Badminton Secrets

[This is Chapter 9 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

If life was kind, I could teach everyone to do the above, they could work
through it all and then go out and serve the perfect serve 92% of the time
or more.

But unfortunately, life isn’t quite like that. You will try all this, go out
and serve and it will not be perfect.

Don’t worry about that at all.

This is a crucial part of the process; in fact this part will probably help
your serve just as much if not more than all we’ve already done.

You serve a serve. It goes out. What is your normal reaction?

Most people’s reply would be ‘I’d better not serve it there again’,
probably accompanied by a polite expletive or two.

This is the worst possible response to a bad serve, and we are going to
first look at why this is, and then reverse it into something that will go a
long way to eliminating that serve the next time.

Firstly, it is a fact in life that what we focus on affects how we act. So if
you try to avoid serving into a particular spot, the primary focus of your
brain will be that spot and guess what! You’ll serve there!

I used to have one spot just an inch to the right of the right hand doubles
tramline that all of my wide smashes would hit, 9 times out of 10. The
more aware I became of this spot, the more I hit it despite my best efforts,
until I learnt the process below and corrected it.

And secondly, by feeling bad about the fact that you’ve served out,
you’re taking yourself out of that peak state that you worked so hard to
get into!

Have you ever had a game where you have served really well for the first
few points, then served a couple of stinkers and wanted to give up, saying
to yourself today wasn’t a good serving day after all.

THAT IS WHERE MOST PEOPLE GO WRONG!!

Most people actually start in a pretty confident state. But the mistake that
they make is that they try to get every single serve in, viewing each one
that doesn’t as chipping off a little bit of that confidence.

So if they are having a pretty good game, start with say 100% confidence,
get most of their serves in but quite a few into the net, each one will erode
that confidence figure, until later in the game they are coming into each
serve at say 60% confident.

This is reactive behaviour. It is reacting to what happens, letting your
results determine your resourcefulness for the next serve.

We on the other hand are going to be proactive.

Another question. How many games have you played against someone
way better than you, and they have started with very bad serving, you’ve
thought ‘aha, a chance!’, only for them to recover their service touch and
wipe you off the court?

That is because they had their confidence levels still up high, they had the
faith in their own abilities to serve well even though the evidence before
them was saying that they were in fact bad servers.

So from now on, you must view every bad serve in a good light. THIS IS
HARD!! Most things here are a bit tricky and take practice to really
master, but this one really does reverse all the conditioning that has gone
on for all of your life.

Your first reaction to a serve that isn’t perfect now is to smile inwardly
and thank it for giving you the opportunity to correct it.

That’s right, we’re going to treat all errors with the respect and
appreciation that they do, in reality, deserve!

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t want to perform incorrect serves, we’re not
trying in any way to do them. But when they happen it is crucial that we
treat them as learning opportunities rather than unwelcome intruders.

Mistakes are crucial to the learning process. They are perfectly natural
and inherent in the way that any human learns anything. You try
something out, you get a result. It may not be the result you were after, so
you check what you were doing, make an alteration and try again. And
you get another result. And so it goes on.

The subconscious mind is perfectly happy with this, it plods along until it
gets where it wants to go, whenever it gets there. It’s just the conscious
mind that butts in with your inner voice bemoaning your poor serve, your
partner reacting negatively towards you, maybe your coach telling you to
do better next time. Over time we have been conditioned to react this way
to mistakes, but here is an opportunity to now reverse that.

After appreciating the serve, the second step is to simply visualise the bad
serve being rewound and you doing it again perfectly.

This will take the focus away from where you want the serve to NOT go,
and back to where you do want it to go. The subconscious will see the
differences between the two, and silently and pretty much without you
knowing about it, register in your brain what to avoid the next time.

You see, the brain works by making trillions of associations every
second, and it is these associations that we can use to our advantage.
Because the next time you serve, if for whatever reason your
subconscious were to go through the exact same process as before, which
would result in the shuttle going out again, THIS time it has this little
association tagged onto the end of the whole process, which will make
the necessary correction and make your serve go in.

For while you consciously want to be focussing on the perfect serve, the
subconscious is going through amazingly complex associations that will
include what NOT to do. By reinforcing what it shouldn’t be doing every
time you serve incorrectly by replaying the correct serve in your head,
you are prioritising that association in your subconscious so that it
doesn’t miss it the next time you serve.

To make this technique of rewinding the serve even more effective, you
can, much like the visualising exercise earlier, change the characteristics
of the images that you create in your mind.

