Human Potential, A Journey Through Badminton, Part III, Section A
Introduction
In the last piece on human potential, I talked about the case study of the Polgar sisters. Their parents created an environment and system to foster world conquering daughters. I covered some of the tenants required to develop world beaters. In this round, I will illustrate the development of a person using the principles of MetaLearning operating throughout the entire lifecycle. Hopefully, it will illustrate the principles of learning more concretely and reveal further my teaching philosophy.
For this piece, I am choosing badminton as target area. First, I want to address why I am choosing a sport. It is an odd choice for a tutor, but I want to demonstrate the principles of learning in something dynamic like badminton. Moreover, badminton is like learning and mastering a language like English. From my experience, people struggle in disciplines that have relatively less straight-forward progression.
Badminton is a discipline in which I am trying myself to improve as a player. However, I do have ambitions to start my own badminton gym and club to foster the development of the current and future generations. This writing exercise will serve as a business plan. Most importantly, I want to vindicate the principles of MetaLearning. By the end of this piece, I hope I convinced you to change your thinking and join me on the journey of MetaLearning.
Noob?
Unless you are a toddler, no one really starts off as an absolute noob in any given pursuit. I first played badminton in high school as a part of PE. I competed in a range of sports like baseball and basketball during elementary and middle school. On top of this, I had played in other racket sports like ping pong and tennis. Without a doubt, my experience in other sports eased my transition into badminton.
In fact, the Federer and Nadal way of playing many sports seems to have casual benefit on improving in a dedicated sport. These two contenders for the GOAT status in tennis accredit that their diverse upbringing for their success. Their experience hints at the transferability of lateral thinking. I will talk more about this later.
“Federer’s and Nadal’s examples are supported by the experts. In 2015 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) released a report on youth development. They stated that coaches should avoid sports specialisation at an early age because ‘diverse athletic exposure and sport sampling enhance motor development and athletic capacity.’ Furthermore, a study by the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine found that ‘kids’ who specialises in sports are at a 50% greater risk of developing injuries.”
If you want a leg up when you start on playing badminton, I advise you to be active and play other sports. The modern sedentary lifestyle absolutely wrecks human potential. For one, your musculature atrophies: your muscles not only lose mass, but they also lose complexity and memory. Worse, it cripples our ability to solve problems in the physical space. Here is a clip of a Zoomer struggling to open a can with a can opener. You may laugh it off this as an outlier. It’s not. I see adults behaving like this on the badminton court too.
This is become the norm in society. People have more difficulty solving physical/spatial problems.
If I were to coach new players, I would ask them to pick up the racket and shuttle. Go figure out how best to hit the birdie above shoulder height… on their own. You might be gasping right now, “No coach does that. You need to teach youngsters how to properly to hit from the very beginning.” I would retort with a line from Young Sheldon, “Why does everybody knowing something make it right?” Of course, I will be guiding their learning with questions and suggestions.
I am letting my athletes explore, so we can combat the lack of body awareness that plague this sport. Many people of all levels have been playing in such a way that increases the risk of injury. I have seen friends with ankle sprains and knee issues. On the professional level, I have watched pros who smash with non-parallel shoulders and land improperly. Knee problems afflict those who do not properly displace their hips and/or have poor lunge form, and too many who play the sport do exactly this.
The plague of injuries and health issues stems from a lack of awareness, an aspect of sport that is often overlooked by coaches. During a game, it is up to the competitors, not the coaches, to find the solutions and execute. The coach can only offer suggestions. I think it be wise to teach people how solve problems on their own from the beginning.
When we are young, we naturally explore our environment, our bodies, and our minds. Kids find solutions to problems by themselves or with other children. It’s a shame when we enter formal education or coaching, all this exploration disappears.
Cave exploring seems dangerous, but kids, with some guidance, can actually do a lot of exploring on their own. In doing so, they learn to work together, solve problems, and manage risk.
I think badminton can learn a lot from the attitude of the climbing world. How would the sport of climbing progress if climbers were not encouraged to break the beta— that is finding a new sequence to complete a route in a way not intended by the route setters. I recently took up bouldering, and so far, I am figuring out how to climb myself. Sure. It’s annoying and frustrating. But I discover pride in my effort, acquire a deeper understanding, and learn the skills in sustainable manner. Such problem solving has spilled over into my badminton as I attempt to improve my smash.
Tomoa Narasaki, a bouldering specialist, finds a different way from the prevailing norm to speed climb. Beta break.
From these experiences, I want my own athletes to develop self-initiated innovation. Give new badminton players a stake in their own development. Cultivate working through an obstacle. Whether the field is math or badminton, learning by discovery is the most sustainable.
Novice
Once the players figure out fundamental movement (overhead hitting, backhand defense, and diagonal movements across the court), we can move to specialized games to expand development.
