badminton return of serve – Badminton Insight

What To Do When Your Opponent Returns Hard Into Your Backhand (Badminton Strategy)

Fee Teng Liew — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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.

Check Out Our Badminton-Specific Weights Programmes!

We have 12 different programmes designed to help you improve your on-court strength, endurance, speed and explosive power.

Check them out here!

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.

The post What To Do When Your Opponent Returns Hard Into Your Backhand (Badminton Strategy) appeared first on Badminton Insight.

The 6 Best Return Of Serves To Play In Singles Badminton

Fee Teng Liew — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:05:06 +0000

The 6 Best Return Of Serves To Play In Singles Badminton

Even though you have a lot more space to play into in singles, people still struggle to know where to return to.

So, we analysed over 1000 singles return of serves from professional singles badminton matches and found the 6 best return of serves to play!

We also found that:

Professional males serve low 86% of the time and high 14% of the time.
Professional females serve low 40% of the time and high 60% of the time, which is quite different!

Of course this will vary between individuals but generally this is quite an accurate statistic for the split of low vs high serves across all levels of badminton!

The 6 best return of serves to play in singles are:

From a low serve – lift, net shot, deceptive backhand net shot
From a flick or high serve – clear, drop, straight slice

We’ll now go through these returns of serve, as well as some important points for executing each of them well!

Returns From A Low Serve

Return 1 – Lift (All Levels)

It might sound basic but playing a lift pushes your opponent to the back of the court which instantly creates space. We found that from a low serve, professional men and women play a lift return of serve 56% of the time.

This is a good choice of return of serve because:

If you choose to play a net shot, this can invite your opponent to play another net shot.
This will likely be tighter than yours as they’re playing it from in front of the service line rather than behind the service line (which is where you played it from when returning).

We have a few key points when doing these lifts to make sure it’s successful:

You should vary the corner that you lift to and also vary the height of your lift. For example, flat lifts can put your opponent under more pressure meaning you can try to take the advantage & counter-attack on the next shot. But these need to be accurate otherwise they might get you into trouble!
You should still take the shuttle early even when you know you’re going to play a lift! Don’t wait for it to drop down otherwise it might be more obvious to your opponent and will also put them under less pressure.
Don’t just stand there and watch your lift after you’ve hit it. Instead you should assess your opponent’s position and get ready for the next shot!

Return 2 – Net Shot (Intermediate)

Despite what we’ve said above, playing to the net can still be a good return in certain situations. You can either play a deep net which lands around the service line so they can’t play a tight net as easily, or you can play a tight net shot.

If your net return is good quality, then your opponent can only either play a net shot back or a high lift. Here you can move your positioning forwards to anticipate the net shot as you should still have enough time to move back for the lift.

Your returns will unlikely be winning shots, but if you can play the returns with purpose and look for the next shot then you can get into a good position and maybe win the point on the following shots!

Return 3 – Deceptive Backhand Net Shot (Advanced)

A deceptive return is a great shot to use to unsettle your opponents right from the start of the rally and in fact professional players used some sort of deception in 10% of their returns.

This deceptive net is played when the serve comes to your backhand side (from the right box if you’re right handed and the left box if you’re left handed).

Here, you look like you’re going to play a straight shot and then at the last second you turn your shoulders to face the left side if you’re right-handed and the right side if you’re left-handed and play a cross shot instead.

Your shoulder movement is what creates the deception in the shot so it’s really important to get this right.

We wouldn’t recommend overusing this deception – about 10% is a good amount otherwise your opponents will get used to it and it will no longer be deceptive!

It’s also a good idea to play a straight shot in the return first before you use this deceptive cross court shot.

Returns From A Flick Or High Serve

Return 4 – Clear (All Levels)

This return was used around 19% of the time for males and 36% of the time for females. Similar to what we said for the lift, this is used to move your opponents to the back of the court and it’s important to vary the corner you clear to.

Hitting it accurately with a good length is also important as if you’re clearing it short to the middle it’s so easy for your opponent to hit their third shot on balance and put you under pressure!

Return 5 – Drop Or Fast Drop (Intermediate)

This was by far the most used shot from a flick or high serve, being used 56% of the time by professional males and 47% of the time by females!

We noticed 2 interesting things from our research:

From a forehand high serve, the drops and fast drops varied between both straight and cross.
However, from a backhand flick serve almost all of these drops or clips were straight!

This is because from the flick serve you’re slightly less on balance and if you played cross, the easiest shot for your opponents is a straight block or net shot. This would mean you have to move the longest distance on the court and potentially take it late and put yourself under pressure!

Return 6 – Straight Slice (Advanced)

This is for more advanced players as it requires a high skill level to play with accuracy. If you aren’t accurate and slice it to the middle for example then your opponent won’t have to move and can put you under a lot of pressure.

The advantage of playing a slice is that the shuttle typically lands in front of your opponent – meaning they have to reach down and they have fewer options of playing a shot that puts you under pressure.

This is because you have a fast swing so it looks like you’re going to play a smash but the slice takes the pace off the shuttle and surprises them.

Should You Play A Smash On A Return Of Serve In Singles?

You might have noticed that we didn’t cover a smash off the return, and might be wondering why?

Well, when we watched over 100 flick serves to professional males, we only saw a few smashes and it often put the player returning under a lot of pressure straight away! So we wouldn’t recommend this unless the serve is bad quality, your opponent has a weak defence or if you have a really good smash.

Learn More

Of course, this isn’t a complete list of what returns you can play, but this is what we found worked best for the pros, which means they can definitely work for you too! To learn more about how to improve your singles game, you can check out our singles defence tutorial here.

Or, to watch video demonstrations of all 6 returns we’ve discussed above, you can watch our full YouTube video below.

The post The 6 Best Return Of Serves To Play In Singles Badminton appeared first on Badminton Insight.