Hello and welcome back to Badminton Insight!
In this video we're going to teach you how to master this amazing shot...
Unlike a lot of trick shots as you've just seen it can be really useful in a match
and this is why we love it :D So when exactly would you play around the back shot?
Firstly it's only done when you're under pressure in defence with a shuttle coming
fast down at you and for this reason it's mainly played as an instinctive reactive shot
there are only certain situations in defence when you can actually play this shot though; either if
you're anticipating a shot on your forehand side or if you play a shot from there and the shuttle
comes across you again to this backhand side and you don't have enough time to go from here to here
taking the shuttle in front of you and therefore you resort to playing it round your back
and as you can see here it's usually played when the shuttle is coming from the cross
as this is when you're most likely to be waiting on your forehand side! So that's when to play it
but now the exciting bit, teaching you how to play it!!
Firstly it's really important to stay
relaxed when playing this shot, even if the shuttle is traveling towards you at over 300 kilometers an
hour it's almost impossible to play the shot if both your body and arm are really tense!
And the second most important thing is your grip - you need to be in either a bevel or a forehand
grip to play this shot and not a backhand grip. This is because as you can see the strings are
facing too flat if you're in a backhand grip and the shuttle will go in the net! Most people use a
forehand grip when they play a soft block but to add in any power you'll need to use a bevel grip
So what shot you're able to play will depend on what grip you're in and what position you're in
Okay so you're now in a relaxed forehand or bevel grip you then need to turn your shoulder and bring
your arm around your back so that your wrist is by your lower back anything wider than this
and you're reaching too much and can't generate any power as you're doing this movement you need
to rotate your hips which will help you with the timing and power of the shot just make sure you
keep facing roughly to where the shuttle has come from. Next you need to make sure your non-racket
arm is out of the way some people keep it back and some people tuck it in front of them. The rest of
the work is done by a small flick of the wrist just as the shuttle is about to hit your strings
and how much power you can generate in this shot will come down to the timing of this small flick
of course if you want to add lots of power into your shot then you need to generate lots of power
from your legs, your hips, your arm, your thumb, your fingers and your wrist and you need to time the
shuttle really well! Yeah and it's important to remember the likelihood is that it won't
be a winning shot and your opponents will probably hit it back at you so you need to be ready quickly
afterwards with both your body and your racket if you can take the next shot in front of you and get
back into a good position and go on to win the rally then your opponents will be pretty annoyed!
So how can we practice staying relaxed and executing this shot to perfection?
It's all good knowing how to do this shot but useless if you never try it!
Yeah and we're actually very different in how we've learned to play this shot
I've only ever done it in games, and probably too many times over the years :P
whereas Jenny has actually spent time practicing it in training before successfully doing it in a
match and we would definitely recommend this and one exercise you can do is to lift to a partner
and then get them to smash to your backhand side whilst waiting in a forehand grip with your arm
back and ready to play around the back block then just experiment with how it feels, try changing
to a bevel grip and adding some power or maybe even playing it to different areas of the court
You might want to video yourself doing this and compare it to the technique we've outlined in this
video and also the technique of others doing the shot - it's certainly what we do a lot of
and we have to mention that you don't need to be able to do this shot to be a good badminton player
there are lots of very good badminton players, Olympic champions even that have probably never
played this shot in their life! Very true but it is fun to do and it can also help you develop your
racket skills which can help you in many other shots such as the brap which we've recently made
a video on yeah definitely the brap is another defensive shot but this time you play it from
the forehand side and we'll link that tutorial for you here but before you go and watch that
if you could please give the video a like and SMASH the subscribe button if
you haven't already we'd really appreciate it and we'll see you on another video very soon :-)