What To Do When Your Opponent Returns Hard Into Your Backhand (Badminton Strategy)
In badminton, a common return to hit in doubles is to the rear-court to your opponents backhand – this is because it’s really hard to get back!
And this means your opponents are likely going to do the same return to you!
Sometimes it can feel like you can’t do anything about this hard return to your backhand apart from to improve your backhand, but we have 3 simple badminton strategies you can implement today to stop people winning points by hitting hard to your backhand!
The 3 ways to avoid people returning hard into your backhand (and being successful) are:
- Vary your serve
- Think about your positioning
- Playing the right shot
Let’s now go through each of these tips in more detail!
1 - Vary Your Serve
This tip of course applies to your partner who is serving – but if your partner is able to serve to a place where it’s almost impossible for your opponents to hit this hard return, they can stop this return from happening altogether!
For example, if your partner is serving to a right-hander from the right side of the court, serving to their backhand means their natural swing is to hit the shuttle straight. This is directly into your backhand!
But if your partner serves across their body to their forehand instead, their natural swing is to hit the shuttle cross-court, which then goes to your forehand.
Serving to this specific place makes it a lot harder for them to play a good shot to your backhand!
There are two important things to note here about your serve placement:
1. You need to look at how your opponent is setting up to receive the serve. This could change where you should serve to!
For example, if your opponent sets up like the image below, then serving to the T means their shot is actually more likely to go cross-court to your forehand because they will have to take a later backhand.
2. You can also tempt your opponent to play down your backhand side, but then you are ready to take it early!
You can do this by either serving low out wide to the tramline, as the most likely reply would be a straight push up the line to your backhand.
Or you can also serve to the T like we discussed earlier. You would do this knowingly and then make sure you are ready for it to take the backhand shot early!
2 - Think About Your Positioning
The 2nd tip is to think about your positioning – specifically, think about where you’re standing when your partner is serving.
For most people, this is in the centre of the court with their feet an equal distance each side of the middle line. Whilst this isn’t wrong, we’d recommend moving your starting position slightly over to your backhand side, to help you reach the hard return earlier. Just make sure to let your partner know so they can cover the forehand side after they serve!
Ideally, you should always communicate with your partner what you’re going to do, so you each know what you’re looking for and what areas of the court to cover.
However we’re not saying your partner should step back a lot to the forehand side because this would leave a huge gap for your opponents to play a simple net shot.
By you and your partner slightly moving position and you’re now only looking for the backhand side, it should look like this after your partner has served:
As well as moving slightly over to the backhand side, you can also move your positioning slightly forwards. This enables you to intercept the return, and play an early backhand shot!
From this earlier position, it’s really important to play the right shot – and this is our 3rd tip.
3 - Playing The Right Shot
If you are able to reach the shuttle early in the mid-court and play an early backhand, we’d recommend 2 options:
- A soft shot to the middle because the returner can’t easily reach this as they have to change their direction of movement, and it also creates indecision.
- Hit the shot over the returner and to the back if they’re staying in and looking for this soft shot.
One big mistake we often see people making which prevents them from playing a good shot from the hard return is not having their racket ready! We see a lot of people waiting with their racket down, which means their racket has a further distance to travel to the shuttle.
This means you can’t intercept the shot or take it early and instead, you will have to turn and play a late backhand (which is what we’re trying to avoid)!
So having a better starting position will hopefully help you with this and get you out of the habit of automatically turning to play a backhand.
If your opponent’s return is higher (like a lift), you might have time to play a round-the-head shot, which will be a lot more effective than a backhand from this position.
What If These Tips Don’t Work For You?
If you try to implement these 3 tips, but still find your opponents are hitting winning shots from the hard return into the backhand corner then you might need to improve two further things:
- Your backhand strength – to help you generate enough power to ease some of the pressure. To help improve your backhand strength, we’d recommend watching the video here where we share some tips to maximise your backhand power.
- Your explosive strength and speed – to be able to move to the shuttle as efficiently and explosively as possible. For this, we’d recommend checking out our badminton-specific weights programmes.
Learn More
We hope you’ve now learned how to solve this very common issue that a lot of people have asked us about! And you can also check out our YouTube video below on this same topic if you’d prefer to see more visual explanations of what we have discussed.