Hello and welcome back to Badminton Insight! If you're new to the channel we're Greg
and Jenny, two professional badminton players releasing a new video every Sunday on all
things badminton. On a recent video we taught you the basics of lifting covering the grip,
footwork, technique and some basic routines of how you can practice your lifts. Today we're taking it
a step further where we're talking about two out of the three main types of lifts in both singles
and doubles. These are flat lifts and high lifts and your third type is just your regular lift
and whilst we'll briefly talk about the technique of how to play these lifts we'll more talk about
why you should play these and the tactics of what to do after. So firstly let's start with flat lifts...
So when should you actually use these flat lifts? Well whether you're playing singles or doubles you
should only really hit this type of lift when there's space on the court and your opponent won't easily
be able to hit it on balance. You want to use this type of lifting to put their movement and speed
under pressure and you might even want to entice them into playing a hard shot so that you can
counter attack and finally flat lifts are more commonly used with fast shuttles as it's easier
to control and your opponents are less able to hit a steep angled shot from your lift
meaning that their smashes are more likely to fly out of the back of the court. As you can see
this lift requires a quick squeeze of the grip to create the punch with a short follow-through.
This short follow-through is really important as if your opponent reaches it
you need to be ready for it to come back at you fast. A big follow-through means this might happen...
And there's a couple more key points to this lift. Firstly you should really step into it like this
aiming to take it early as it's an aggressive shot aiming to put pressure onto your opponents.
After you've hit it you should stay high up the court in an aggressive position adding further
pressure to your opponents. If your opponent hits their shot off balance and you take it here you're
automatically giving them even less time to recover.
Obviously if you try this flat lift at
the wrong time or it's poor quality you shouldn't stay high up the court or again this might happen...
So you need to recognize these moments and be able to quickly adjust your positioning
and it's these small details that will really help you take that step up to the next level.
So one exercise we regularly do to not only practice our flat lifts but also getting the
next one back and testing our reactions is this. The feeder hits in a soft shot
the worker comes in and flat lifts and then the feeder quickly feeds in a second shuttle like this.
The worker should aim to stay in a high position and play an aggressive shot back.
Also make sure to practice this from both sides and also the cross like this.
Anyway let's move on to the second type of lift, high lifts. As you can see we've got a
much bigger follow through swing with this lift. This is because we want to hit the shuttle high
up into the air so need to come under it more and often hit it a lot harder to get it to the back.
And these big high lifts have several tactical advantages: as the shuttle's traveling down
vertically like this it's much harder to time the shuttle as you end up hitting the side of it
not face on like this. It also means that you can reset the rally and give yourself
more time to recover if you or your partner has been stretched out of position and this
is one scenario where you'd use these big high lifts. Another is if you're using slower shuttles
as your big high lifts are less likely to go out the back of the court and it's also easier
to defend. You should always aim to make your opponent move across the back line when lifting
and we'd recommend to never hit more than two lifts to the same place in a row.
This is so that we keep them moving and they're never fully on balance and in a good position.
One way to practice your lifts and to have a bit more fun is to have four people on the court like this.
Two lifters will lift one shuttle and then swap sides and lift the other shuttle. Here the droppers
are always dropping straight and the lifters are always lifting straight and then they switch over.
You can then change it so that the lifters still lift straight but the droppers drop cross so that the
shuttle is coming from a different angle. It's a fun routine to practice reacting to lifts at the
last minute, trying to play accurate shots when you're not in a good position and also you have
to adjust the height of your lifts depending on what's going on with other shuttles. You
can also do more variations such as the lifters lifting cross and the droppers dropping straight
and then you can make it even harder by getting all of the players to swap sides after they lift.
If you're a singles player then you can have a feeder stood at the back like this
and you keep lifting to them using both flat and high lifts.
They should play drops to either side however can mix up the pace of their drops
and the progression of this is to add some smashes or clears to really keep you guessing. So a quick
summary, you want to use these flat lifts to quickly move your opponent around the court and
create counter attack opportunities but you can only do this with a short quick hitting action.
High lifts can be used to get yourself out of trouble and you can have this long swing to
generate the extra height you need. Now there is a final type of lift we want to teach - deceptive
lifts to really get your opponent off balance and it might even be an outright winner. We'll
cover this on our channel in just a few weeks so make sure you smash the subscribe button so you
don't miss out on that one and for more detail on the basics of lifting check out this video here.
If you have enjoyed today's video please give it a like and we'll see you on another video!