How To Improve As A Beginner In Badminton - 5 Common Mistakes
Playing badminton as a beginner can seem overwhelming at first as there are so many different components and techniques you need to learn to improve your game. It can sometimes feel like you can’t get any better, and that’s why we’re here to help!
The 5 most common mistakes that beginners make in badminton are:
- Hitting to the wrong place
- Using the wrong grip
- Using the wrong footwork
- Making your shots too obvious
- A lack of repetition or practice
We’ll now discuss these mistakes in more detail, and most importantly, tell you how to fix them!
1) Hitting To The Wrong Place
A large part of badminton strategy, whether that’s singles or doubles is to outmanoeuvre your opponents.
This means they’ll be later to the shuttle, and either play a worse quality shot, make a mistake or not reach it at all!
A very common thing we see beginners doing wrong is NOT outmanoeuvring their opponents, and instead hitting straight to the middle!
So rather than hitting to the middle, you need to hit into the different corners of the court, moving your opponents front and back and side to side. Doing this means you can start to control the rallies, and prevent that feeling that you’re running around the court chasing the shuttle!
2) Using The Wrong Grip
There are 3 common grip mistakes beginner badminton players make:
1) Pointing your finger up the racket on overhead shots
This means you’re using your wrist rather than your forearm, and you’re only using 3 fingers to squeeze the grip, rather than all 4. Your racket head speed then becomes much slower, which hugely reduces your power!
Instead, you need to be in a forehand grip like this:
To learn more about all 4 basic grips in badminton, check out our in-depth article here.
2) Not using a backhand grip
A backhand grip is where you place your thumb on the wider part of the racket like this:
This will help you when playing shots in the mid court or front court on your backhand side.
Using the correct backhand grip will help you create control and power, meaning you can hit shots right to the back and avoid mistake number 1 – hitting straight to your opponent!
3) Not changing between the different grips fast enough
If you don’t change to the correct grip for specific shots, you will have much less control over the shot, which hugely impacts your ability to win points!
To be able to change your grip in time you need to use your fingers and never be gripping your racket too tight. This is a difficult skill to learn but one that’s essential if you want to improve the quality of your shots!
As well as learning the 4 different, grips, to learn more about how to change between the different grips effectively, check out this article here.
3) Using The Wrong Footwork
You can be as fast as Usain bolt but if you don’t use correct badminton footwork you’ll actually be quite slow on the court and find it difficult to reach shots in time!
The 3 biggest footwork mistakes we see beginners make are:
1) Not lunging with your racket leg
This is your right leg if you’re right handed, and left leg if you’re left handed.
Lunging with your NON-racket leg means your core is more likely to collapse – this not only makes it harder to be in control of your body and racket when playing the shot, but it also significantly impacts your recovery after the shot!
2) Not being able to pivot or turn in your round the head corner smoothly
To fix this mistake:
- For lifts or clears where you have time, you should do a split step, push off your racket leg, and then pivot on your non-racket leg so you’re facing sidewards. You then push off your racket leg to rotate and do a ‘scissor kick movement’.
- Being able to do this smoothly helps you rotate into the shot, rather than being front on to the shuttle where you then can’t rotate (which impacts your power, control and recovery!)
3) Not Doing A Split Step
A split step helps you load your legs and push off explosively in whichever direction you want to travel.
It also enables you to move more efficiently in between shots and get to shots earlier as a result.
It’s likely that if you don’t split step you’ll end up taking lots of little steps and basically start running, which massively slows your movement down!
You can learn much more about the split step in badminton here.
4) Making Your Shots Too Obvious
We see so many people using their whole arm to play shots in one slow motion because they’re so focussed on just hitting the shuttle over and in. This unfortunately makes it very obvious where the shot is going to go, especially for softer shots like drop shots and net shots.
Instead, you need to be able to keep your opponents guessing where you’re going to hit it right until the last millisecond.
As well as using the correct grip and footwork as we’ve already discussed above, this can be helped by 2 more things:
- Being relaxed in your arm and grip before hitting the shot as having this one slow motion is often caused by being really tense.
- Then, squeezing your grip at the last second to help add more power into your shot.
Doing all of these will help you play multiple different shots with the same preparation technique, which will help to not make your shots too obvious!
5) Lack Of Repetition (Practice)
In his popular book Bounce, Matthew Syed talks about the importance of ‘implicit systems’ which basically means that once you’ve practiced and mastered a task, it becomes automatic and therefore frees up your mental space to think about other things.
So, if you keep practicing lunging with your racket leg or your footwork into the round-the-head corner, then over time you’ll be able to focus on other things that will further improve your game such as your shot placement or tactics!
💡 We’d recommend trying to improve 1 or 2 things at a time so you don’t overload your brain and then when you’ve improved it and it’s engrained into your muscle memory, you can move your focus onto another area!
Learn More
By being more intentional with your training and being specific with what you want to improve, we’re sure that you will see huge changes in your game! And we hope you’re now able to level up your badminton game by fixing these common beginner mistakes.
If you’re interested, we have a beginner to intermediate playlist on YouTube here which includes lots of other tutorials and tips that you might find helpful.
Or, you can watch the full YouTube video of what we’ve discussed in this blog below, which includes more visual explanations, plus an additional 3 practices to help you correct the 5 beginner badminton mistakes above.