How hard is a club night?
Harder than it looks from the side of the court. Deka and colleagues fitted 14 recreational male players, about 36 years old on average, with a portable system that measured the oxygen they used, and had them play singles for 30 minutes. Their oxygen uptake averaged 34.4 ml per kilogram per minute, which was 76% of their maximum, and it held steady through all three 10-minute periods. Heart rate averaged about 168 beats a minute and was higher in the last 10 minutes than in the first two. Blood lactate rose, each player took about 2,400 steps, and their rating of how hard it felt climbed from 15.8 at 15 minutes to 17.6 at 30. The authors conclude that recreational match play can be categorized as vigorous intensity.
Two limits on that figure. It is 30 minutes of singles in men, and plenty of club nights are doubles with a wait for a court between games. The 2024 Adult Compendium, which gives population averages for how hard activities are, lists social singles and doubles at 5.5 METs, in the moderate band, and competitive badminton at 7.0 METs, past the 6.0 where vigorous begins. The badminton hub has the whole table.
So ask how you play yours. Games against players near your level, with short breaks, look like the work Deka measured: a training session in its own right, not a light extra on top of your training.
If you finish a club night breathing hard and rating it hard, it is one of your hard sessions. Plan the gym around it the way you would plan around a hard run: the heaviest leg work on the day furthest from the next one, and lighter work closer to it.
Gym before or after badminton on the same day?
Either can work, but the question has two halves with different answers. Whether the lifting still builds explosive strength depends on the gap between gym and court; whether you feel flat on court depends on how hard the sets were.
On the gap: Schumann and colleagues compared people who only lifted with people who lifted and also did aerobic training, across 43 studies of healthy adults training for at least four weeks. The aerobic work left gains in maximal strength and muscle size intact. What it held back was explosive strength, the quality behind a jump or a fast first step. The loss was significant when both were done in one session, 20 minutes or less apart, and not significant in studies that kept them at least three hours apart. Nearly all the aerobic work was cycling or running, so badminton itself was never tested.
On the sets: Morán-Navarro and colleagues tested ten men used to resistance training on the squat and bench press, with a weight each could lift ten times at most. Three sets of ten, every set to failure, hit jump height and bar speed harder than three or six sets of five, even though six sets of five matched the total reps. After the failure sets, recovery lagged for up to 24 to 48 hours, while the sets of five came back significantly sooner.
On a day that holds both, that comes to three things:
- Leave hours between them. A gym session in the morning or at lunch with club night in the evening puts you past the three-hour mark, where Schumann's analysis found no significant loss of explosive strength.
- Keep reps in hand. In our view, stopping each set while one or two clean reps are still in you keeps the load heavy and avoids the failure sets that slowed recovery in Morán-Navarro's study.
- Keep the legs for the evening. On a court day, in our view, upper body and trunk are the half to train, and heavy squats and deadlifts get a day without court. That is our reading of the two studies, not a rule tested in badminton players.
Which order suits which goal has been studied mostly with running: see running and lifting on the same day. If the court matters more to you that day, play on fresh legs and lift on another day.
The day before a club night or a match is its own question, answered in full on gym the day before a match. The short version: a light, familiar session is the safe default for adult players, and a few heavy reps beforehand is an option for experienced lifters, with limited evidence behind it.
What should a badminton player lift?
Mostly what anyone lifting for strength lifts. In the 2026 ACSM position stand, which pulled together 137 systematic reviews of healthy adults, heavier loads of at least 80% of one-rep max, for 2 to 3 sets, gave more strength, while taking sets to momentary failure did not add to it. Heavy, few sets and short of failure also fits neatly around court nights.
Most of the evidence for lifting at all is about injuries, and none of it comes from badminton. The strongest general evidence, a 2014 meta-analysis by Lauersen and colleagues of 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants across mixed sports, some of the trials with adolescents, found strength training cut sports injuries to less than a third, and found stretching made no difference. Their 2018 update, six trials and 7,738 people aged 12 to 40, linked more strength training volume with lower risk. Neither includes a badminton figure.
The badminton-specific evidence is thin. Wang and colleagues reviewed 14 studies in 377 competitive players aged 14 to 25, most of them male and most of them late teenagers and young adults, in samples of 1 to 70 players. Resistance training improved jumps, shuttle-run speed, agility and endurance; lower-body training had the strongest effect on jumping; upper-body training looked promising for the speed and accuracy of overhead attacking strokes, on limited evidence; and programmes longer than eight weeks did better than shorter ones. The review covered only competitive players aged 25 or under, none of them recreational adults like the men Deka measured, so read it as a direction, not a dose.
In our view that adds up to ordinary strength work with three additions for a sport played off one leg at a time:
- One heavy two-legged lift. A squat, trap-bar deadlift or leg press, for 3 sets of 4 to 6, which is where the ACSM's heavy loads live.
