By Justin Ma, 7x US Junior National Badminton Champion.
Last updated March 19, 2021
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2 min read
In addition to my lower body warmup routine, I also have a shoulder strengthening upper body warmup routine. Note, most of this is personal to my own body and my own shoulder due to my common shoulder injuries, but I would also like to share this with all of you as they are great consistent exercises to work on your shoulder stability and all the muscles around your shoulder. Because badminton requires so much shoulder strength with each overhead shot, I find these exercises extremely good for the long term health of my shoulders.
Scapula push-ups are the core of my upper body warmup routine. This works out an under-looked part of your upper back / shoulder muscles. I commonly do 3-5 sets of 10 repetitions for warm up, and I do this before any badminton or upper body workout session. Take a look at this video on how to do the exercise.
The next exercise I do are the same side bird dogs. If you are not flexible enough or have enough balance, you can start with normal bird dogs and work your way up to the same side bird dogs. This is a great exercise to promote circulation in your shoulders and start introducing mobility to the muscles around your shoulder. Same as above, I will do 3-5 sets with 10 repetitions for each side before continuing. Here is a video on how to do these:
Forearm wall slides (with resistance bands) are the next exercise that I do. This one is more tiring than the others, but really activates my muscles to get ready to play badminton. This activates your outer muscles in your shoulder and trains them (something that is commonly not targeted by other exercises).
Following this exercise, I will do a variety of different tubular resistance band exercises to engage more muscles in the shoulder area. This includes a variety of different shoulder abductions and extensions, external rotations, and pulls all using the resistance band anchored to a point. Here is a video showing the external rotations, but you can check the other exercises on YouTube as well.
These set of exercises help to engage different shoulder muscle groups prior to playing badminton. I make sure to do these prior to all my badminton sessions just to strengthen my shoulder muscles and make sure I don’t cause any more injuries. If you are interested in any more conditioning clips or badminton training videos, please check out the full length videos on my YouTube channel! These are all drills that I go through weekly to improve my current badminton game and you can all do the same to improve your games as well!
