Hi, If you were tasked with designing an Insanity style workout (High Intensity Interval Training) which was specific for badminton, which exercises would you include? I'd guess skipping and fast-feet style exercises would be good along with anything plyometric and exercises suited for abs etc. Lump101.
The actual Insanity programme (or insanity max 30) is excellent for badminton. To design a new programme, the qualities you want are: 1. Lots of cardio for "active recovery" 2. Lots of plyometrics (thinking mainly jumps, jump lunges, tuck jumps, scissor kicks etc) to build the explosive power in the legs and ankles (combinations of big slow jumps and faster jumps) 3. Something that gets the heart rate right the way up. You want to be able to do the workouts with a heart rate that is 85% to 90% of you max, and recover for 30 seconds. The benefit here is that this will aid your recovery on court - so you can play high intensity rallies and then recover completely. If I were to design a programme, all I would really be doing is picking out moves or sequences from insanity and doing those...
I can highly recommend the workouts from www.darebee.com. The site is completely free of charge and offers a lot of complete workout suggestions or ideas to put together your own workout. Here's an overview of all available workouts: http://darebee.com/workouts.html On the bottom of the page you can filter the workouts for "interval training / HIIT" and you end up with a pretty nice collection. Personally, I really enjoyed (not sure if you can really call it 'enjoyment' though...) the "Super Sonic" or the "Confessor" workout to target the legs. And if you want to go for the core, I think the "Pinner" workout does a pretty good job. However, it might be useful to vary the lenght of the intervals to better target the specific requirement of badminton which cosists more of rallies and recovery phases that are mostly shorter than 1 minute.
