Hello everyone!

I wanted to start a thread about one of the
most overlooked aspects of playing badminton: seeing the shuttle. The
basic tenet is “If you don’t see the shuttle, how are you going to hit
it and really play the game?”.

I’m being purposefully vague here.
There are tons of interpretations to the idea of ‘seeing the shuttle’.
I’ve learned the importance of many of them early on, and it greatly
helped me improve at a rapid pace from scratch.

One illustration
of this is receiving smashes. It was obvious after learning to defend
smashes and practicing the technique over time that it was all useless
against stronger players. The reason was simple: the smash was too fast
for me to see in time. Noticing the direction and speed of the shuttle
while defending is one such skill.

Now I’ve always heard that
there are specific ‘steps’ to learning to play. First you learn to get
the shuttle over the net. Then to the corners. During this stage, you
also learn to play the shot while at the same time ‘seeing’ where your
opponent is, so you can hit opposite them. Later you learn to hit
higher clears in defence and lower ones on the offence. You learn to
play tighter drops to slow the pace and faster ones to quicken it. You
learn to add variance to your shots.

The two things I had to
learn by myself was that there seem to be two more dimensions to this.
I learned to see the shuttle through time, and to see your flight path.

At
one point, as an experiment, I started to visualize a shot I was about
to make as an image of the exact curb the shuttle would make. It was a
thin, green curb like you’d expect to see in a video game or somewher
in the Matrix. I did
this whenever I had the time to think, and I would adjust the path
until it fit what the shuttle did and vice-versa. After practicing this
new ‘skill’, I found I could adjust my mental path and physical stroke
to fit each other. That was cool.

Then
I started to add my opponent into the equation. I stuck with my path,
adjusting for my opponent’s reach, his movement speed and agility,
added a little marker on the path for the earliest normal contact
point, calculated the time I needed for my own movement and recovery
according to the most offensive shot that could come from that angle
(it was a straight red line from that ‘danger marker’ for me, going
just over the net), etc.

It completely revolutionized the way I
played. This is how I managed to beat stronger and more experienced
players than myself. With a laughable endurance and a weak smash, I
could drive them to a heaving, panting, shadow of a player, or induce
enough ‘mistakes’ to take the win. I saved energy, made the most of every shot, and kept me calm even in dire circumstances.

It
was all about seeing the shuttle in space and time and adjusting the
smallest details to give me that advantage I needed. It changed my
shots, my tactics, strategies, footwork, mentality, everything.

So
that’s my strategy for really ‘seeing the shuttle’ in the realm of
tactical decisions. It’s my own, and I’m sharing it here because if you
don’t have one of your own, this worked for me. It might or might not
work for you, and I’d love to hear what you guys have instead (and
maybe don’t
realize it).

So
for all of you who have good stories about how you’ve improved your
game in the realm of ‘seeing the shuttle’, by all means post it here.

Cheers!