speed of the jump smash

It could probably be your technique.

 

For my case its faster...maybe because theres no fear of hitting the ground with your racket thats why i tend to swing more and harder

 

Kinetic Chain & other kewl stuff

For quite a lot of ppl, their jump smash is a bit slower than their ground-based smash. What they give up in speed, they make up for in angle. Some ppl may actually have a faster jump smash than their grounded smash.

It's most likely a timing & spatial judgement. The timing is a bit trickier. For a regular (grounded) smash you need to time your swing to the expected contact point of a falling shuttle. The exact timing will depend on how fast you plan to swing the racket.

With a jump smash, the contact point changes... it is higher in the air. That is an added complication. You must also properly time your jump to the incoming shuttle & the earlier contact... definitely a greater challenge.

There are a couple of possible reasons why the jump smash might not be as fast for you. The first is, becuz the timing is more difficult, you may be starting your upward swing toward the shuttle with a slightly reduced swing speed to compensate for the more difficult timing of the stroke.

Tennis players do this quite often... if the lob that are attempting to hit is particulary high, the ball will be dropping a lot faster when it gets to their expected contact point; therefore, the timing will be more critical. They will often opt to swing earlier with a slower racket head speed to deal with this more difficult timing.

The 2nd reason could be the timing differential between your leg extension & your racket extension (the upward swing of the racket toward the shuttle). You might not be able to use the leg drive perhaps because it happens too much before the upward swing of the racket. You might be experiencing a break in the kinetic (power) chain.

Back to the tennis player... Powerful servers use their leg power for added speed on their serve. They don't really jump just for the sake of jumping and they don't jump to get a lot higher (altho' this is an added benefit). They use so much leg drive for added power that their feet come off the ground. The leg drive is part of the serving kinetic chain.

In this chain, the power generated in the legs is transferred to lower body (& hip) rotation, followed by upper body (torso) rotation. As this is all happening the racket head is dropping behind the back. By the time that the legs are fully extended and the power has been transferred thru body rotation, the last links in the chain are ready to accept the transfer of power. These last links are the parts of the arm and the racket itself. If all the links in the kinetic chain are properly sequenced & timed, then the tennis server can generate a very powerful serve.

Back to the badminton jump smasher... if you jump off the ground then you have generated power thru leg drive. However, if this leg power is not immediately tranferred to body rotation, followed by another immediate transfer to the arm with an upward swing of the racket, then you have a broken kinetic chain of events.

Another way of saying this... if there is too much of a pause (or too much time differential) between your jump & the actual upward swing of the racket, then you will be unable to transfer much of the power of your leg drive into the swing of your racket.

On the ground-based smash, it is much easier to transfer leg drive into body rotation and then racket swing... therefore, your kinetic chain is intact (and power is tranferred more effectively).

 

Hmm...what if the person can jump really high? If the person turns while he jumps, the contact point of the shuttle would not be at his maximum hight potential. Is this to say you must sacrifice power for angle?

 

Wing, at your age, you shouldn't even be considering jump smashing.

My friend is 17 and has been playing for over 4 years, and he doesn't even do jump smashes. He says that his body isn't stable enough yet to do it.

I've only been playing for like 4 months and I jump smash anyways, because I can execute it quite well and it seems faster than my ground smash.

Everyone tells me not to jump, but I jump because its fun.

Lol.

So, I think you should only jump smash if you feel as if you are confident. Just keep practising the timing and aim for the sweet spot on your racket.

 

So read it a few more times... maybe you will learn something. I know that a lot of young players are just looking for easy simplistic answers. Perhaps when you are older, you might appreciate the details a bit more.

 

I had assumed that if you fully extended your arm on your non-jump smash that you would also do the same for your jump smash. If you are doing it for the former but not for the latter, then it is probably because you have not properly timed your swing as I had suggested.

Yes, you can actually perform a powerful smash w/o the complete kinetic chain. Using the legs & body rotation prior to the swing is a more efficient way of producing the power cuz you are using your body's strongest muscles to generate the power. It will save a lot of wear & tear on your shoulder, elbow & other parts of the arm is you use the full chain.

Once in a while we might be in a situation where we only have time to use primarily arm power to hit a smash. However, this should not be your normal smash... it places way too much stress on the shoulder & other parts of the arm if you hit most of your smashes this way. You may find this out the hard way later... as you get older, shoulder or elbow problems can plague you due to overuse (cuz of the extra demand on the arm).

If you watch the world class players, they usually try to use both lower & upper body rotation (sometimes only upper body [torso] rotation) prior to the acceleration phase of the arm swing. That is why they almost always turn their body (toward the sidelines) when the first get set to smash... so they can unwind using body rotation to generate more power efficiently.

Bottom line... even if you don't have much of your leg drive available to start the kinetic chain, you still want to try to always use body rotation (upper body rotation, at the very least) for the smash.

One last word about the use of the sweetspot... Using the sweetspot is a good idea for powerful shots such as drives or net kills. In shots such as these, the racket head does not travel thru very much of an arc. However some shots involve a significant arcing motion, such as the smash, overhead clear & high singles serve. For these shots you want to contact the shuttle on the stringbed a couple of inches (5cm or so) "above the sweetspot" (a bit more toward the top of the frame). When the racket head travels thru an arc, the tip (top) of the racket has a much greater linear velocity than the sweetspot does.

 

so anyone knows the way how to improve the timing for jumping smash????

 

Jump Smash?

When i jump smash, it seems alot faster, but thr angle is poorer, and it tends to go out. Well thats from the back court.Its really all timing, sometimes i have perfect jump smashes too. But more smashes your body does lift off the ground, it might not consider to be a jump smash, because u didn't really mean to jump. But your body lifts off the ground anyways.

 

Instead of one fluid leg motion, it is possible to split the jump smash into two parts: the first would be to jump vertically, as high as possible. This gives the angle advantage. The second part would be to quickly tuck your feet back, elastically loading your quads before explosively extending your legs, this being the "leg drive" of the kinetic chain.

The advantage of the jumpsmash for power is that you make enough space to forcefully engage this stretch reflex in both legs - meaning you get more "kick" from your legs. Of course, the timing issues still exist, but hopefully you'll intimidate your opponents so much that they'll mishit their return. You can always hope.

Good luck with your jumpsmash

 

Your 2nd variation is an interesting idea! Does it really give you the the leg drive as part of the kinetic chain? I'm not sure about this, perhaps it does.

I would think that a ground-based smash would give yield more power contribution from the legs that most types of jump smash. A 'jump' smash where the feet don't come off the ground very much but immediately transfers power to the next link (hip/body rotation) would probably also use the leg drive as the first part of the chain.

If properly timed, the heel tuck (or the leg tuck back as you put it) can have a very pronounced effect on 'hang time'. Volleyball players do this quite a bit when they are spiking the ball. It allow them to hang in the air a bit longer because their center of gravity is shifted upward when they raise their arms and their heels during the jump. Perhaps this added time allows the hitter to put a bit more speed on the ball or on the shuttle.

 

The point of a jump smash is really just to create more angle, but if you really master the technique in jumping towards and twisting your body while slamming the shuttle. You get a much greater kick of speed. Very hard, all in the timing..

 

I don't know if it's any more powerful, but it certainly feels more satisfying (if connected properly). When you're in the air, you can move your legs through a much larger range of motion when hitting the shot (and expend much more energy while you're at it). Whether this translates into more power for the shot, I don't have any objective information to examine to reach a definite conclusion.

However, if it feels powerful, you'll feel powerful so your mood will be better. Then, you'll feel very confident hitting big, powerful shots. Perhaps subjectivity is a bit more important than I thought...