Hi All, I am 43 and new to the sport. My background is endurance running and MTB, however a month or so ago I played my first ever badminton game with a friend and now I am hooked. I am trying to learn as much as I can and improve. I am also fascinated with the history for the sport. Thank you for having me in your forum community. Cheers Manx
Great to hear you have found the beauty in our sport. Take care not to get injured, especially in the beginning when the body is still adapting to the new movements. As you will sometimes read on the forum: "You don't play badminton to get fit. You get fit to play badminton". Especially the shoulder, the knees, ankles and achilles can be vulnerable in the beginning, even more so with an imperfect technique. I don't mean to downplay the risk of injury in other sports. Endurance runners must take care to avoid overuse injuries, and I can imagine the risk of taking a bad fall on the MTB, but badminton involves fast technical footwork with some 'unnatural' movements. If anything goes wrong, or something bends the wrong way, it could lead to damage from which players might never completely recover. I don't want to scare you off. Badminton is a great sport, but make sure you can play it for decades to come. Take care, and listen to your body.
This seems like great advice SnowWhite, in all of my sporting endeavours, I have always been keen to get the right technique dialled in first and foremost, so I hope to do the same with badminton.
Hi Cheung, I am not fluent, unfortunately. However I am armed with a few words and phrases, my favourite being ‘Traa dy Liooar’, which means time enough. As in there is time enough for everything, no rush. Which I think is quite beautiful.
Update. I won my first match today haha. A group for work play every Friday. Up until now I have been improving but loosing. However tonight I won my first singles match. It might be time to buy my first racket!
Hi tailless one, glad you found this beautiful sport and your first win, but please take Snowhite’s sage advice, my story is a sad one. Having trained under a Scottish Badminton Union coach back in the day, started to signs of going places but family circumstances forced my retirement, all I lived for was Badminton and a Lycra clad hardcore roadie (climb like Robert Miller and race with heart like Sean Kelly), fast forward 35yrs (stuck in the family shop), I decided to rekindle my badminton love, went to the now Scottish Badminton Academy in Scotstoun, 2nd game warm up, my left Achilles Tendon exploded, laid off for a while and interest fell away, fast forward another 10 yrs, had the yearning again so went back but to play with the OAP’s social badminton group, bang!, right Achilles Tendon exploded, now definitely a retiree with gravel biking and coastal hiking and the odd Munro bagging thrown in. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck and please take time to warm up properly and warm down, hate to say it, you are at a dangerous juncture for Achilles ruptures at 43yrs, i snapped my first Tendon at 45yrs, my 2nd at 55yrs, concentrate on the technique, in my case that wasn’t the case, it was the little explosive movement that I took with aplomb in my youth that took me. I feel an affinity with you as you are a biker too, looking forward to your updates.
Thanks, it is indeed, to happen twice is really unfortunate. When I stumbled on Manx’s thread, I just had to throw in the wind of caution, what the physio said was although the skill set is still in my mind, my body has changed in the intervening years, I was stuck in beast mode mindset from my youth and didn’t see it coming.