For instance, simply make the rewind black and white and the successful
serve colour. Give the rewind a noise that is sad and blue and whiny, and
the successful serve a celebratory sound, like a fanfare or your favourite
song. Experience the rewind as a negative emotion, like sadness, and the
correct a positive one, such as joy.

The clearer you can do this, the clearer that association will be and the
higher the likelihood that that particular mistake will be rectified in the
future.

[This is Chapter 8 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

Now we have our three steps to take just before serving that if done
correctly and consistently, will guarantee that you will get 92% of your
serves just where you want them.

Number one, breathe slowly in and out to relax (B). Next, get into your
most confident and resourceful state by acting as if you are guaranteed to
get this serve in, and firing off your anchor (C). Then thirdly, visualise
exactly where you want the serve to go, see in your mind’s eye you
serving it and it dropping just right (V).

As simple as that, BCV. Breathe, Confidence, Visualise.

And there we have it! Although that’s not quite enough to guarantee that
you will now get 92% of your serves in.

There is one more thing that you need to master…

[This is Chapter 7 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

Our aim is to get 92% of serves in, and where we want them.

So we are going to need a system that guarantees that wherever we want
the shuttle to go, it will (well, 92% of the time of course!).

And I mean a system that will enable you to serve millimetre perfect (I
actually serve now getting the shuttle to land fractionally inside the
service line, for times when I have read the opponent and know that they
won’t risk leaving it!).

To achieve this, we are going to use a system of visualisation. That is,
seeing what you want to achieve in your mind’s eye.

Yes, we are going to get you serving 92% of your serves in, IN YOUR
HEAD before we even set foot on a badminton court!!

Humans are controlled by their five senses; how we perceive the world
comes into us via these five senses, we react accordingly and take action
in response.

Each one of us has a different level of each sense. Maybe you don’t think
that your sense of smell is very good. Maybe you have a photographic
memory, and find it easy to picture things in your mind. Perhaps you find
it hard to feel things, not only by touch, but using your emotions and
inner feelings.

What a lot of people don’t know is that these senses can all be developed,
nurtured and improved to suit their needs.

Most people are very visual; they think in pictures. This is because life
around us is geared towards this. If you can instantly picture all the dates
from history, you’ll pass your exams. If you can look at a problem in your
mind’s eye, see it from all angles then you can solve it in the best way,
and get a fantastic job solving the world’s ailments.

If someone loses their sight, over time their hearing develops, out of
necessity.

Let’s try a test. Close your eyes now, wherever you are and picture a
badminton court in your head. How does it look?

When I first tried this, I found it very hard to keep the picture there for
anything more than a split second. There was a fog around the court, for
some reason the players had no heads (!), and before I knew it the other
millions of thoughts that swarm around my head had wiped the picture
away.

I also know that when I was younger, at school, this would have been
very different. The court would have been clearer and I would have been
able to make out much more detail, even keep it there longer.

This was because at school, my visual sense was a lot more developed
(with all those exams it had to be!). But over the years I’ve ‘come to
terms with my emotions’ so to speak, there hasn’t been as much pressure
to be visual and other senses have become more developed.

That is often why it is much easier to teach a child something – they don’t
have all the other worries and stresses filling their mind, trying to get
their attention when they’re trying to imagine a badminton court!!

Don’t worry if you can’t picture a badminton court at all. As I said
before, we will develop this skill, just like a muscle, by practice a little bit
every day.

Even if you are now saying ‘but Robert, I’m just not a visual person’.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you are! In the same way that someone
says ‘I’m not muscly’, what they really mean is that they have muscles
but they’re not very well developed. The same with your visualising
skills. They are there; they just need those cobwebs dusting off!

One tip when trying to visualise better is to try, whenever possible, to
remember an image rather than create a new one. This is because you
use a different part of the brain to recall images than you do to create new
ones.

Let me give an example, using something called the eye access methods.

In its simplest form and assuming no other interferences, when someone
is trying to remember something (an image), their eyes will go up and to
the left to access one part of the brain, but when they are trying to create a
new image, their eyes go up to the right, to access another.

Try it. Try to picture an image of someone close to you. Your eyes (all
other things being equal) will tend towards the top left to access that part
of the brain where images are kept.

Now try to imagine a picture of that same person but with long white
hair, a beard and a wizard’s hat on. Your eyes will now automatically go
up towards the right to try to create that new (presumably!) picture.

So we can use this information in our quest to serve better.

By remembering a good previous serve just before you prepare to hit the
shuttle, by visualising exactly what you’re aiming for you are ‘reminding’
the brain exactly what it is that you are trying to get it to do. And it will
oblige!

