and this is a mistake a lot of people don't even know they're making! This guy could be really good...
Have you ever felt like you're not improving? Or you're constantly losing games that you
know you could win? Well in this video we're gonna analyse five of our subscribers playing badminton
and if you answered yes to either of those questions our advice will hopefully help you
so let's get straight into it! So first up we have Xing from Australia and this is from the
Australian National Championships and he's playing the eventual winner! Now Xing is obviously a high
level player but there are two things that he can improve on that are going to be relevant to a lot
of you out there whether you're playing singles or doubles! Yeah the first thing is his choice to
play cross-court shots on his round-the-head side when he's under pressure. So because his opponent
has played a lift it's really difficult for Xing to hit around the shuttle to play a good quality
cross-court reverse slice as he doesn't have much time. He actually did this a few times and each
time he was put under even more pressure because his shot quality wasn't very good so his opponent
could take it earlier and then he also has to travel the longest distance on the court, so let's
show you what he could do instead - yes so instead of choosing to play this cross-court slice he
could have played a straight slice down the line this would have been easier and made his opponent
take it later and not expose these big gaps on the court! The second thing Xing can improve on
is his deception now we're big fans of deception and Xing has some great skills but in this rally
he hits eight shots from the front of the court and six of those were deceptive shots. Yeah this
isn't great because if you're playing this many deceptive shots they're going to be much less
effective because your opponent knows the rhythm of your shots and what we mean by this is that if
your opponents know that you're going to swing once and then actually hit the shot then they
can delay their movement and they're therefore not going to be deceived like in this situation
so instead if you're playing eight shots in the front court in one rally we'd advise trying one
maybe two deceptive shots because when you do play these as long as they look the same as your
other shots they'll be a lot more effective! Okay let's move on to Dau from the USA who's in the
light blue t-shirt and what we saw Dau doing is something we saw happen a lot in the other
clips our subscribers sent in to us and this is making the wrong shot selection in the mid court
if we slow this rally down you can see that Dau is hitting the shuttle from slightly below the
height of the net and he hits the shuttle hard and in an upwards direction and this is the one shot
his opponent was waiting for! He got away with it this time but if he was playing against a better
opponent he probably wouldn't have done! Yeah so if you're in a similar position to Dau here
there are two shots that would have been much more effective the first option is a soft shot
either straight or to the middle if there wasn't a danger of hitting his partner on the head!!
Hitting to the middle would have forced his opponent to turn and take the shuttle late
and also cause confusion between his opponents resulting in them either being later to the
shot or just not getting it at all. And the second option is to actually play a lift over
the opponent's head to here as you can see Dau's opponent is stood quite close into the front line
so if he lifted to the back then that's a long way for this guy to move yeah this scenario actually
happened again a few rallies later but on the forehand side again Dau hit this shot hard when
he was below the height of the net but a soft shot to the middle would have set up his attack
very nicely and this is what we can all learn from Dau, shot selection is so important! Dau has
great attacking shots so he needs to think about how he can set these up rather than trying to win
the rally as quickly as possible! All right let's move on to our third clip which is a men's doubles
match from Singapore and this was sent into us by Yong now the biggest mistake we saw Yong making
is defending in a forehand grip and this is a mistake a lot of people don't even know they're
making now you might be thinking he's stood on the cross court and he's covering the middle
so he should be in a forehand grip but we wouldn't advise doing this from this position. It's great
that Yong is covering the middle as this is something that we see a lot of players not doing
but the way Yong is standing exposes so many gaps on the court so let's show you what we mean
So if I'm defending on the cross court here and I'm stood like Yong was and Greg smashes
cross-court from a similar position then I have almost no chance of getting it because I have no
time to change to a backhand grip instead I have to use my wrist to try and generate some power to
at least get the shuttle over the net, but it's not very good! Whereas if I'm stood in the same
position again but this time in a backhand grip then it's easier to quickly change to a bevel
grip for any shot coming to this side and anything closer you can use a backhand grip like this and
if they do smash across you it's much easier! We'll just caveat this as if you've seen your opponent
isn't in a good position when smashing you might step forwards with your racket up and here
