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The serve is one of the most important aspects of badminton, especially during a doubles match. Unfortunately serving is a weak point of many badminton enthusiasts. This is a problem that badminton lovers are trying to solve.
There are lots of instructional materials out there, such as videos, books, web articles etc. that can help out a lot, but all of these materials can only teach you the theory. There is still only one way to get real skills, and it is, you guessed it, by doing lots of practice.
Most of the time when people rent a badminton court, they use it to play games and not many people use the time to practice their serves. In an average length game of around 15 minutes, every player only has a limited opportunity to serve. This is why there are a lot of players out there with years of experience by still have a lackluster serve.
There are ways you can practice serving by yourself. You don’t necessarily need a court to practice. If you are doing long serves, then you’ll need a large space, like outdoors, to practice. As long as you have good posture and enough forearm and wrist strength, long serves shouldn’t be too difficult to master. In modern times, the type of service that decides the game is the short serve. You don’t need a lot of space to practice short serves. A 3m x 2m space will do fine. Here are the steps you should take to set up a good practice session:
1) Determine where you should stand (In a real game: the inner front corner of your service area);
2) Determine the target of your serve (In a real game: the inner or outer front corners of your opponent’s service area);
3) Put a string half way between your position and the target and make the string as high as the net. If you have a real badminton net available, use that instead.
4) Find some sort of open top container, such as a box or bucket, and put it on the target area.
5) Get lots of birdies (24-30) and practice your forehand and backhand short serves. You want the bird to fly just over the “net” and land inside of the container. At the start you might miss a lot but after a while most of the birdies should hit their target. You want to be accurate at least 90% of the time. Of course, 100% accuracy is even better.
6) Monitor and mentally note down your posture and the quality of your serves. Try to adjust yourself to improve your accuracy.
7) If you have a large enough space, you can have to containers and pretend that they are the two front corners of the opponent’s service area, so that you practice switching between two different targets.
If you keep practicing, the accuracy, quality, and consistency of your serves will improve.