The modern game of Badminton is fast-paced, explosive and the best players in the world are highly tuned athletes as well as skilled in technique and tactics. This means the concept of physical training to improve badminton performance has never been so important and there is a wealth of sport science research and findings to support how this is developed across our sport.
Badminton England’s England Junior Performance Programme has been working closely with Kathryn Canham, a Strength and Conditioning specialist, to produce a series of videos and resources to support our coaching network with content and methods of how to effectively develop the physical skills and fitness components in our junior players.
As part of this work, Badminton England has produced our ‘BE Ready’ resource. BE Ready is a warm-up and physical development session built into one. This has been designed with the focus on building physically resilient players, who spend more time on-court. The idea behind this came from research in other sports, that has demonstrated that following a structured warm up at least twice a week has reduced the number, and severity of injuries, meaning more time is spent developing those technical and tactical skills. BE Ready is a badminton specific warm up that is designed to take roughly 20 minutes, 15 of which should occur before players even step onto the court and is easy enough the athletes can run through it themselves (after the first couple of times).
Please click here to download the BE Ready recommended progressive structure for a warm-up with video clips and coaching tips to assist in the delivery or completion of this.
We have also caught up with Kathryn to get her views and ideas on several topics related to physical development via a Q&A, click here to view this.