it's okay to be in a forehand grip as it's a lot easier to change grips from this position
so if you struggle to defend when you're stood on the cross court then this technical point will
hopefully help you and our next clip is also about defence but this is another tactical point so
let's sit down and watch it... so here we have Zak from England who's in the red top, now Zak was
generally in a good defensive position throughout the rally but he was just way too defensive
Yeah so from positions like this where he's below the height of the net he hit nine lifts and only
one net shot and especially in men's doubles this is too many lifts as he's giving the attack to
his opponents too easily! Obviously he's taking the shuttle below the height of the net so he
can't be too aggressive but some good options of shots Zak could play from this position
are straight net shots, cross net shots, a push, a drive, or even a flat lift to put the opponent
under much more pressure. As you can see in this rally Endo and Watanabe are defending a lot
but they're lifting with purpose playing a variety of other shots to continually move their opponents
and they're not just lifting for the sake of it! So if you like Zak find yourself lifting a lot from
these positions then really try to force yourself to play some of the shots Jenny just mentioned
maybe say to yourself you're only going to play a maximum of two lifts per rally and this will
force you to be more creative because when you do play against better players who have big smashes
and really dangerous attacks then you simply can't just lift! Okay next up we have Jaden
from the USA now in all honesty this guy could be really good! He's got some great strengths
especially his speed around the court but there's one key part of this game we need to discuss...
Yeah like Zak who lifted nine out of ten shots or Xing who played six out of eight deceptive shots
Jaden hit 11 rear court shots in the clip that he sent us and 10 of them were smashes! Yeah that
is a crazy ratio and all of these statistics are showing that even if you don't realise it
you probably need to add a lot more variety into your game. Now Jaden might be thinking well I won
most of my points by smashing and whilst that might be true at the next level up when he's
playing a better opponent he'd need to build the valley a lot more so using drops clears and half
smashes and saving his full power smashes for when he's in a really good position! Yes so we've just
watched 11 overhead shots from professional player Anthony Ginting who's also got great speed around
the court and in this random selection of lifts he hit three smashes, three clears and five drops
and you might be thinking that's just Anthony Gingting's style well Lee Zi Jia is known for
his smashing so we also watched 11 of his overhead shots here he hit four smashes, two clears and also
five drops. Maybe not the biggest data set, I'm still recovering from studying 30 hours of Viktor
Axelsen's matches! But hopefully it proves a point so if you rely a lot on your smashes to win points
next time you play a match in training we challenge you to not smash - this will force you
to use more variety in your game and outmaneuver your opponents to win points rather than just
hitting loads of smash winners! This will help you become a better badminton player in the long term
especially when you come up against better people exactly right and having this one area to focus
on when you're training or playing a match is so important, if you've got maybe five or six things
to focus on then you're not going to do any of them very well! Yeah and we've definitely fallen
into this trap in the past but we were reminded about the effectiveness of only focusing on one
or maybe even two things that are really important in Greg Mckowen's great class on skillshare
who as it happens are kindly sponsoring this video. In this class Greg talks about finding out
what's important to focus on to make the biggest improvements and this is so applicable both on and
off the court - so instead of Dau trying to improve every area of his game all at once he could really
focus on his mid court or Zak could focus on not lifting everything and Jaden could focus on not
smashing everything! Yeah so if you're interested in achieving more with less as Greg would say
we would highly recommend this class on skillshare! To watch this or any of the thousands of other
inspiring classes then head to the top link in the description below where the first 1000 people
to use our link will get a free one-month trial to skillshare with no strings attached :-) If this online
learning platform isn't for you then you can cancel without charge but there's so many useful
classes on there to learn from and as you're still watching at this point in the video we're quite
confident that like us you're keen on learning and bettering yourself, so yeah top link in the
description and a huge thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video! And also a huge thank you
to all of you that sent us in a video to analyse, we're sorry that we couldn't include everyone - this
would have been a very long video if we did but we hope that you learned something
and if you did we'll definitely do another one in the future! So that's it for this one
if you've enjoyed it please give it a like, SMASH the subscribe button if you haven't already and
hopefully we'll see you in another video very soon where Jenny doesn't laugh on the outro! Bye :-)