http://www.weightvest.com/mensvests.html I chose the 40 lb basketball weight vest since it seems the closest thing to badminton compared to the others. Agree/disagree? Anyone else ever use a weight vest to train as well?
Hi mate, yea I use a weighted vest I bought off ebay to run hills with. It is really gud mate, I found it so much more easier to run normally afterwards without the vest! I speeded up my time a fair bit so its a gud job. Makes the work out reali hard!
Jeez, I wouldn't want to be wearing one of those out in public, though I'd be you'd get a seat on any public transport. They look like they have a totally different use. . . On a different note, do you have to be more careful and think about injuries? I can see a lot more loading on knees & joints wearing that thing.
Weight vest are good for training as long as it is not too much of weight. What am I talking about? Basically the weight should be enough not too heavy but with the increased resistance it do wonders for body. I remember long time ago when I saw this weight vest advertisements on TV in MAS. As a student I can't afford those weight vest. What I did was I bought some thick canvas and made it into a triple layer waist belt. The weights were made from cut spring leaf suspension metals and secured on my waist with long lines of velcro. Worn it under my oversize t shirt all the time. Worn the weight belt everyday for a month when I walked to and forth from college which is about 3 kilometres away. Yup even did jogging + sprints twice a week on a grass field to lessen the shock on my joints. Slow gain but effective. Gain 1 foot on my vertical after a month. Oh yeah the total weight is around 13kg +-
40lbs??!?! i think that is way too much weight. if the weight is too much you might end up doing more harm than good. say your an average guy, 5'10 160 pounds. now imagine having the same strength and muscle mass, but at 200lbs. think of it, 40lbs is 1/4 of your body mass if your 160lbs!! not a good idea imo. i'd probably tone it down to 10lbs or so. on a side note, why would you spend 150 on a weighted vest? couldn't you just have filled a back-pack with text books or something? hhahah i'm cheap
well, the reason I didn't do the back-pack thing is because the weight is not distributed around the body its much more on the back. Second, I do not plan on using 40 lbs initially or anywhere near that. My plan was going to be like 3-5 lbs for a month or two. Work my way up. Anyone know how much weight the pros carry? That's where I got the idea of using a weight vest. Thanks for the concern and advice. I'll try to be extra careful.
The weight you should use depends on what exercise you're doing. 40 lbs is nothing if you're doing squats, as you should be able to lift much more than your own weight when doing so, or the "dragon stance" (which then would be more "support" than lift). But if you are doing some plyometrics or footworks, you sould consider never going over 10% of your own body weight (starting at around 7%) as suggested by most high-level trainers, and in particular that Danish guys that I can't remember the name but he has written this book that has been cited in here a couple of times; it's considered the Bible of Badminton "Bo" was his first name, I think...
oh ok thanks for the info. I'm also curious don't soliders carry around like much more than 10% or so of their body weight with all the equipment like ammunition they carry? Sure they aren't doing footwork but may be running for dear life or running in combat. So once they are done with all that and retire do they all usually have problems with their body because of the extreme weight they carried? you mean badmintonbible.com?
The numbers I gave were badminton specific and therefore shouldn't be applied to the kind of training soldiers get. Running (also squatting and doing the "dragon stance" as I said before) require a muscular and tendon activity much different then when playing badminton, which is why soldiers can support a lot more weight; they are not moving around with side steps or doing incredibly violent stop-and-goes; they're going forward. As of myself, many times I have carried around 40 lbs while running (I weight around 155 lbs), especially in uphill sprints (downhill sprinting would have been hazardous for my knees and my ankles with that much weight), but when I trained in a way that my knees and ankles would need to be able to support minor but violent torsions (footwork, plyometrics, running in the mountains), I had to downgrade to around 15-20 lbs (I am cheating a little . And no, I don't mean the website, it's a book I found quoted on this very site, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I guess I don't remember the names and lines well... Sorry
The guy's name is Bo Omosegaard, I think the book is called Physical Training for Badminton. I read it years ago when I was a kid, but I haven't been able to locate it at the library since then. There's this great article floating around where he describes his process for prescribing exercise routines. I can see that there is some guesswork involve, but he's a smart guy and adjusts routines to have good performance. Basically, once you start understanding physical training better, you want to start thinking in terms of motor patterns. The added resistance of a weight vest will cause your body to compensate by finding different motor patterns as well as strengthening some muscles. What you want is for these changes to improve your technique when you take the vest off. Usually, if you wear too heavy of a vest, your technique changes quite a lot to accomodate for the added weight. So, afterwards your technique becomes a bit off. That's why lighter vests are used, technique won't change as much when you wear them. However, another question that must be asked is whether improvements from wearing the vest will translate to a useful adaptation for improved movement. The reason we ask this is because there are many different kinds of stimuli for the body, but we can only adapt to so much at once. Could there be a better exercise choice? This is quite possible.
Yeah, that's the one. Thanks stumblingfeet And yeah, I question the weight vest training also. I've always been a strong believer of the "as-close-as-possible-to-the-real-thing" kind of training. With more and more research results coming out each day, it seems more and more obvious that the human body has an incredible capacity to adapt to and perfect to the conditions it trains under with a precision hard to explain, or even imagine. If you train dehydrated, your performances under dehydration will improve, but performances under normal conditions might remain the same, or improve only a little. The same is supposed to go for whatever condition, which would imply a weight handicap also. But, who knows? Maybe the best is some kind of mix between all methods. As long as there is not a global gigantic research on the subject, I guess we can only all give it our best at whatever method we choose and hope Up until now, a pretty decent level as been attained by badminton players around the world, so I guess we can't be all doing it THAT wrong ;-)
