5 Technical Ways To Improve Your Attack In Badminton

professional players making weekly videos on all things badminton with the aim of growing

the sport around the world :-) That's right and in today's video we're going to share five ways that

players of all levels can improve their attack whether that's in singles or doubles! We're also

going to finish with a major mistake a lot of people make when trying to improve their attack,

so let's get straight into it! The majority of people obsess over their smash power desperate

to hit that massive smash past their opponent and yes this is a good feeling and we'll go on to how

to do this later on in the video but one thing that is just as if not more important than power

is accuracy which is our first way to level up your attack! The better players don't just smash

directly onto their opponent's rackets they smash with accuracy to make it as difficult for them as

possible, one example of a good area to smash to is the right hip or shoulder of a right-handed

player or left hip or shoulder of a left-handed player this is where World Champion Zheng Siwei gets

a lot of success! Two more examples are straight down the line in singles or down the middle in

doubles so how can you improve your accuracy? Well one way is target practice you can use shuttle

tubes as targets by placing them where you want to practice hitting to. We'd recommend putting two

shuttle tubes on top of each other as this is a more realistic height of where your smash will go

to if you only have one tube then you should put this further back unless you're eight foot tall

and get in a ridiculous angle on your smash! Or if like us you want to go all out on improving your

attack accuracy you can use these - when aiming at targets you can either practice a smash in

isolation or hit two or three shuttles back to a feeder before they lift and you play your smash

this will help make it much more match specific as you're moving from different directions!

Now when we realised that we needed to do this next thing it made our own attack way better and

we're sure it will for you too and this is using variety and being patient! Using variety means your

opponent doesn't know where the shuttle is going and ensures that when you do smash it'll be much

more effective! We've done a lot of research on this across all events and found that in men's

singles world number one Viktor Axelsen only smashes an average of 39% of the time in his

overheads, in men's doubles in the final of the World Championships Aaron Chia actually only

hit one full power Smash and instead mostly hit shots with around 70% power and one more example is

the current mixed doubles World Champion Zheng Siwei who as we said on a recent video uses his variety

to great effect, this is shown on the match point of the recent world championships final where he

played a slice to set up a weaker lift for him to hit a smash winner with perfect placement!

Yeah it's their ability to use variety that makes their overall attack the best in the world so how

can you do this too? Well it's all about working out the percentages of success which depends on

who you're playing, for example hitting a smash might have a 20% chance of being a winner, 50%

chance of the rally carrying on and 30% chance of you losing the rally whereas if you played

a clear you might only have a 5% chance of winning the rally but an 85% chance of the rally

carrying on and only a 10% chance of losing the rally! And how do you know when to play these different shots?

Well in both singles and doubles there will be situations where you're not quite on balance

and hitting a smash can get you in trouble so instead you should be patient and play a clear

or drop shot to reset the rally! But an advanced tip is that you should also use variety when you