[This is Chapter 6 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

Now we come to the most crucial step in this three-step process.
Confidence.

If you had 100% confidence, in a totally relaxed yet alert state, THEN
YOU WOULD ACHIEVE THAT WHICH YOU SET OUT TO DO, i.e.
in this case, get 92% of your serves in.

The number one rule when developing confidence it to ACT AS
THOUGH YOU ALREADY CAN GET 92% OF YOUR SERVES IN.

This may not be true yet of course (though it will be!). But consistently
acting as though you can do it will send messages to your subconscious
that will convince it that you can.

And as we already know, it’s really the subconscious that is going to
control whether or not we succeed with our goal.

So the next simple step, after you have taken a breath in and out slowly,
is to put yourself into a perfectly confident state.

And the first part of this is simply to act like you have the ability to
achieve the goal.

If you find this bit hard, it often helps to imagine that you are an actor
who has been given the role of playing ‘Badminton Player Who Can Get
92% Of Their Serves In’. It’s amazing what we can do when we pretend
to be someone else!

As an actor, how would you play this part? How would you hold
yourself? How would you look at your opponent?

Remember this, for it can transform not only how you play on court, but
also how you feel about the game in general.

Next we are going to get that feeling of confidence available to you from
within, any time you need it.

Think back to a time when you were serving the best you have ever
served. Every time you hit the shuttle, it went just where you wanted it, in
fact just like what we’re trying to achieve here on a consistent basis.

If you can’t remember a specific time, try to remember a time when you
were playing your best all round game. Maybe it was your greatest
victory, or just a time when everything seemed to go right.

Now go back to that occasion and see it through your eyes as you did
then (this is called associating into the situation).

What do you see?

Describe it in as much detail as you can, using some of the following
questions as a guide:

• What colours do you see (if any)?
• Who is in the picture?
• Are they moving or stationary?
• How bright is what you can see?
• Does anything look different to how you expect?
• Is it in three dimensions?
• Where is this place (what court, location etc)?

Next, what can you hear? How loud is it? What is the most prominent
sound? Really go back into the experience and make it real. What are you
saying to yourself?

Then, how do you feel? What emotions are going through your body?
How do you feel towards your opponent? Sympathy? Contempt? Some
people report saying that they feel sorry for their opponent for having had
such a wasted journey (thus the title of this section!).

What are the positive feelings that playing so well conjures up? Where in
your body do you feel them? How long do they last? With what intensity
do they occur?

Then, take each one of your answers, and make it more pronounced, more
vivid, more noticeable.

For instance, take the colours that you can see and make them clearer,
brighter, more luscious. Make the whole picture bigger, the sounds louder
and more intense, and the feelings that you experience deeper and all
consuming.

Keep doing this until you are fully in your peak state, fully associated
back into the time when you were at your best. This is the state that we
want to harness so that we can call it back at any time.

The way we are going to do this is by using an anchor. This is an action
that we perform when we are back in this peak state so that it is
completely associated with that state. This then means that at any time in
the future when we do this action (or anchor), the peak state will return to
us. And the wonderful thing is that this works!

How amazing would it be if you could summon up your most resourceful
state whenever you wanted it!! Well, with this little technique you can.

Back to our peak state. When you are at maximum intensity, you need to
fire off your anchor. Your anchor can be any action that is easy to
replicate on court, just before you serve. Maybe adjust a string, or clench
a fist. Maybe touch your nose.

Whatever it is, when you are at the very peak of your state, seeing the
past success through your own eyes, do your action, deliberately and
obviously, both in your mind’s eye and physically in the present.

Then let your mind go blank, as though you are at the movies and the
screen has gone totally white.

Now do the exact same thing again, go back into the former experience,
see what you saw then, hear what you heard then, and feel what you felt
then. Intensify these experiences, make them bolder and louder, bigger
and more extravagant.

When you think they are as clear as you are going to get them, fire off
your anchor in exactly the same way as before. This is vitally important –
it must be in the exact same way as last time.

For example, if you adjusted a string, you must adjust the exact same
string this time, in the exact same way with the exact same fingers. The
more identical you can get your anchors, the more powerful this tool is.
Again, blank out your mind by imagining a totally white cinema screen
and return into the present.

The more you can do this, over a longer period of time, the more
ingrained it will become into your subconscious, and the more powerful it
will be when you come to use it.

Now, ‘fire off’ your anchor.

You should experience the same feelings of confidence as you did when
you ‘remembered’ your best experience and created this anchor the first
time.

