After recently playing in and watching the World Championships we realised one big thing We all need better defence! Apart from
maybe the Malaysian pair Chia and Soh who are now World Champions basically because
their defense was incredible in the final in fact after watching that match we went straight
to the training hall and practiced our defence so in the next four minutes we're going to give
you four simple practices to help you improve your defence and we'll also include some technical
points throughout so let's get straight into it Practice number one is re-lifts and this is quite
simple your partner stands at the back of the court either smashing or half-smashing and you
keep lifting to them but simple doesn't always mean easy! This clip was sent into us by one of
our subscribers called Zak and as you can see his lifts are poor quality.
They're quite short
and also to the middle which means his opponent doesn't have to move and this poor lifting
quality is why he ended up losing the rally! Now let's compare this to Chia and Soh who as we already
mentioned defended with ridiculous quality and accuracy in the final of the world championships
you can see all of their lifts are going right into the back corners so what are they doing
that Zak isn't and probably you aren't either? well if you look closely at their feet you can see
that they're continuously moving and their body weight is leaning forwards if you lean backwards
and let the smash come to you you won't be able to accelerate your racket as much to generate enough
power as you'll be hitting it here rather than here and this means you'll struggle to hit the
shuttle to the back and you'll also have a higher chance of mistiming the shuttle! We'd recommend
doing this practice for around 60 seconds and then switching with your partner and it's important to
mention that if you feel really uncomfortable ask your partner to hit their smashes with less power
and you can hopefully increase this over time okay let's move on to our second practice tap
downs this is where your partner is stood around the service line and is tapping the shuttle
in a downwards direction to you.
If you've been watching our videos for a while you'll have
definitely seen us do this before but it's a practice that both ourselves and all top players
in the world are doing on an almost daily basis and it's really important for you to do too if you
want to improve your defence! Now this practice is great for dealing with pressure from your opponent
at the net so if this situation happens in a match it doesn't mean that you lose the rally! As we said
at the start defence is something everyone should be continually working on and being critical
of myself if I could get out of pressurised situations better I wouldn't have lost points like
this at the world championships!! So one way I could have got out of this situation would have been to
make the net player move even if it's just making them change from a forehand to a backhand grip so
when you're doing this practice you should try to not just hit straight at your partner's racket and
instead you should keep doing little turns like this so that it's not too easy for them.
Another
way to not make it too easy for your opponents is to hit your shot with more power so that they're
forced to take their shot here rather than here and this brings up an important
point you actually need to be hitting all of your shots with some power in
this practice otherwise it won't work Our third practice is a great progression from
our first two practices and for this you'll need an extra person to help feed this time instead
of just having a feeder at the back smashing or at the net tapping down you've got both 🙂 Here
you should try to implement what you've learned from the first two practices, your re-lifting
quality and also your ability to deal with pressure from the player at the net! Now the most
important thing is to keep moving and stay relaxed just because there's now two people attacking
you doesn't mean you need to become tense and stop making the little adjustments you need to
make! So focus on keeping your hand, racket arm and body relaxed but your brain and feet fast. The aim of this practice is to push yourself out of your comfort zone, as we said in last
week's vlog comfort is the enemy of progress and what we mean by this is to not just go for
the easy options for example don't lift at the start of the rally and then not again just because
it's easier to hit to the net instead try to lift when the net player is putting you under a lot of
pressure as this is probably where the space will be in a match and even though you're lifting here
make sure to keep your swing short and compact for the close reactive shots as you don't have
enough time to have a big swing or follow through okay let's move on to our fourth practice which is
an insane progression from our first practice and this is to do re-lifts but now with two shuttles
and I know we just said in practice three that you need to be relaxed but move fast but it's even
more important for this one! To make this work you need to try and re-lift to the same place
each time and the feeder needs to smash at the same pace each time this practice will really
help you to improve your racket speed and timing and therefore improve your shot
quality and consistency in defence the most important thing with all of these
practices is to make sure you're defending with a good technique you don't want to be
building bad habits into your muscle memory and if you're going to give these
practices a go in your next session or you've already given them a go but you're
not completely sure about your technique then we recommend checking out this video here
on the fundamentals of doubles defence or we'll include our playlist of defense
videos here if you want to check that out too and lastly don't forget to SMASH the subscribe
button if you haven't already, give the video a like for the magic youtube algorithm and we'll
hopefully see you on another video very soon 🙂