We've been playing badminton for the last 20 years now and professionally for the last 8
and during this time we've made lots of progress but we've also made lots of mistakes so in this
video we want to share 7 of the biggest mistakes we've made and give you some simple
tips to help you avoid these mistakes in your own badminton journey! Number one is having fun
Having fun is so important for many reasons; it boosts your motivation and energy levels, it increases
your endorphins which reduces stress and helps you deal with nerves and just generally helps you
to live a more happy and fulfilled life! You see quotes like "I don't train because I like training
I train because I like winning" which suggests it's okay to not enjoy training because it's only the
winning that matters but we would argue against this and say it's not just the destination that
matters it's also the journey! Exactly :D In the past we've been so determined and desperate to
win that we forgot to have any fun and this often led us to play worse! Now of course not every part
of your badminton training will be fun, especially if you want to be the best player you can be
but if you can shape your environment so you're surrounded with people who you enjoy playing with
and you add fun elements into your sessions then not only will you enjoy the journey more
but you'll also be more likely to be successful :-) An example of this is current Olympic champion
Viktor Axelsen who attributes a lot of his success to having fun especially when he was young as he
says this helped him to develop the different skills and shots that he still uses today
We were training alongside him last week and he started session with some fun games
so we can definitely say that he still has fun! Okay the second thing we wish we knew earlier is
the importance of training smart. There's been so many times where we've felt like we've had to stick
to our training schedule at all costs and often we've just been trying to survive in sessions
rather than thrive and the biggest consequence of this was the countless injuries that we got as a result!
Another important lesson we've learnt about training smart is that one hour of high intensity,
high quality and purposeful practice can be much more beneficial than say three hours of brainless
multi-feed or physical routines. For example you'd improve much faster if you hit 100 lifts focusing
on your technique and movement and playing 95% of these with good accuracy rather than doing
1000 lifts without moving or thinking much and only hitting 50% of these with good accuracy
This quote sums up perfectly - "Practice doesn't make perfect only perfect, practice makes perfect"
We're not saying here that you can be a world-class badminton player by just doing
three hours of great training a week and we're not saying that we don't believe in multi-feed
or hard physical routines, we definitely do! In fact we have 27 multi-feed programs on our website that
we do regularly it's just about being smart with the volume and content of your training
If you find yourself going through the motions and not training with a purpose or you feel like
your body is on the edge of breaking then maybe consider doing something else which will still
benefit your game like match analysis or technical practice which is our third area we definitely
didn't work on enough when we were younger! As many of you will know the longer you play
the harder it is to change your technique when you're first starting out it's so easy to make
the mistake of just wanting to play matches and do the fun routines but we've learned that your
technical ability will hugely determine how good you can be as a badminton player so we definitely
recommend placing less importance on winning at first and really focusing on your technique and footwork
Yeah and having this as a focus will likely lead to you winning more matches in the
long run so keep that in mind! But what if you've already been playing for years we hear you ask?
Well luckily despite it being difficult technical areas can be changed! We've worked with lots of
people who've successfully managed to change their technique and become much better badminton players as
a result those guys just wish they'd set more goals around developing their technique earlier
on in their careers and so do we! And finally it's important to mention that one technical session
isn't going to just change your technique it will take patience and a lot of practice over time
but we promise it'll be worth it! Another great quote is "Don't practice until you get it right.
Practice until you can't get it wrong!" So we're big believers in setting goals but putting too
much pressure on ourselves to achieve our goals is probably the biggest mistake we've
made in our badminton careers so far yeah whether that was chasing world ranking points, winning a
certain level of tournament or getting to that next round to earn more prize money we've had
so many times where winning one more match would mean 500 more dollars in prize money which would
mean that covered the cost of the next tournament we put so much pressure on ourselves to achieve
these things that for a period we stopped having fun and focused purely on the destination rather
than the journey! Recently we've completely moved away from outcome goals like reaching the top 20
in the world and focussed on the process goals like enjoying our training and always putting in 100% effort
so even if we don't end up reaching the top 20 in the world
we'll still be satisfied with our performances! And this is something that we'd recommend to everyone
don't put too much pressure on yourself to achieve your goals focus on the process and enjoying this process!
There's so much we want to share about goal setting and how to deal with pressure but
that's a whole video in itself! Mistake number 5 is not being consistent and here we're not
talking about all of the smashes we've missed or all of the serves we've hit into the net although
there's definitely been a lot of those in the last 20 years! What we're talking about is not being
consistent in our daily habits that will help improve our badminton this might be doing regular
technical practice like we mentioned earlier or getting your nutrition and sleep right! We didn't
realise just how important it is to be consistent in all of these external areas until we read the
book Atomic Habits by James Clear. After reading this book we started doing a lot of research
into habit building and habit stacking which is when we came across a couple of great classes on
skillshare who as it happens are kindly sponsoring this video. Skillshare is an online learning
community with thousands of inspiring classes and if like us you're interested in becoming a
better badminton player then we have two classes on skillshare that we want to recommend to you
the first is principles and tools to boost your productivity by Ali Abdal where he talks about
the power of habits if you think about kind of compound interest and compounding gains
if you can improve by one percent every day for a year at the end of the year you will be 37 times
better than you were at the start! And the second class is building habits that last by Thomas Frank
we recently recommended this on the channel but it was so good that we want to recommend it again in
case any of you missed it! We've also recommended this class to so many of our friends who want to
build better habits whether that's for badminton, studying or even dieting! So if you want to watch
either of these classes or any of the thousands of others on skillshare then click the top link in
the description below and the first 1000 people will get a free one month trial and by joining
through our link it really helps to support our channel so thank you in advance and thank you
to skillshare for sponsoring this video. Okay so our sixth mistake that we've made throughout our
badminton careers is not trying enough to play with people who are better than us! Now we know
this might be easier said than done and lots of people are scared to even put themselves in this
position - we definitely were, but just doing this once a week can help you improve so much!
Yeah shots come back that you don't normally expect to and you're under way more pressure than usual
this is something we always try to replicate in our training as there really is nothing better
to help you improve than being pushed out of your comfort zone in this way! Now some of you might be
sat there thinking well I'm the best in my club or area so what should I do? Well there's always
something you can do in sessions where we've been the strongest players in the group we might lift
half court to put ourselves under more pressure or we might play against three players rather
than two. This goes back to training smart and in this situation it's about adapting your training
to put yourself under more pressure! We've watched a lot of badminton over the years and I mean a lot
but when we were younger we could have watched with more of an analytical mindset
even just spending an hour a week on youtube to see what the best players do can be so helpful
you might be watching how they hit certain shots, where they hit to and what they do after this
or maybe their footwork and positioning on the court there's so much you can learn that you
can apply to your own game but of course don't forget to enjoy watching too! So they were our
seven biggest mistakes we've made throughout our own badminton careers and what we've learned from
them and we hope by sharing these we might help you avoid making similar mistakes in your own
badminton careers! Exactly right and if you're sat there not wanting to make the mistake of
not watching enough badminton then you might enjoy some of the videos in our beginner playlist here
or our advanced playlist here and lastly if you've enjoyed this video please give it a like
SMASH the subscribe button if you haven't already and we'll see you on another video very soon :-)