Badminton injures three parts of the body more than anything else: the shoulder, the calf, and the knee. Almost all of it happens in the first ten minutes of play, to people who walked on court and started hitting.
This takes eight minutes and prevents most of it.
Minutes 1-3: get warm, actually warm
Static stretching a cold muscle does nothing useful and may do harm. You need blood moving first.
- Jog the length of the court and back, four times
- Side-shuffle across the court, four times each direction
- Twenty skips, or thirty seconds of skipping if there is a rope
You are looking for slightly raised breathing, not exhaustion.
Minutes 4-6: the shoulder
This is the joint badminton wrecks, and it is wrecked by repetition rather than by any single shot.
- Arm circles, twenty forwards and twenty backwards, starting small and growing
- Wall slides — back to a wall, arms in a goalpost shape, slide them up and down ten times keeping wrists and elbows touching
- Shadow smashes, fifteen slow ones, full range, no racquet
The shadow swings matter most. They take the joint through the exact motion it is about to do a few hundred times, while it is still under no load.
Minutes 7-8: calves and knees
The calf tear is the classic badminton injury for anyone over thirty, and it happens on a lunge from a standing start.
- Calf raises, twenty, slowly, both feet
- Walking lunges, eight each leg, controlled
- Shadow footwork — six corners of the court, twice round, at half speed
On court, the first three minutes
Do not start with smashes. Rally gently along the diagonal, then hit some clears, and only then hit anything hard.
Your first smash of the session should be the fifth or sixth overhead you have hit, not the first.
The part people skip
Afterwards. Two minutes of calf and shoulder stretching once you are done costs nothing and is the difference between playing again on Thursday and not.
If something already hurts
A shoulder that hurts at the top of the swing, or a calf that feels tight before you start, is information. Playing through either is how a three-day problem becomes a three-month one.
Coaches at KGB will look at your technique if a particular shot keeps causing pain — very often the problem is the swing, not the joint.