Biomechanics for Coaches: See, Screen, Adapt

Thirty years in badminton, and I have never stopped looking for ways to make the sport better.

Lately most of that happens through technology, AI and the products we build — bringing badminton together with other sports such as football, alongside ecosystem mapping and road map development for national governments and international federations.

The goal behind all of it is bigger than any single tool: to make coaching a true profession.

But at ISBS 2026 I spent ninety minutes on a subject I do not usually present on. Biomechanics.

Why present on something that is not my expertise

It never has been. And yet it is something that has driven me for years — helping me improve my own players, then the coaches I worked with, and later coach education across countries, building towards a single holistic system for understanding movement.

That is the honest reason to stand up and talk about it. Not authority in the discipline, but thirty years of needing it and finding the translation layer missing. The research exists. The screening exists. What is thin on the ground is the bridge between a biomechanics paper and what a coach does on Tuesday evening with fourteen players and one court.

So the session was about that bridge, worked through three real problems any elite badminton coach will recognise — and that I have experienced deeply myself with players over the years:

• Deep lunges that look technically clean
• Landing on the non-dominant foot in the overhead area
• A smash that will not gain power

The loop: see, screen, adapt

The method behind each one is simple enough that any biomechanical practitioner — or any coach — can use it.

See

Watch what is actually happening in the movement, and understand the basic principles behind it. Not what you expect to see, and not what the model in your head says should be happening. The right biomechanical work can make a huge difference here, because it gives you the vocabulary to describe what you are looking at rather than only whether you like it.

Most coaching errors I have made started here — with a description that was already an interpretation.

Screen

Find the cause, not just the symptom, drawing on the full range of screening available to us.

This is the step most often skipped, because the symptom is usually coachable and the cause usually is not. You can cue your way around a compensation for a whole season. It will look like progress and it will hold until the load rises.

Adapt

Individualise the solution to the player.

Two players presenting the same symptom, screened properly, frequently need different interventions — and sometimes the intervention is not technical at all. This is where a method stops being a protocol and starts requiring judgement.

The real skill is knowing how to drive that loop. That is where science genuinely starts to change coaching, rather than sitting alongside it.

And it is a loop, not a sequence. Once you have adapted something, what you see changes — the compensation you were reading is gone, and whatever was sitting underneath it becomes visible for the first time. Coaches who treat this as a three-step process fix one thing and stop. Coaches who treat it as a loop find that the second pass is usually where the real problem was.

That is also why it survives contact with a squad rather than a single athlete. You are not running a protocol to completion on fourteen players. You are running one turn of the loop on each of them and knowing which ones to come back to.

Why go this deep

Because the detail is where coaching actually changes — the same way detail decides the outcome in AI, or in consultancy. Get the small things right and everything downstream improves.

That is not a platitude about standards. It is a claim about where leverage sits. A federation can rewrite its coach education framework and change less than one coach changes by screening a lunge properly.

The part nobody plans for

Here is the thing about our world: it is small, and it is connected.

A very positive conversation on court that day opened a door to football, and potentially to work that ties straight back to what we do at SportERP. Ninety minutes on a subject outside my expertise produced a lead in a different sport entirely.

I have stopped treating that as luck. Turning up with something specific and useful, in a room of people who care about the specifics, is a reliable way for that to happen.

Thanks

Huge thanks to Prof. Mark King for organising and inviting me, and to Loughborough University for hosting the 44th ISBS Conference — the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports. A brilliant way of bringing brilliant people together.

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Building coach education and development pathways that carry this kind of detail is the substance of my sport development consulting work. If you would like a version of this session for your coaches or your conference, that sits under speaking and training.