Friends I have a few questions. 1) Could you please explain in detail about the Danish way and Chinese way of MOVEMENT around the court? At my age of 15, I do shadow play of four sets of 10 minutes each with 3 minutes break in between each set. In 1 set of 10 minutes, I do the shadow play for the 1st 4 minutes in top speed, next 3 mins in slow/ medium speed and last 3 minutes again in top speed. Now the questions are- 2) Will this much of shadow play help me in improving my footwork because i want to improve my footwork. 3)Should I do this much of shadow play everday or 3-4 days in a week? 4)For my age ie 15 years, is this much enough or not? Note: I have been playing badminton for only 1 and a half years.
It really depends on what your needs are. A few questions to ask yourself: Is your general conditioning and movement efficiency good? If you don't have the basic ability to move well, or you don't have very good fitness, learningbadminton specific movement patterns is going to be more limited in its benefits. How are you managing intensity and volume? Are you doing 10 minutes straight without rest? Do you realize that the typical singles rally lasts less than 10 seconds? Doing work sets lasting much longer (and at that much lower intensity) is fine for getting more repetitions in to groove the movement pattern. There's no problem with that if that's what you need. The problem is when that isn't what is needed, but people keep doing more of the same thing expecting different results. That's just stupid. The top speed that you can reach under 10 seconds is a lot higher than top speed that you can sustain for 4 minutes. How are your strokes in relation to your footwork? If your footwork is decent but your strokes/tactics/anything else is lagging behind, that's a weakness for your opponents to exploit. I know some players who are fit and have nice footwork, but in competitions they get taken down by smart players because they don't have the higher level skills to truly compete at that level.
