By Justin Ma, 7x US Junior National Badminton Champion.
Last updated September 30, 2020
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3 min read
Agility exercise drills in badminton are a great way to improve your speed and quickness on the badminton court.
If you combine them in a circuit – you’ll improve your endurance as well. Win-win.
As a professional badminton player since 8 years, I do an agility circuit for badminton at least once a week.
There are a wide variety of different agility exercises that you can do – in this post, you’ll discover some of the more popular and beneficial ones that will improve your badminton workouts and exercise effectiveness – quickly.
| Step | Drill Name | Key Focus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Badminton Ladder Exercises & Agility Drills | Improve speed, quickness, and coordination |
| 2 | Agility Jumps for Badminton Players | Improve agility, quickness, and lower body strength |
| 3 | Agility-Speed & Sprint Examples | Improve speed, quickness, and endurance |
| 4 | Jump Rope Agility in Badminton | Improve agility, coordination, and cardiovascular endurance |
Ladder agility exercises are commonly done for any sport involving short bursts of speed and general quickness. Even without a ladder, you can mark places on the ground with the general width of the ladder rings. There are many exercises you can do with the ladder, where you generally take one step per “hole” of the ladder. Some common exercises are high knees, shuffle steps, carioca, in & out steps and single legged hops. Here is one example of a QUICK ladder drill working on forward and backward steps.
These exercises will help you be lighter on the court and get used to staying on your toes. When combining these exercises in a longer circuit, you will get a strong cardio benefit and work on your endurance as your muscles will begin to burn through the sets.
The second group of exercises are something I like to call “Agility Jumps”. These are a variety of exercises that all involve jumping while staying on your toes. You can mix and match these exercises in any way that you like, but I generally like to do 3 sets of each exercise in a row before moving on. In each set, you will 20 seconds of a slow-moderate pace and 10 seconds of a full speed 100% energy pace. These exercises include:
For each whole circuit, aim to work on these exercises for roughly 10 minutes total without any break. You will for sure feel the burn in your calves and your quads!
These next examples of exercises are called an “Agility Sprint”. Set up or find an area of roughly 20 meters that you can go back and forth between. Here, you will be doing 6 different agility exercises in a row at full speed. You should time yourself in completing these 6 exercises so that in the future, you can aim to beat them and get even faster at speed and agility. This dramatically helps your athletic ability to move efficiently. Here are the exercises:
Although bunny hop can be considered more of a plyometric exercise, it is still very important to this agility sprint. It is forcing you to be able to give a full speed sprint even though at the point of the sprint, your calves and quads are already burning. If you have any questions about these exercises, you can easily find them on YouTube and Google!
I have detailed in another post all the benefits of jumprope and different progressions and exercises you can do with it. Be sure to include this in your agility circuits as well!
Regardless if you are new to the sport, training seriously, or just playing for fun, these different exercises can go a long way in helping your quickness on and off the court. Even if you aren’t doing them to train for badminton specifically, they are all still worth the exercises and are fun to do with a group of friends. Try this out next time you do a conditioning day and let me know what you think in the comments below!
