide more powerful smash; whereas, for soft strokes, light tightening keeps the racket head stable.

Direction of the Racket Face

A good badminton grip allows you to control the angle of the racket face, so that you can hit the shuttlecock in the direction you want.
For straight shots, the racket face will finish parallel to the net on impact (in other words, it faces forwards on impact).

But the angle of the racket at the start of the stroke is often different from the angle at impact. This is mainly because, in order to generate power, badminton strokes require a turning motion of the racket.

Badminton is a very fast game, so getting to the perfect position in the shortest time possible is very crucial. A second of delay often turns a winning situation into a losing one.

Benefits of footwork:
Reaching the shuttlecock early
Hitting from a balanced position
Quicker recovery for the next shot
Prevention from injuries

Reaching the Shuttlecock early

Good footwork will help you reach the shuttlecock early. You should play your shots from the highest point. You should never wait for the shuttlecock to drop. Hitting the shuttlecock from the highest point allow you to hit it downward. Even though, it's not necessary to hit downward, however, the options to do so provide you more varieties in your game style.

At the front of the court, hitting the shuttlecock early has a crucial effect. If you can reach it early, you can play a net kill to end the rally. If you are late, and the shuttlecock drops below the net height, you will miss out the chance to kill the rally at once.

At the back of the court, you need to hit the shuttlecock from the highest point. Allowing the shuttlecock to drop is fatal! In this situation, you can only afford a weak shot, instead, of rally killing move. When shuttlecock drops below the net height at the back of the court, most players struggle to play a good clear, and definitely a smash is impossible.

Hitting from a Balanced Position

Good footwork helps you to maintain a balanced position, thus, you will have more control of your shot. If you are unbalanced, then it's harder to control your shot as you will need to compensate for your body motion with shot accuracy. The greater your body motion, ,the harder it's for you to hit the shuttlecock accurately.

Quicker Recovery for the Next Shot

After every shot, you need to get ready for the next one in the shortest possible duration. Good footwork will help you significantly recover to the best position for the next shot. If you are slow in recovery, your opponent will inevitably gain an advantage. Without good footwork, you often find that you are being wrong footed by your opponent or further out of position on the next shot.

Ready Position

Before we discuss on different types of movements, let's discuss on ready position. There're the following factors that you need to pay attention in:

Stance
You should be ready with a somewhat wide stance: your feet a little more than your shoulder-width, your body weight need to be lowered and shifted forwards a little by bending your knees slightly. And, your right foot should be slightly ahead of your left foot - only about half a foot length. (Only for right-handed player)

Racket Position
Even though racket position varies a lot depending on the situation. However, you should never leave your racket dangling around your ankles! Typically you will hold it about waist height; but you'll probably need to hold it higher when attacking and hold lower while defending.

Left Arm (Right-handed player)
Even though, your left arm does not hold the racket, it will affect your body balance. So, never leave your left arm dangling at your side!

Split Drop

Split drop is an important technique in badminton. Split drop allows you to react quickly just after your opponent hit the shuttlecock. In badminton, quick reaction towards each hit is very essential, otherwise, you will find yourself chasing shuttlecock.

Split Drop Technique

Split drop involves widening your base and lowering your body weight.

Start in the ready position. Now push upwards slightly to get your feet just off the ground. As your feet are coming off the ground, widen your legs so that you land with your feet farther apart. As you land, bend your knees so that you land in a slightly lower posture than before (with the knees bent more).

A casual observer would not even realise that you momentarily took your feet off the floor. Your feet barely leave the surface before you land again.

The whole process takes a mere instant, and then you are ready to push off and move to the shuttlecock.

Timing Your Split Drop

After you learn the technique of split drop, you will need to learn on how to use it with the precise timing. You should start your split drop just as the opponent is hitting the shuttlecock, so that you complete it just after you see where the shuttlecock is going. The timing must be precise. If you split too late, your movement is delayed; but if you start to early, you will lose the bouncing effect.

Footwork Technique

Every movement in footwork may consist of either step, chasse or lunge. Now, we will discuss in details on three of them. In order to have a good footwork, you will need to learn all three of them. Even though, some coach will teach only chasses and think that steps are redundant. (I personally do not think so).

Steps

When you are in situation where you need to cover a substantial distance to reach the shuttlecock, you will need to use steps rather than chasses. Let's think about a 100m race. If one of the runners decided to use chasse steps instead, how well do you think he will perform?

Chasses

Chasses, although slower in covering distance, it provides some advantages if it's used correctly. Chasses are more adaptable to different distance. You can speed up a short chassé by moving each foot only a small amount, thus, chasses are much faster than steps over short distance. And it will keep you balanced throughout the whole movement, thus, it will help you to launch yourself for a jump in the end of the movement.

Lunges

Lunges involve making one final large step, so that you finish your movement with your foot well away from your body, in a low posture with the lunging knee bent.

Lunges provide several benefits:
A good lunge absorbs lots of force, without hurting your joints.
A lunge provides a balanced position from which to hit your shot.
Lunges maximise your reach, so that you can take the shuttlecock earlier.
After the shot, you can use your lunging leg to push back in the direction you came from.

If your lunge technique is slightly wrong, you are at risk of damaging your knees or ankles. There are several important points to follow:

1. The foot must point in the direction of the lunge

Whatever direction you are lunging in, your leading foot must point that way.
For example: if you are lunging towards the right tramlines, then your leading foot must point towards the right tramlines when it lands.

2. The foot and knee must stay in alignment

When you lunge, a large force travels up your leg. This force is supposed to be absorbed by your muscles; but if you get the technique wrong, it will go into your joints instead

The knee must be lined up with the foot. Ideally, the knee should stay lined up with your second toe

3. The knee must not travel beyond the foot

As you complete a lunge, your forwards movement will cause the knee to move towards the foot.

This movement must not continue beyond the point where the knee is directly over the foot. The angle under the knee should be more than 90 degrees throughout the lunge.

4. The heel must strike first

Another common error is to contact the floor with your toe first, or all of your foot together. You must make contact first with your heel, and then roll onto the rest of the foot.

Using this heel-to-toe contact absorbs a surprising amount of force. If you land flat-footed instead, guess where that extra force is going? That's right: into your joints!