Help with Stroke Please!!

Have you tried doing it for someone else and taking turns? It's pretty obvious if you help someone else, they'll try and help you

I learned a good amount from feeding multishuttles. It makes your really focus on finger power and accuracy, because your partner is relying on a good feed. It's great for repetition because that's exactly why you are doing it!

The only temptation to avoid is pushing your partner past their capabilities - it's often tempting to feed flatter/harder/faster than your partner can handle because it's so easy to do as the feeder!

 

Have you noticed all the strong players are able to give a good multishuttle feed? It's not a natural movement to hold a stack of 12+ shuttles in one arm and feed a variety of shots, especially with overhead drive/smash action.

Feeding is a separate skillset to being a good player, though good technique does help. Converse is true - feeding can help to develop good technique because it makes it easier - increase efficiency, less fatigue, and increased consistently.

You'll probably find the strong players all have invariably practised feeding thousands of shuttles, probably as part of helping their team mates/partners train.

 

You've improved well!

But somehow your movements (movement patterns) still seem a bit choppy and a lot of energy is lost. It just looks restless and if you are nervous. I think you can run much more relaxed and do your swinging movement. Just before the hitting point you have to tighten your grip.

The result will be that you will be much less tired and at the same time you will be able to hit much harder. For me this is the next big step for you. Try to play smoother. Your opponent in light green does this good.

 

Try to play (Clear, Drop, Smash, Netplay) with a friend for 10 minutes at the beginning. This is the right moment to pay attention to it. In the game itself it is more difficult. It "clicked" on me when I noticed that I was less stressed, got more shuttlecocks and hit harder at the same time. Extremely I noticed it in the singles. I was much less tired in the end.

 

It does look very nice to me! It feels more natural and looks like your are 'walking' through the stroke which is very good.

I'll let the expert confirm or not tho

 

When you do (garage-) training, try to think about your movement and repeat it. When you play a game, you need to abstract your goals.
Learning a motion is not learning to make the right decisions. It is only a tool to execute your decisions.

There's no time to think about how to correctly put the left foot before the right one. Instead I would try to think about positions and stances only. When you take a backcourt clear, you will not think about going to the rearcourt corner to take it, you will do it automatically, but you should think about your position you want to be after you play your stroke, e.g. get to the base position. You will automatically utilize the learned movement pattern to reach your goal position.

E.g. you often do only a half scissor, a reason could be, that you only think about the shot, therefor you need to think about what to do next afterwards.

You should learn to think ahead, your feets will then carry you there without thinking about it. The real danger is, that you think too much ahead (strong anticipations of certain shots etc.). So make more fluffy goals first and try to add more anticipation over time. Eg.
- After a high serve: "guard the front court"
- After a smash: "move quickly to the base position"
- After a net shot: "move away from the net" (do not stand there and await an other net shot)
- After a too short clear: "defense stance for a long smash" (make the decision to risk a cross court smash)

To what think about depends on your and your opponents strenghts and weaknesses.

From a scientific point of view, your reaction time will increase (logarithmic, but almost linear for low number of choices, see Hick's law ) with the number of choices you have. With training you can reduce the reaction time for certain choices (-> pros), but your first goal should be to get rid of the number of choices.

When you watch a beginner, then often he will stand still after doing a shot, watching his own shot and make a decision after the opponent return it. He is not only out of position, but his choices to react are 6 corners/smash/drop shot/drive etc.

Over time try to anticipate the return of your opponent to reduce the number of choices even further. You play a smash along the line, anticipate weak return to the net. You could even go as far as to make only binary decisions, e.g. after a net shot you think about a net shot of your opponent, it is either yes or no. You will have lighning fast reaction time, so if your opponent play a net shot, you can quickly kill it, but if you opponent will play something else, you are in the position of making a new decision with more choices this time. This will take time and there is the real risk.

 

Watching prior videos where your arm sometimes went 'off' during a set and comparing to now, your arm strokes are alot more consistent/reliable now!

In set 12, your strokes eerily similar across reps!

 

I think the difference is not the foot positioning itself as much as going forward. By keeping your back foot straight, you are forced to go forward which is what you should achieve in the end. Any cue you use is good as long as it achieves the target result.