The same confidence will now be with you each time you perform your
anchor.

[This is Chapter 5 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

Picture the scene, you’re in a tightly fought game with your bitter rival,
the scores are extremely tight and every point counts.

Say it gets to 13-13, your opponent serves but in the tension he or she
puts it into the net, you get the serve back and serve the game out.
What was the difference? What made you able to serve well in the
circumstances but not your opponent?

The difference is that:

a) You read this book, and

b) Just before you served you put into practice the following
important step.

Our bodies are amazing machines. They keep us going for however many
years, despite all the stresses and strains that we place upon them, all the
bad stuff we shove down our throats and bad lifestyle choices we make.

Obviously this all takes its toll and our body is rarely at its perfect,
natural state of complete peace and harmony.

It is these imperfections that cause us to make bad serves. It is the tension
in your opponent’s arm, caused by the worry about missing such a crucial
serve that caused them to serve into the net at 13-13.

We need to rid the body of any imperfections, causing everything to run
in perfect harmony, every part of you poised yet relaxed.

Well, maybe that’s asking a bit too much, to reverse the many years of
stress that we all do to our bodies!

But there is one way to get you a great deal nearer to that state, certainly a
lot nearer than your nervous rival.

And that is to control your breathing.

Have you ever noticed in a stressful situation, or one that is taking all of
your concentration, you suddenly realise that your breathing has become
really shallow, or in some cases stopped completely?!

It’s the same in your tight badminton match. You are so intent on beating
your opponent that breathing well has been pushed way way down the list
of priorities.

But we can change that!

From now on, the first thing that you will do when going up to serve is
take one breath in and a slow breath out. No one need ever know that you
are doing it, but you will feel the benefits immediately, feeling the good
healthy oxygen racing around your body, and the bad toxins being
expelled from your body in the out-breath.

It is important that the out-breath is a little longer than the in-breath. This
will calm you, especially if you imagine yourself letting go of any
stresses or strains (if you found yourself a little too relaxed and needed a
bit of a pick-me-up, then take a longer in-breath and ‘sigh’ out the out-
breath quickly, much like professional sports people do just before a big
shot/kick/performance where more power is needed).

You will be left feeling relaxed yet alert and ready for the next stage in
the process.

[This is Chapter 4 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

You can see why I didn’t use that as a title for the book!!

We also need to make our ‘goal’ time-sensitive. Without a deadline,
nothing would ever get done.

As there is a 90 day money-back guarantee with this product, that seems
like a good place to start! So think of the date three months in the future,
and we’ll add that in later.

Next, a goal must be personal; it must be your goal. Which we’ll simply
accomplish by changing the ‘you’s to ‘I’s.

Which gives us:

By , I Will Get 92% Of My Badminton Serves In And Exactly
Where I Want Them To Land, At The Height Above The Net That I
Wish.

Lets drop the ‘deception’ bit for now, I’ll come to that at the end.

Next comes a key step that will take us a massive way towards achieving
the above statement. It is a simple step that takes a few seconds, but is
often the difference between attaining a goal and failing.

And that key step is to write it down. Putting down what you want to
achieve on paper makes it official, makes it more realistic. This is a time-
worn truth that really works.

To prove how serious the goal is, use a blank piece of good quality paper,
or a postcard, with a good quality pen. Write carefully and neatly, in your
best handwriting.

There was an interesting (mythical?) study done in 1953 on students from Yale
University. They were surveyed, and it was found that less than 3% had
clear, written goals for what they were going to do when they graduated.

But the interesting bit, and the bit that concerns us here is that 20 years
later they returned to those same pupils, and found that the less than 3%
who DID have the written goals WERE NOW WORTH MORE IN
MONETARY TERMS THAN THE OTHER 97% COMBINED.

Not that money is the true barometer of success of course, but it was a
clear indicator of the power of written goals. And this certainly rings true
when you consider that they also found that the same people were
happier, more fulfilled and more content than the rest.

So there is no doubting the power of setting goals. But it has to be done
right, in the way that we have here.

Another important step that makes a huge difference as to whether the
goals are achieved, is working out WHY you are aiming for this
particular goal.

What benefits will you have when you have achieved your goal? How
will it make a difference to your game? What will that lead to? Winning
more matches, or tournaments? Would that mean getting picked for a
certain team?

How will you feel inside when you can safely and confidently say that
you can get 92% of your serves in?

Harnessing these feelings will keep you motivated, and keep you
focussed on what you want to achieve.

