Do you work on improving your decisions making skills
Specifically, on improving your anticipation & thinking skills
Great players make :
great decisions, anticipate, plan and intentionally influence rallies
Why Decsion-making is important
6 elements you need to become great at
- Understanding what could happen when you play your stroke: anticipating how it will affect your opponent
- Identifying where your opponent is strong and weak
- Be able to ‘see’ / ‘feel’ what your opponent is about to do, “to read your opponents preparation”
- Accepting that sometimes you will feel uncomfortable and may not make the right decision
- Accepting that you can intentionally influence practice rallies, even technical practices
How many of these do you believe that you are good at?
Decision-making skills are subtle skills
They can be difficult to measure and difficult to see improvements
. However, they often the difference between players on court.
When was the last time moment & asked a question that
alloweedge?
How to work on these skills
Advice is for you and your coach to consider
- Play MATCHES …. lots of matches
- Ensure that you focus on anticipation and try to influence the rallies within a practice
- Alwasy try to work out how to either win the rally or stopping your oppoenent from taking advantage
- Expect errors as you try to intentionally influence/anticipate the outcomes “error is the price of skill”
- Try to reduce the amount ‘knowns’ in any practice. Smash kill x 15 will not improve your anticipation. Static feeding may even harm/limit your skills
Advice for any technical practices
- Don’t just be a ‘passenger’ and allow the feeder to dictate
- Start most of the practices yourself. You’ll need the shuttle to start.
- Think about anticipating before they strike the shuttle, it’s essential
- Use 1 shuttle and play mini rallies. Maybe have both players hitting and moving, learning.
- Ask feeders to try and beat you. Expect to be beaten by them, but also please make it tough for the ‘feeder’.
Warnings
Here are a few things to consider that may explain why you don’t anticipate as well as you would like
You don’t play enough matches in Practice
This is a must do!
Play matches, all sorts of matches: 1v1, 2v1, even 3v1 will help!
I especially like both Conditioned games and Open Challenge matches where it’s important to try and win!
You don’t try to win (or gain an advantage) in Technical Practice
If you are just happy hitting shuttles over, you are missing out.
There is so much more to practice than just returning the shuttle and ‘waiting’ for the next. Please don’t just hit with an empty mind. Always be thinking about seeking and imagining creating an advantage for yourself.
Having an ‘empty mind’ is not acceptable.
Too much multi-shuttle
If the majority of your practice is multi-feeding, you will become good at reacting and chasing.
Is that your aim?
Multi is great for physical development but not for game decisions.
However, reacting is not the same as anticipating and influencing.
- Using static repetitive feeding will help you technically but it will not develop your game anticipation/influencing skills.
- You need to practice anticipating then reacting to an opponents stroke : to the shutle you just hot, not another 'feed'
- You can influence your opponent in a game but you can’t in multishutle, especially if they don’t return your shot!
Having the speed to chase a shuttle is never fast enough if
the correct anticipation element is missing
Thinking about feeding
This is a good place to start
The important point is the context of the feeding.
If the player knows where the next feed (the shuttle) is going, then how can that develop decision-making?
Certainly, vary the feeding, and yes there is a small element of deciding what speed and flight the shuttle will take, but that is different to the decision-making that wins rallies.
If you want rallies, then use one shuttle and ask the feeder to return the shuttle, (this is not a multi-shuttle)
Feeders should consider how much the move (the more the better), how much they try to play game-like replies (the more the better), and how long the rally continues.
The player should be encouraged to try and influence what stroke the feeder could play.
If longer rallies are the goal to enhance physical elements, either play against better players or, if you can’t find any, use a multi-shuttle practice.
Send me a question
I’m always grateful if you have read this far.
If there is anything that you have read that has helped or that you disagree with, then please send me an email.
I promise to read all your comments
It would be great to hear from you contact@badmintonandy.com
