Playing badminton gives the entire body a brisk workout. And although it would not make you look like a bodybuilder with massive muscles protruding out of your limbs, it can actually help you build and tone lean muscle.
Playing badminton can help build (and maintain) lean muscle if practice regularly at high intensity. With regular practice, a badminton player can expect his legs and arms muscles to get into great shape.
Continue reading to find out how playing badminton is contributing to your muscle health.
A Full Body Workout
When playing badminton, you have to use most of your body, from your lower-body, to your core, to your upper body. The body parts that especially get to work are your legs, forearms, and upper arms.
Over time, these muscle groups display increased metabolism that reduces extra fat and gives muscles more strength and power. Which tones and shapes up your muscles, making you fitter, more alert and agile.
Check this short clip to have a better idea of how playing badminton can give you a full body workout.
Upper Body Muscles
A typical competitive badminton game will demand frequent, spontaneous movements of your upper body, particularly of your shoulders, forearm, biceps, and triceps areas. Since the shuttlecock has to be airborne all the time, this game requires a lot of overhead strokes, which involves a lot of upper body action. There are very few other racquet sports that offer such intense upper body workout.
Lower Body Muscles
A game of badminton challenges players to quickly cover a lot of ground to meet and hit the shuttlecock every time. This not only requires them to run around the court but also demands them to make lunges, jumps, and squats while trying to reach for the shuttlecock.
Frequently running, jumping, lunging, and stretching your body in different ways is part of the game. In an hour of playing badminton, you may end up doing all of them, at least 100 times each.
Core Muscles
Apart from the large muscle groups in the upper and lower body, badminton also demands a lot of work from your core muscles. Just look at the kind of movements that top pros have to perform on the court to tackle their opponent’s shots (check the video above).
At a high-level, this sports requires turning extremely quickly at sharp angles to make sure that your racquet is behind the shuttlecock every time. Also, players have to stretch their bodies in incredible ways, as well as to dive on the court, to reach for the shuttlecock and tackle its deceiving spin or ferocious speed.
These movements extensively work your core muscles, which makes badminton a full-body workout sport.
Over time, all the muscle groups in your body are going to benefit from a regular practice of badminton. This game, when practiced at medium to high intensity, can definitely help you become fitter, leaner, and stronger.
Burning Calories and Fat
Playing badminton can also help in weight loss. About an hour of playing badminton can burn up to 450-500 calories. This is the same amount of calories you could burn while spending hours at the gym.
This game involves hitting the shuttlecock back and forth at high speed and intensity. A shuttlecock can reach a top speed of up to 300 miles per hour. So to compete in a badminton game, a player needs to have a very high degree of agility and reflexes. As a result, losing fat, it’s a matter of being regular with your badminton games.
You are certainly going to lose weight as the movements that you make during a typical game of badminton are largely the same as advised by weight loss experts.
Similar to Working Out
Let’s take, for example, the kind of workouts that a personal fitness trainer will have you do to get your muscles in shape. She would most likely ask you to jump, squat, lunge, lean forward, make frequent jumps with explosive force, among other exercises. If you play an hour of badminton at a competitive level, it can offer you the same set of exercises with the same degree of intensity in the normal course of the game.
Due to all those lunges, jumps, and body movements that you have to make on the pitch, playing badminton will surely help you lose weight and fat, as well as, make you fitter and stronger.
A Popular Workout Choice
Badminton is the second most popular sports in the world, after football (soccer). It is not hard to find family members spending their mornings or evenings playing a session of badminton. The sport is so energizing and offers such a complete workout to the entire body without even trying.
The health benefits this sport brings to its practitioners makes it a top choice when it comes to selecting a sport for recreational or competitive purposes.
Playing Regularly
If you play badminton regularly, you would perhaps have to make no extra effort to get into shape and fit. It will happen on its own. Rest assured that your body muscles are getting a regular workout and they are slowing toning up and getting into better health and shape. That’s one of the reasons this sport is so popular.
Other Benefits
Speed is an essential factor of the game, and in order to keep up with your opponent and the shuttlecock, you need to develop your physical, as well as, mental, abilities.
This sport requires you to be more alert, agile and sharper in your thinking and reasoning. In addition, playing badminton helps increase the production of endorphins in the brain, which acts as the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters.
Like many other sports, especially racquet sports, badminton, helps you improve your social interaction, resulting in a better and more positive mood. Therefore, additional psychological benefits are the reduction of stress and anxiety, as well as, better sleep at night.
In overall, this game will help you improve both your body and mental health.
All things considered
This sport has a lot of health benefits, and most of them stem from the fact that it offers an intense full-body workout. It is such a fantastic game that it works the entire body, much like high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which is considered to be one of the best ways to burn extra calories and fat.
Playing badminton goes a long way in improving the health and fitness of your body muscles. Hitting the pitch, regularly, will make your muscles tighter, leaner, and stronger. There are very few other games that offer the same range of workout to your muscles as badminton does.
So, if you are looking forward to building lean muscle through badminton, you are on the right track; just make sure that you always try your best to hit that shuttlecock back.
Related Questions
Can Badminton help Control Diabetes?
- Yes, it can certainly cut down the sugar production in the liver and reduce blood sugar levels. A study by the Diabetes Prevention Program revealed that physical exercises can reduce the chances of developing diabetes by 58%. As a result, a regular session of badminton can be highly beneficial to diabetic people.
Can Badminton Help Achieve Weight Loss?
- Yes, by playing badminton regularly, you can lose excess fat in your body muscles, and look leaner and in better shape. A typical game of badminton extensively works all large muscles groups in your body.