If you already have a nice/good racquet, upgrading probably won't do you much good. Or if you're used to a particular model of racquet, sometimes you simply don't want to change because it upsets your mental game if there's an unwanted change in your game like a new racquet. Psychology is just as important as training and where applicable, technology. But you shouldn't discount how much of an impact new technology can have. If we look at the 100m dash, records rarely get broken nowadays because it depends nearly 100% on the human body and the body has a limit that all the athletes in that sport are running into, so there's no much you can do to the shoes or track to improve performance for that particular sport. But swimming has seen all sorts of records fall like dominoes in the last 10 years, why? Because of technology. The new swimsuit tech has drastically improved. Now back to badminton, generation to the next generation of racquets, you probably will have a hard time seeing the improvements from the new technology being put into racquets. But if you pull back and look at the last 10 years, it's noticeable. 10 years ago, Fu Haifeng was smashing ~300km/h in tournament play, that was amazing and netted him a world record. But now you have a lot of players hitting on the upper 300s and a few able to hit over 400km/h. And the current world record for a smash in a tournament was a recent 421km/h. Even the women can hit much harder than before. Nozomi Okuhara can hit over 300km/h and is regularly clocked hitting just south of 300km/h. Training certainly plays a big role, but so does the racquet technology. If racquets tech didn't matter, we'd all still be using wood racquets.
@ mikomi - isn't it mostly that the technology measuring smash speed has changed? No way is Okuhara hitting like Fu of 10 years ago...
I saw on some of the badminton.tv streams of Okuhara playing and I saw one of the smashes clocked at +300km/h. That's what the read out said on the bottom corner and the commentators didn't say anything regarding it, so I thought it was a normal occurence? I believe women can smash around 300km/h. The physical conditioning of some of the women players, especially the Japanese, are very high. As far as I know, BWF still measures smashes with a doppler gun/radar at the time of impact (smash).
Look at Okuhara. Now look at 2006 FHF. No way their smashes are even in the same region.... Nowadays smash speed is measured with high-speed cameras (by the same guys who did the hawk eye), which means the speeds are gonna be higher as you can measure over a shorter distance of travel than with a radar gun. MD smashes should be at roughly 370-380 then, no? Compared to WS players, men used to smash 60-100km/h faster. Side note: tracks have changed drastically over the years, which is why the 100m records used to go up so much (that and the discovery of steroids)
I am taking those numbers that BWF are showing at face value. But I'm glad to learn something new. My question is, doesn't the doppler radar measure over a shorder distance than high-speed cameras? Since it's done by sound starting at the sound of impact? Despite all these technically issues/differences, my actual point is to illustrate that both men and women today are smashing harder than they were 10 years ago. I'm too lazy/busy to actually look at old footage and try to calculate speeds from then. As for the 100m dash, the doping stuff aside, the change in track has made some impact in world records, but the world records are not falling by the wide margins you are seeing in swimming. It's very small incremental improvements.
They're falling none the less, and a lot of it has to do with technology. You have to view it in perspective. This TED talk reveals all. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eps...g_faster_better_stronger?language=en#t-176105
Radar guns measure the speed of the shuttle by sending out radar waves and measuring the reflections coming off of surrounding objects. It's been a while, but I remember interference playing a role.....nonetheless, they measure the speed over a distance of travel of 50-100cm,where the shuttle loses a lot of speed. The highspeed camera technology works basically just the same as what Yonex used to promote their Z-Slash and Z-Force. The only difference being that it probably measures over a slightly longer distance. Still, it's a significantly shorter distance than with radar guns. Personally I'd guess players smash less hard these days, if not by much. The last tournament I remember that used radar guns was the 2011 WC - fastest smash of the tournament was 303km/h, I believe. That's modern racket 'technology' and somehow no harder smashes than in 2005/2006... Otoh, higher string tensions these days probably play a role as well.
I see. Hmmmmmmm. I'll need to rethink things. But whatever the conclusion comes out to be, I'm still buying new racquets. I'm addicted to getting racquets.
