By Justin Ma, 7x US Junior National Badminton Champion.
Last updated July 15, 2021
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3 min read
Many of you may be familiar with training rackets. For those of you who aren’t, these are essentially just badminton rackets — but heavier! Some of the most popular training rackets out there currently are the ones created by Yonex, the Isometric TR0 Training Racket. These come in many different weights to suit your own strength. But why and when should we be using these rackets? They’re clearly not meant for competitive play — let’s take a look!
Many players opt to use a heavier training racket during their warmups. When they practice their first strokes for the day (i.e drives and clears), they may start with a training racket before switching to their normal racket for the rest of the training session.
This is a great opportunity to quickly work on your wrist strength since your body is still warming up and you are only practicing basic shots. Drives are a perfect shot to practice with a training racket — high repetitions of shots will help your wrist grow stronger and faster. At the same time, once you get into the more intense parts of the training session, your body can adjust to the faster speeds quicker as your racket will also be much lighter!
Hitting against the wall is another common time when players will use a heavy training racket. Here, we are just practicing our drive consistency. Adding another element (weight of the racket) into the mix can make the training much harder and help you focus on improving your strength as well.
If you are able to stay consistent with your drives using a heavier racket, it will just be that much easier to use a normal racket to hit even faster paced drives. The next time you plan on playing badminton by yourself (against a wall), try using a heavy racket instead and see how much harder the drill gets!
Some other times you may not have an opportunity to play with your peers or higher level players. In these cases, to give yourself more of a challenge, you can try using a heavy training racket instead.
It will be much harder to hit any of your shots (clears, drops, smashes) but if you are still able to keep up with the rallies using a heavy racket, it will just be that much easier when you get your normal racket back! This also gives you another good reason to spar with younger or lower level players, as you can still get a good workout in just by using a different type of racket. At the same time, you can also help improve their level so that when they do improve, they will be an even better opponent for you!
Training rackets are not meant to be used non-stop. If you overuse it, you may end up hurting your wrist or your arms from the heavy weight and repetitive movement. Instead, try to mix in a small session in the beginning of your workouts (during warmups), or when you are playing by yourself or against a weaker player!
Professional players around the world carry heavy rackets in their bags to all of their training sessions. It might just be time for you to get yours!
If you are looking for more training drills for badminton, be sure to check out our YouTube channel or subscribe to our email mailing list. Thanks for reading!
