Hello everyone, As the title suggests, I was wondering if a person should be training/playing more than one racquet sport at the same time ? Say if I have been playing Badminton for a good period of time (not professionally) and determined to level up but now I also want to start with may be Tennis (in hopes of strengthening my grip and learning a new sport simultaneously) or pick up table tennis which I used to be really good at as a kid. But I see the general consensus is simply to focus on one game especially with racquet sports. I have searched the forum and everytime people have left one sport in love for the other because it was "ruining badminton". I also observed that people complained of diminished Badminton performance more rather than say Tennis or Squash. I remember one friend of mine purposely started playing table-tennis with his left hand because he used to play badminton with his right. What are your opinions regarding this ? Cheers.
I think there's no issue if you want to play multiple racquet sports, as long as you don't try to use one sport to train for another and vice versa. They all have different techniques, and so it doesn't make sense for example to say "use tennis to improve badminton". Use tennis to improve tennis and use badminton to improve badminton.
Yes. By improvement I meant the strength part of the primary arm because of the racquet weight difference between the two sport. Although I have seen a friend using the tennis underarm shot beautifully in his table-tennis matches. Do you play any other racquet sport ?
tennis and table tennis are similar. both have big arm swing and body rotation. badminton and squash are also similar, both have compact swing and a lot of wrist motion and power. but that also make tennis and badminton totally incompatible. i can spot a tennis player trying their hands on badminton from 10 courts away. they have the wrong strokes and look funny.
I used to play table tennis. It's safe to say that it's very difficult to switch between badminton and table tennis
Hello, I agree to an extent because I have never played Tennis but most of the table tennis played near the table has very compact movements and only once we go away from the table it becomes... funny  Otherwise yes it's like a bonsai tennis. So are you suggesting that it would be easier for me to take up Squash rather than Tennis ? Ofcourse I can take up Tennis too because of my table-tennis childhood background . But Squash would interfere LESS with my badminton ? Cheers
Really ? I haven't played table-tennis for more than a decade but I was leaning towards picking it up again rather than tennis because of really compact and soft gameplay as compared to full blown Lawn Tennis.
squash heavily relies on wrist power. in fact, squash players probably has the strongest wrist of all racket players. it takes a lot of wrist power to dig a shot out of the corner with power. esp when the racket is much heavier than badminton. your badminton will improve after taking up squash. tennis... your badminton will get worse.
I was afraid I would be getting this reply. My only consolation here is that "Squash is easier than Tennis" ( I read it on a different thread. ) Tennis in itself looks really formidable among all the racquet sports. I wonder how long I have before my body starts rejecting strenuous activities.
There’s a sport called Racketlon, and it involves playing a game of table tennis, a game of Badminton, a game of squash, and a game of tennis! I have no idea how the competition formats looks like, but the idea is of doing all racquet sports, so there is certainly a following somewhere! I suppose it really is one of those jack of all trades, master of none things - it’s highly unlikely a Racketlon specialist would win against a specialist of a specific racquet sport at the highest level, but most of us aren’t professionals, so why not try it if it appeals? Here’s a wiki link for the lazy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketlon
if you look at the competition video, most the players have weird technique, they are too stiff for badminton, but too flexible for tennis. winning such a competition is still not easy. the world championship winners actually look rather decent and would beat many local players. however, they will barely get a point playing against international women badminton professionals.
tough to say which is harder. any sport is hard if you want to play it well. i do think squash is crazy hard. there are godzillion possible angle and a bounces in a room with 5 walls. a very complex sport. tennis on the other hand, just seems 1 dimensional. run left/right/left/right, move forward, left/right/left/right again...
To me, another major difference is intensity. Tennis tend to have a large variance given serves and time taken to pick up balls. Badminton/squash, especially badminton singles, can keep at high intensity consistently. That’s why I always choose badminton over tennis in winter, despite both courts are indoors. Tennis is simply flipping between being too cold/warm.