And, as before, write them down. On a separate piece of paper to the one
that you wrote the actual goal on, jot down at least 5 reasons for wanting
to achieve the goal.

So, to recap, we now know what it is that we are trying to do, and we
know why we want to do it.

All that remains is the HOW we are going to achieve it!

[This is Chapter 3 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

First of all I’ll answer the common response to the book title, i.e. that
it’s really not that difficult to get 92% of your serves in – just dolly them up
into half court.

But I think you and I know that that’s not going to get us anywhere!

Our aim is to get, on average, 92% of our serves just where we want
them, at the height above the net we want them, and consistently.

What about the other 8% I hear you cry!

FORGET ABOUT IT. Lesson number one. However good you become,
you are never ever going to get every single one of your serves in.

That’s why our goal is for 92%. Your goals should be realistic
(ie attainable) but really stretch you. 100% is not realistic. The
best badminton players in the world don’t achieve that, so we’re not even
going to think about it.

But I’m sure you’ll agree 92% is stretching us!

Goals also need to be specific. Now I know you can’t be much more
specific than 92% (!) but, to avoid those pedants from above, let’s extend
the goal to…

[This is Chapter 2 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

There is one reason why we just can’t serve perfectly each and every
time.

I mean, why not, we consciously know what we need to do and we’ve
done it a hundred times before.

However…

It is the subconscious mind that controls how well you serve in
badminton.

Quite a statement I know, but lets prove it by contradiction (as my Maths
lecturers used to say).

• Assume your conscious mind controls how well you serve.
• It is a fact that you control what your conscious mind thinks.
• Therefore, you can always instruct your conscious mind to serve
the perfect serve.
• But you don’t always serve the perfect serve. Contradiction!

There must be something else there, something that stops us from just
telling ourselves to serve perfectly. And there is, and it’s the
subconscious.

The subconscious works very differently to the conscious, but is
responsible for a lot more of our actions, and thus a lot more of our
frustrations!

This is a very important fact, and if you can grasp it, it will put you a long
way beyond your rivals.

There are many people who think, all this namby-pamby subconscious
stuff, if you want something, just go out and do it. They try to hide their
weaknesses as much as possible. They are generally the people who fail.

You are not one of them. They are also the people who have the perfect
reason why they failed, always because of some setback or other. But
we’ll talk about setbacks a bit later on…

[This is Chapter 1 of my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

I remember when I was about 13 or 14, and for some reason had gone
for some coaching with a different coach than normal, I think maybe it
was the school holidays.

In the first session, he said that we were going to start with the serve, and
asked us why we thought that would be the best place to start.

And I, being the kind of kid who liked to answer questions straight away,
put up my hand and said that it was because that’s the first thing you did
so we might as well do them in order.

He looked at me funnily, then asked one of the girls (who incidentally
was a year younger than me), and she said that it was because if you
didn’t get your serve right, there was no point learning anything else.

The sheer wisdom in her answer still stays with me after all these years.

If you have a poor serve, you can have an amazing smash but you’ll not
last the rally to use it.

It’s so obvious, but how many hard hitting players have you met who
don’t win as many games as they should because they’re losing points
due to their serve letting them down?

How many games have you played in where the better players lost
because they were having a bad day with their serve?

It is pretty much widely accepted that badminton is the fastest racket
sport in the world. IT SURE IS IF YOUR SERVE GOES INTO THE
NET!! Or if it’s smashed back down your neck. That’s a pretty fast rally
in anyone’s book…

[This is the introduction to my book "How To Get 92% of Your Badminton Serves In... Guaranteed!", now available free on badmintonsecrets.com!]

This book came about from my fascination with just how badly it was
possible for me to perform the rather easy task of a badminton serve.

There would be days of course when I could serve very well, with few
serves going into the net or landing out.

But then there would always be plenty of times when, for no apparent
reason (or so I thought at the time!), I would totally lose the ability to
serve a perfect serve.

I knew from my studies of psychology and the mind, that the reasons
for not mastering the art of the serve were largely psychological,
happened to just about everyone, and were totally and utterly, 100%
‘fixable’.

I also knew that the answers would largely be quite simple, and as I
investigated further, trying out what worked and what didn’t on my own
serve, this book slowly evolved.

At its simplest, it is a few things that you can remember to do just before
you serve. But for the serious badminton player, who really does want to
be able to serve well every game, “How To Get 92% Of Your Serves
In…Guaranteed!” is a study book, a proven course of action to read,
practice, reread and practice again until you get it right.

It is my pleasure to bring you the process that I used to perfect my
badminton serve, I know it will do wonders for your game too.