- Single-leg work. A split squat, step-up or single-leg Romanian deadlift, done on each side.
- Calf work. Standing and seated calf raises, straight knee and bent knee, for sets of 10 to 12.
- Trunk work. Side planks, anti-rotation presses and loaded carries.
- A pull and a press. A row or pull-up and an overhead or bench press, so the upper body is trained as a whole.
The sample week below fits that work into two gym sessions, in line with the ACSM finding that strength gains were greater with two or more sessions a week. It is an example, not a rule: the same review found the advantage of training more often shrank when weekly volume was equal.
Why does the Achilles come up?
Because it comes up in the research. Kaldau and colleagues, who measured 10 recreational and 10 elite Danish men in a landing study, open their abstract with the statement that Achilles tendon rupture is common among recreational male badminton players. If your Achilles or calf hurts, see a physio or a doctor before you lift or play on it.
Why the badminton lunge loads that tendon, and how that collides with a race that has a lunge station, is argued on badminton and HYROX in one training week, from a scoping review of lunge biomechanics.
Do you keep lifting through the badminton season?
Yes, though the aim changes. If you play most weeks of the year, the gym's job in season is mostly to keep the strength you have.
The evidence here comes from another sport. Rønnestad and colleagues took 14 professional footballers through a 10-week preseason of twice-weekly strength training, then split them into two groups of seven for the season. For 12 weeks, the group lifting once a week held its strength and 40 m sprint gains; the group lifting once a fortnight lost both. Neither group's jump height changed significantly. A study of 14 professionals in another sport is thin ground for a club player: it suggests a small, regular dose can hold strength, and no more.
The 2026 ACSM position stand covers the other half. It found that progression is not necessary to get the benefits of resistance training, and that adding to the stimulus is likely needed only by people who want to keep improving over the longer term. In our view, that means in a week with an extra league match, the lower-body loads from the sample week further down stay where they were, and a week with a single club night is the one to add weight.
A tournament is a different week again, with its own page: training around a tournament weekend.
A sample week around two club nights and a match
One way a week around Monday and Thursday club nights and a Saturday match could look, with the study each placement leans on:
| Day | Session | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Club night | Count it as hard: in Deka's recreational players, 30 minutes of singles averaged 76% of VO2max. |
| Tuesday | Strength, lower body, the heaviest of the week, about 45 minutes: squat or trap-bar deadlift 3 x 4 to 6, split squat 3 x 6 a side, single-leg Romanian deadlift 2 x 8 a side, calf raises 3 x 10 to 12, side plank. Stop every set with one or two clean reps still in you. | 48 hours before Thursday's club night, the furthest any day in this week sits from the next court session. Sets stopped short of failure recovered faster than sets to failure, which slowed recovery for up to 24 to 48 hours (Morán-Navarro). |
| Wednesday | Easy day: a walk, easy cycling or mobility, 20 to 30 minutes, or rest | Thursday's club night is another hard session, so the day before it carries nothing hard. |
| Thursday | Morning or lunchtime: strength, upper body and trunk, about 35 minutes: a row or pull-up, a press, a carry and an anti-rotation press, 2 to 3 sets each, short of failure. Evening: club night. | The shared day. Explosive strength gains were held back when strength and aerobic work shared one session, but not significantly with three hours or more between them (Schumann). Upper body leaves the legs for court. |
| Friday | Rest, or a short, light, familiar session | Saturday's match is tomorrow: nothing near failure, the kind of set that slowed recovery for up to 24 to 48 hours (Morán-Navarro). |
| Saturday | Match | Count it as hard, like the match play Deka measured. |
| Sunday | Rest | Thursday and Saturday were both hard sessions, and Monday's club night comes next. |
If badminton shares your week with another sport or a class, the crossovers cover pairings like that, one at a time.
Add badminton under You: in SPORTS STACK, tap + ADD and pick it. With Pro or during your trial, your coach plans your training around what you already do, instead of on top of it. More in add a sport or a class.
Club nights suit Fixed days: pick the weekdays you play, and each day you pick is one session a week. Choose Flexible instead and the app picks the days. Set your usual session length too. The Coach warm-up and cool-down toggle on the same screen adds a short warm-up and cool-down around your own session, written by your coach, with Pro or during your trial. See sport settings.
Workout mode walks you through a session one step at a time and counts your sets and your rest. A one-side move like the split squat in the sample week runs as two steps, LEFT then RIGHT, and workout mode works on the free plan. See train with workout mode. Exercises are shown as clean illustrations: the movement on a plain background, with nothing extra. The team is exploring video and moving images. See exercise illustrations.
If a club night moves and a gym session no longer fits around it, move the session: a session you move stays where you put it, and nothing else in your week changes. See move, copy or delete a session.