Badminton Multifeed Drills: How Long Should a Set Run?

Last checked: August 2026 · Written by the player-led team at Badminton House

How long should one multifeed set run?

Run most multifeed sets for 10 to 30 seconds of continuous feeding, with rest at least as long as the work. When internationally ranked players performed 10, 30 and 50 second sets at a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio, average heart rate was the same in all three, so longer sets add fatigue without adding cardiovascular stimulus.

Those numbers come from a trial in which 19 internationally ranked players completed all three set lengths, matched for ten minutes of total feeding time, while researchers tracked heart rate, blood lactate, movement distance and stroke quality. The full protocol and results are in the Frontiers in Physiology multifeeding study. The practical mapping looks like this:

If your feeder counts shuttles rather than watching a clock, time one typical set once, note how many shuttles it used, and keep that count. The point is that set length is a training decision someone makes before the first feed, and the group tiring out is never the stop signal.

What changes when feeds run longer

Average heart rate barely moves as sets lengthen: about 164 to 165 beats per minute, roughly 85 percent of maximum, in all three conditions. What changes is blood lactate, which climbed from 3.6 to 5.6 to 7.3 mmol/L, and movement, with distance covered falling from 756 m to 655 m.

That pattern is the whole argument against marathon feeds. The heart works equally hard either way, but short sets let the legs keep producing fast, full-court movement, while long sets flood the muscles with acid and quietly slow every rep. The 10-second condition leaned on the alactic energy system that powers explosive rallies; the 50-second condition produced heavy glycolytic stress and lactate levels the study authors note are rarely reached in competition, where match values sit around 1.9 to 4.7 mmol/L.

Multifeeding also runs hotter than the game it prepares you for. In the same research program, simulated match play averaged 152 beats per minute with peak lactate of 2.2 mmol/L, below every feeding condition, and the 30-second sets came closest to match demands, as reported in the European Journal of Sport Science match-play comparison. A multifeed block is already a concentrated overload, so it needs a dose, and the dose is the set length.

How to set rest, and when to cut a set

Use a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio as your baseline, the same ratio the trial protocols used: every second of feeding earns a second of rest. The studied sessions accumulated ten minutes of total feeding, a sensible ceiling for one block, and the researchers advise caution with any interval beyond 30 seconds.

Their reasoning is practical: past 30 seconds the external load drops, meaning the player covers less court per minute and skill performance suffers, so 50-second sets belong in a session as single peaks or in shorter total volumes. If you want the lactate stimulus, schedule one or two 50-second sets at the end of a session, where the heavy legs cannot contaminate technique work that follows.

The stop signal inside any set is visible from the feeding position. When the player arrives late, stops splitting before each feed, reaches with the arm instead of the feet, or the feeder starts slowing down to keep the pattern alive, the set has degraded into slow shadowing. Cut it there, even mid-tube: finishing an ugly set rehearses slow movement at high effort, which is the opposite of what the drill exists to train.