Interview with Bo Omosegaard - Seeking the science of badminton (Part 1)

Bo Omosegaard

Bo Omosegaard

Bo Omosegaard is a pioneer in many ways. The current Talent Development Manager of Badminton Denmark was among the first to conduct detailed scientific studies on physical training for badminton players. Badminton, until the 1980s, depended on conventional wisdom; there was little scientific work that had gone into the particular requirements of the sport. Omosegaard, who has authored a thesis on bio-mechanics in badminton and was sports physiologist at the University of Copenhagen, is an author of several highly-regarded books on physical training. Interestingly, Omosegaard was a player at the same club Prakash Padukone played at during his Denmark days.

This is Part-1 of a detailed interview.

Your books were rare for the time. There must have been very little scientific work done on bio-mechanics in badminton.

Yeah. It comes back to my education and graduation from university. At the beginning I thought I should make a living out of being a scientist or teacher at the university. For the first many years, I had a normal job and I was coaching part time during evenings or weekends, and as part of that I wrote books and did a lot of seminars and keynote speeches and all that stuff, so all that was on the side.

My main job was working as a management consultant, editor-in-chief making books for universities and high schools. I had my own training centre for ordinary people and sportspeople, testing and so on. I’ve done a lot of different things.

How did you get involved with Denmark’s badminton team?

I took the normal courses from Badminton Denmark, way back in 1974 when I was 16. That was mostly about on-court training. Then I was made consultant when badminton became an Olympic sport, and we found Denmark was getting to lag behind. We’d always been top-3. Other countries were overtaking us. We had this project for Olympic Games 1992, and I was in charge of the scientific part. It was new in those days.

From my part, it was still a part-time occupation. At university, I did my thesis on bio-mechanics of badminton. So I mixed and added my experience and education as a coach and also a player in those days, though I was never better than no.7 for Denmark. I played at the same club as Prakash Padukone. I played a lot of times with him, but he beat me all the time. He was very good!

From this training, I gained a lot of experience in physical training for all sports, such as athletics and football and handball and so on, and I also got some communication with coaches from the old Eastern Bloc.

Was the approach of the Eastern Bloc coaches very different from your own?

Very different.We met at different tournaments and conferences. I wrote this book about physical training, and it was something they wanted to learn about. I got some of their experiences. The Danish badminton tradition is, you play on court, and you’re good at that. The multi-feed, physical training, etc. came later.So in the old days, upto mid-1980s, it was about just playing, and a bit of running. That was the Danish way. In Asia, you did more physical training. So there was room for improvement. Badminton has developed tremendously, from being a closed-party local sport. When it became an Olympic sport, elite centres (started) all over the world. If you see videos of today, of Rudy Hartono for instance, he looks slow. The whole sport has developed.

Do you think, physically, someone like Lee Chong Wei is better than Rudy Hartono?

Oh yes. But every player is made out of their time. So of course you could say, PrakashPadukone was a beautiful mover, but he was quite slow. But if he was a player today, he would have adapted to the whole style, so he would play faster. You see it in handball too – when the training volume increases, and the talent development becomes serious, the whole speed of the game increases, and that’s happened to badminton also. They’re not necessarily smarter than the older players, or mentally stronger, but they’re physically more fit, and they’re used to practising at a much higher speed. Maybe the winners would still have been the same, but the style would have been different.

Bo Omosegaard book on training for Badminton players

Bo Omosegaard’s book on training for Badminton players

What did you learn from the Eastern Bloc coaches? Was it true that a lot of their athletes were breaking down from over-training?

Yeah. (I learnt) Their training planning, the way they were organising things. It depends on how you look at it (breaking down). One of the things about Danish badminton: we had to take extreme good care of every single talent we had. Because we’re only 5.5 million people. Every time you had a talent, you had to nurture it, and if you’re injured, a lot of resources were spent in getting them back again. That’s not the case with China; they have a lot of players. The training planning was one of the big things I learned from the Eastern Bloc coaches,also because they had this merge between the scientific world and practical play. In Denmark, we had the tradition that sport science is at university, the scientists are living in their own world, and then you have the sports world. It’s not getting closer. But (in the Eastern Bloc) they have always been close – in sports schools and all that. So you use the information better, there was a scientific basis on training to develop for two-three peaks, how do you control the intensity and volume and all that. They were very good at that.

What were the particular challenges with badminton?

There are lots of areas where you can develop the bio-mechanical side of it. We have a long tradition of video-analysing the games, from a tactical point of view. But in order to analyse technique, you need high speed cameras with more than 300-400 frames/sec, otherwise you can’t see the racket. So when we get better equipment, we will move in to biomechanical analysis I think.

What was the main challenge when you were working on it?

We had this old notion of badminton being played with the wrist. It couldn’t be true, because in tennis you could see the forearm rotation and the rotation of the shoulder. So I made this high speed analysis, and we saw that every single player was rotating the wrist by using the the forearm muscles. You use the wrist only a little bit, to adjust position. Coaches were convinced (about the wrist). This was back in the early 1980s.

I took Prakash and did the study on him and Jens Pieter Nierhoff (a former All England champion) and put them on court and analysed their footwork and hitting technique. We did different analyses. We found a lot of things that were different (from what we thought). And that was not only a theoretical thing, but from a practical point it’s about how to teach stroke production. Coaches were urging their players to use their wrist, instead of the forearm.

You can read the second part of the story here.

Edited by Staff Editor