Well, according to a test by Astand, long-distancerunners have 63-98% type-I fibers in their musculus vastus lateralis. On the other hand sprinters have 13-39% type-I fibers in their m. vastus lateralis. Wich means sprinters have more type-IIa or IIx. When you say that every excercise is turning IIb into IIa (I think you meant IIb = IIx?), is not really true I think. Else, these long distance runners would have more type-II fibers. Or did you mean excercises specificly for badminton? I do agree about the intensity at 1RM and the intensity on court with you. But I still believe that more repititions is more functional for badminton, but that's just my opinion. You can indeed produce more power when you briefly stretch your muscles before contracting them. Wich is already plyometric. I think plyometric training is a good form of training and a good addition for already physically trained athletes/players and not just only if you can't generate enough force at a 1RM excercise. But there are risks of injury due the generation of great forces, that's why you'll need a certain level of physical strength before it's wise to do plyometrics. There are alot of diffrent approaches for (strength) training, but this is just my personal vision on it. You have to know for yourselves if you agree or not .
Well, despite all this discussion muscle fibre type is a complete non-issue when I train. In the body, the central nervous system is supreme and the muscles simply follow the orders given by the CNS. There's a classic experiment known as cross-innervation. You start off with two muscles, one slow twitch and one high twitch. Each of these muscles is innervated by a nerve of the same speed, one slow and one fast. The experiment does the following: it attaches the fast nerve to the slow muscle, and the slow nerve to the fast muscle. What happens is the fast nerve causes the slow muscle to contract quickly, while the slow nerve causes the fast muscle to contract slowly. What we're really getting to here is not simply of a discussion of strength exercises, but of periodization. I agree that repetitive effort, max strength and plyometric can be effective methods, but the challenge is the long term organization of these and other physical training methods in order to maximize performance, particularly during important times of the year.
For the people who are maybe following this discussion, Stumblingfeet is (probably) referring to a research by Dias & Simpson on rabbits where an abstract can be foud here: http://ep.physoc.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/3/213 Or a research by Dum et al. on cats where an abstract can be found here: http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/4/818 Or possible on any other scientific (medical) search-engines. The FDL stands for Flexor Digitorum Longus and SOL for Soleus. The way I interpretet the first abstract is that slow-twitch do indeed contract faster and visa versa. But they still are both intermediate in contraction time. So my guess is that it's a co-operation of both fibers and nerves. I could be mistaking though. The second article is clearly founding your previous post. I was not aware of these researches, so thank you. I've learned something new ;D. Players should have a certain physical level all the time, in my opinion. And indeed peak at certain moments, where I totally agree with you. Anyhow this got a bit off-topic, because the question of the topicstarter was wether muscle development could interfere with badminton . But it's been a good discussion anyhow . And after all it's helpfull for new insights and it's always good to read/hear some one else's opinion on things, that's how we learn.
