We've said it before and we'll say it again, badminton is the fastest sport in the world
with shuttles traveling over 400 kilometres an hour!
That's 150 kilometers an hour faster than the fastest tennis serve and even faster than a formula one car!
Well how do you actually train yourself to react faster to the shuttle on court?
Well in this video we're going to show you four fun ways you can do this!
So we originally saw a clip on YouTube of an Australian boxer catching four coins in a row
and we had to try it but we thought we should start with three coins to ease ourselves in
but it turned out this was still really difficult!
but like anything the more we practice the better we got and we eventually caught all three coins
then we tried four coins after about 45 minutes of practice
we were still struggling to catch them all I think we might need a bit more practice
but Greg was finally successful although not with the boxing technique, does this count?
let us know in the comments below if you think that counted!
Well that was hard, really hard and whilst that isn't the most badminton specific exercise it really did show us that
the more you practice something the better you generally get at it over time and we'll talk more
about this in relation to reaction speed later in the video! And for the second exercise we have you
just need a tennis ball and this isn't only going to improve your reaction speed it's also going to
improve your peripheral vision and movement, both of which are very important in badminton!
So set up like this and as you can see I'm throwing the ball over Jenny's head to either her forehand or
backhand side and she has to move and catch it with her racket hand whilst also lunging on her
racket leg like she would on court. Because we've done this quite a lot she's pretty good at it
so I can make it a little bit harder for her by throwing it a little bit further and feeding
this is definitely a skill in itself! This third exercise is a lot of fun and for this we're going
to need some newspaper or bin bags you want to hang them over the net and practice doing some
multi-shuttle training as you can see here I'm practicing my sharpness and speed around the net
you can also do a single shuttle rally back and forth with your partner but you do have to be
cooperative we'd again suggest doing net or four corner defence like this if you want a challenge
Our final method of improving your reactions is one we've been using
a lot in the last few months these are called blazepods which were kindly sent to us to try out
they haven't asked us to include them in a video we just genuinely love using them
so these pods connect up to an app on your phone and you can program them to do literally
anything and anyone that knows me knows that I'm very competitive and these are great for bringing
out that competitive side of me as the app tells you how long it takes to complete each challenge
one of our favorite preset programs is the plank competition where we can test our reactions and
also work on our core at the same time so I'm green Jenny's red let's go let's have it come on
good start
could be close I got 26 hits Greg got 26 hits sure we'll take that! My reaction
time was actually quicker though what mine was 0.542 and Greg's was 0.555
as we've said you can program them to do literally anything so we've decided to replicate the last
rally of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics men's singles final, Viktor Axelsen vs Chen Long
can Greg match the speed of Olympic champion Viktor Axelsen? Let's find out!
and if you do want to join us and other sporting professionals such as Anthony Joshua and Max
Verstappen in using these blazepods then check out the link in the description below to their
website and you can also get 10% off using the discount code 'BAD-INSIGHT-VIP10'. Now here's
the interesting stuff it's not all about reaction time, we as humans can't actually instantly react
in real time as the opponent hits the shuttle so instead we use our predictive mechanisms to
predict where the shuttle is going! This means we need to improve our reading of the game
so looking at our opponent's body and grip which might show us which shots they can and cannot play
the more accurate our predictive mechanisms are the more accurate our response is likely to be
so what we're saying is yes these reaction drills we've done in this video are good
but the more specific you can make your practice in your on-court routines
the better your predictive mechanisms will be and yes you can do this by watching your opponent's
positioning but also improving your own as we touched on in last week's backhand drive video
by having your racket ready higher up and also things like waiting in the right grip
now we know a badminton smash is nearly double the speed than the fastest tennis serve
but a few years ago I played a professional tennis player and could I return his serve? Absolutely no
chance! This is because I'm not trained to predict where the ball is going and make the necessary
adjustments to be able to return it! We hope you've enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed
creating it let us know in the comments below which was your favorite drill we showed today
and how you get on with them don't forget to also give the video a like and smash the subscribe
button if you haven't already and while you're doing that we need to give a shout out to kkh
channel who won our Olympic prediction tournament here on YouTube for correctly predicting Viktor
Axelsen and Chen YuFei to win the olympics as well as predicting the Chinese Li and Liu
and Zheng and Huang who both got a silver medal and also a shout out to Roger Adams who
won our Patreon prediction tournament so a huge congratulations to him he won a racket, a mug
and some other bits of kit! Thanks for watching and hopefully we'll see you on another video very soon :-)