Badminton matches can last anywhere between 15 minutes to over 2 hours. In fact, the world record for the longest badminton match currently stands at 2 hours 41 minutes! Now that is a long time to be playing badminton without much rest, which shows how important endurance is in badminton!
Endurance is defined as your body’s physical capability to sustain exercise for an extended period of time. It’s made up of two components: cardiovascular endurance (which is the ability of your heart and lungs to fuel your body with oxygen), and muscular endurance (which is the ability of your muscles to work without getting tired).
We’ll now go through: 2 principles for improving your endurance, followed by 3 methods of training to help you get less tired and improve your badminton stamina!
SAID stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands – this is where your body will adapt to the exercise that you regularly perform.
This is why it’s important to have training methods that are focused on badminton-specific movements.
This is where you make gradual increases in either volume or intensity to improve your endurance. For example, if you want to improve your 5K runtime, you wouldn’t just keep running 5Ks; you would either run further OR faster to ensure you make improvements!
As professional badminton players, we have tried and tested many different forms of endurance training over the years.
We have found 3 in particular to be most effective:
Interval training
On-court endurance training
Multi-feed training
We’ll now go through each of these in more detail!
Although this method is done off court, it is still relatively badminton-specific as a badminton match will often consist of short bursts of high intensity, followed by a period of rest.
You can do this interval training on a stationary bike or by running (either in a sports hall, on a treadmill, or outside).
Which method you choose is completely up to you and your personal preferences.
We typically choose the bike option as we spend over five hours a day jumping up and down on a badminton court, so we want to reduce the impact on our knees and feet as much as possible!
For this training, you will need a partner to help feed you. On-court training is where you do a variety of on-court practices in a specific time block.
We would typically do this type of session 1-2 times a week where we’ll do one of two session types:
1) 25-Minute Blocks
Choose 3 or 4 exercises, work for 75-90 seconds, and alternate with your partner after each set. We’ll do this for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute rest, and then do another 25 minutes with a different three or four exercises.
2) 25 Shots
Other times, we’ll choose 3 or 4 exercises and hit 25 shots, but if we make a mistake, we have to go back to 0! If you make a mistake at 24 shots and have to go back to 0, then you’re working on both your consistency at crucial times and also your endurance!
It’s really hard to work on your endurance if you’re constantly making mistakes, which is why it’s so important to focus on both your quality AND consistency when doing these practices.
Multi-feed training is a great way to get your heart rate up and in the zone to increase your cardiovascular endurance whilst also doing badminton-specific movements. It’s something we do almost every week!
This type of training meets the overload principle where you’re having to move faster than you would in a match as a shuttle is coming back to you a lot quicker than normal.
It’s also great because even if you make a mistake, the feeder will always hit the next shuttle in, so there really is no rest time!
However, you don’t want to overdo this type of training because the shuttle is only coming from one place, and you don’t have to think about playing a shot to get a certain reply so it’s not very realistic to a match situation.
So when doing multi-feed training, keep in mind that it is for your endurance and be cautious trying to use it to develop your technique or ability to read the game.
We have created 27 different multi-feed programmes with over 80 different exercises to help you improve your on-court fitness and speed, shot quality and consistency. There are video demonstrations for each one too so you know exactly how to perform them. If you’re interested, you can check them out below!
Check out our ready-made multifeed sessions that are designed to improve your speed, stamina and consistency (even when you’re tired).
As a final note, remember that improvements to your endurance and stamina takes time. You can’t just do one interval session and then expect to be able to complete an hour-long 3-set match without getting tired at all!
It’s also important to mention that we’ve been doing this type of training for many years as professional players, so we’re conditioned to doing it multiple times a week. If you’re not used to this, then we’d advise adding it gradually into your weekly training schedule to avoid any injuries!