I would minimalize the number of drills as much possible. You might be gasping again. I ask you, “How well do drills train athletes to build specific skills? What’s the rationale and empirical evidence?” Well, the answers are disappointing. What is a drill? A drill is a repetitive activity that trains a particular skill by isolating aspects of said skill. Unfortunately, many players become good at drills but not better at badminton. Drills are predictable. Real badminton is not.
The same harm inflicts young students. Take multiplication tables. I remember being pressured to memorize the table. I became good at it. However, I struggled if a question that was beyond the bounds of the prescribed table. “What’s 13x15?” “Uhhhhhh…I know the answer to 12x12!” The biggest combo I learned was “12x12.” Unfortunately, I did not learn the logic behind multiplication. Multiplication involves different size groups of numbers interacting with each other. You can think of multiplication as repeated groups of numbers. But it would be even better to think of multiplication as elements in one set combined with elements of another set.
As students go up the math ladder, they struggle to progress due to the lack of understanding.
How many possible blocks can be made with exactly three colors and four shapes? That’s 3 x 4 = 12 combinations.
Sounds like a drill right? Well, this is what happens when you mindlessly do repeated routines. You spend a lot of time for little benefit. Time inefficiency at its best.
You think you are learning, but in fact, you are reinforcing bad habits. This is especially true in sports.
The same thing inflicts many athletes. They grumble, “Coach, I can’t retrieve deceptive drops and sliced drops. I don’t get it. I can do it during practice.” Well, badminton players don’t learn how to react to sliced and drop shots as part of the normal flow of play. During many drills, athletes expect these shots all the time. That’s why the skill never gets learned, and it never gets transferred to the real game.
I challenge any coach who does this to tell me what movements in these drills do professional badminton players use during the flow of play? I thought the opponent was a human being, not a cone. These drills do not teach players to read the body language of the opponent, the physics of a bird, and subsequent reaction to these elements. Also, the students are not doing proper form for movements like lunging. Good job on reinforcing terrible biomechanics. Good grief.
Instead, I would have my players play games that incentivize the progress of skills. Here is one game I envision. Have two participants play a game to 11. Cut the court in half. Award double the points if one of them can compel the other to go the wrong way or just freeze. I can imagine another variation of this game by having the two plays engage diagonally only. This variation will train my students to create and anticipate deception diagonally. I might even award triple the points for audacious and stylistic deceptions. Onlookers can even vote for the best-looking deceptions. My approach will yield results far superior to those from drills. Why? Learning skills from games enhances the incentives for learning them successfully. You literally score higher by performing the skill better. And it’s fun. At the same time, you retain the randomness and adversary nature of competition.
This leads to the concept of collective consciousness in learning. I encountered this method as I got deeper into climbing. Despite the individual competitive nature of sport climbing, you will often see competitors chatting with each other over the best strategies for routes during the observation period. The culture of climbing encourages everyone to lend each other a hand. But the reason why competitors share information with each other is they all benefit: sometimes, the information provided by a rival triggers a line of thought that inspires a solution. It’s a nonzero-sum game.
Badminton, despite being an individual sport, is the same way. Look at the career trajectories of Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan. Chong Wei started his career as a defensive retriever. He was explosive and had good reflexes, but his default was to use those attributes in a defensive nature. Lin Dan was the opposite; he attacked and attacked. At the beginning of their rivalry, Lin Dan got the better of Chong Wei because his attack overwhelmed Wei’s defense. Wei’s spectacular loss to Lin Dan at the 2008 Olympics convinced him to develop his own attack to prevent Lin Dan from attacking. If you attack, your opponent is not attacking. His changes made Chong Wei a more dangerous player, and the records reflects this change: he stayed world number one for a consecutive 142 weeks from 1 October 2009 to 20 June 2012.
I could watch this all day. These two legends pushed each other to new heights. And the sport was changed forever.
Collaborative learning and healthy competition should become standard values in the education system as well. In the current system, it’s every student for him/herself. If you cooperate with others, you will be severely punished and made an example of. Not only is this a lonely, miserable way to learn, this is also an ineffective strategy. Hirokazu Shirade, a researcher from Yale University, published a piece in Nature that showed the superiority of group learning. Using computational modeling, he found dynamic networks had a shallower learning curve compared to static networks and individuals when dealing with risky and uncertain situations. Dynamic networks improved communication quality over time by synthesizing both individual learning and network evolution. People learn faster and better from mistakes through experience, observation, and talking. And of course, people learn from the wisdom of the crowd.
And wisdom is what education and sport desperately need right now. I try to do my part in my tutoring and sports training to dispel ignorance. I will continue to do so in the upcoming two sections that will cover the intermediate to professional stages of the badminton journey. I hope you can join me later on this path.
