Last checked: August 2026 · Written by the player-led team at Badminton House
Quick answer
Turn serve practice into a number you can compare week to week: six drills, each with a target size, a score out of 20, a pass-or-fail cue, and a trigger for making it harder, instead of hitting serves until they feel right. Start with single-target scoring for the low serve. Add the flick and singles depth once that number is solid. Then test the whole thing under a fault penalty.
- Score one drill out of 20 every time you practise, so you have a written number instead of a feeling.
- Once a drill clears its pass mark twice in a row, shrink the target or move on to the next drill.
- Run the five-minute version before a drop-in starts, so warm-up time doubles as logged practice.
Related reading: How to Serve in Badminton — for the legal basics and stroke steps these drills assume you already have.
Why Scoring Beats Practising by Feel
Serving until it feels right hides how inconsistent a serve actually is. A trajectory-tracking study found that national-level players landed only 27% of short serves inside the accuracy standard coaches use, even against a real receiver. A written score turns that same gap into something you can see, track, and close session by session.
Researchers tracked the full flight path of 240 short serves from eight national-level players and defined an accurate serve by two things: a low net-clearance height, and a flight apex that happens before the shuttle crosses the net rather than after. Under simulated match pressure, only 27% of serves met both standards. If players who already train seriously miss the mark three times out of four, a club player guessing at "good enough" has almost no way to know whether a session actually worked.
This guide replaces the guess with six scored drills. Each one gives a target, a scoring rule out of 20, a pass-or-fail cue, and the score that tells you when to make it harder. Work through them in order if you are building serve practice from scratch, or pick the drill that matches whatever is actually breaking down: low serve accuracy, flick disguise, or singles high serve depth.
Low Serve Accuracy and Flick Disguise Drills
Two drills fix the two most common low serve breakdowns: missing the tight front corner, and telegraphing the flick before it leaves the racket. Score both out of 20 using a shoe-box-sized target just past the short service line, so a serve that floats but still lands in bounds still costs the point.
Drill 1: Single-Target Scoring
Mark a target roughly the size of a shoe box, about 30 by 20 cm, in the front corner of the service court, just past the short service line (1.98 m from the net under the current Laws of Badminton). Hit 20 low serves at it: one point for a serve that lands fully inside the box, zero for anything else, including a serve that lands in the correct service court but outside the box.
Write the number down after every set. A score of 7 or under means the target is too demanding for where your serve is right now, so widen it to roughly the front third of the service court until the number climbs. A score between 8 and 13 is normal building work; keep the same size and keep logging it. Once you score 14 or higher in two sessions in a row, shrink the box or move it to the opposite front corner, so the drill keeps asking a slightly harder question.
Drill 2: Alternating Low and Flick
Once the low serve target is holding, add the flick without ever changing your setup for it. Serve 20 in a row, alternating a low serve to the same shoe-box target with a flick to a target near the back edge of the legal doubles serving area. Score one point per serve that lands inside whichever target it was aimed at.
The pass-or-fail cue here is not the shuttle at all; it is whether a partner (or a phone propped at receiver height) can call which serve is coming before you make contact. If they can call it early, the disguise has failed no matter how good the score out of 20 looks. Track the two separately, and only move on once you are landing 15 or more of 20 and the disguise call keeps failing.
For the stroke mechanics behind both serves, backswing, contact, and the wrist detail that makes the flick disappear inside the low serve's setup, see our doubles low and flick serve guide. This drill assumes that technique is already in place; it only scores whether you can repeat it under a target.
Singles Depth and Net-Clearance Drills
Two more drills cover ground the first two do not: reading a random call under time pressure, and the height a serve crosses the net at rather than only where it lands. One trains a singles high serve to real depth; the other punishes a serve that floats even when it lands in the right spot.
Drill 3: Two-Target Randomised Call
Set two targets: the same shoe-box target at the front for the low serve, and a strip about 50 cm inside the back boundary line for a singles high serve. That back strip is legal at full depth because the singles court's rear limit sits 6.70 m from the net, with no separate long service line cutting it shorter the way doubles has. Have a partner (or a shuffled written list if you are alone) call "front" or "back" immediately before each serve, mixing the calls so no pattern forms across 20 attempts.
Score one point only when the serve lands inside the target that was actually called; a serve that would have scored on the other target still counts as zero, because reading the call and adjusting technique on the fly is the entire point of this drill. A score of 12 or higher out of 20 means your read-and-execute is holding up. Below that, go back to Drill 1 and Drill 2 in isolation before mixing the calls again.
Drill 4: Tape-Clearance Ladder
Clip a marker (an old shuttle or a strip of tape) onto the net a set height above the top of the tape, and treat that height as a hard ceiling rather than a target zone. Start with the marker 15 cm above the tape. Any serve that crosses above it fails the rep, even if it lands cleanly inside a target from an earlier drill, because a serve that lands well but crosses high still gets attacked before it drops.
Hit 20 serves at the current rung. Fifteen or more clean clearances move you down to a tighter rung, first 10 cm above the tape, then 5 cm, which is close to the least daylight a serve needs to still count as low. Drop under 10 clean serves out of 20 and move back up one rung for the rest of the session. This drill exists because clearance height, not only landing spot, is one of the two things that separates an accurate short serve from one that only looks fine leaving the racket.
Pressure Set and the Five-Minute Warm-Up
The last two drills add match-like consequences and a version that fits before a drop-in even starts. A fault resets your streak to zero in the pressure set, and the five-minute routine compresses the first four drills into a warm-up you can run while courts are still filling.
Drill 5: Pressure Set With a Reset Penalty
Pick any target set from the drills above: low only, alternating, or the randomised call, and serve toward a streak of 10 clean makes in a row. Any fault resets the count to zero: a serve outside its target, a serve that crosses above your clearance marker, or a serve struck with any part of the shuttle at or above the legal 1.15 m contact height under the current Laws of Badminton.
Log how many resets it takes to complete one clean streak of 10 in a session. Under three resets across three separate sessions is a sign the target set has stopped being a real test, so raise the streak to 15, or shrink whichever target zone you were using. This is the drill that most closely reproduces what a real service game feels like, because a single loose serve costs the whole run, not just a point.
Drill 6: The Five-Minute Pre-Session Routine
Courts are often still filling for the first few minutes of a drop-in, which is dead time you can turn into logged practice instead of aimless warm-up hitting. Run two minutes of Drill 1 at the front target, two minutes of Drill 2 alternating low and flick, and one minute checking whatever rung you are currently on in the tape-clearance ladder.
Do not chase a full 20-serve score in that time; the point is to get your first reads of the session logged before match pressure arrives. Even a partial count, nine makes out of a rushed 15 serves for example, is worth writing down next to your usual full-session numbers, so you can see whether your serve needs longer to switch on.
Every drill above works without a partner. A partner's only real job is calling targets and checking disguise, not feeding shuttles, so serve from your own basket or tube. Hit a full batch. Then walk up and count what landed where. Replace a live caller in Drill 3 with a written list shuffled in advance, or a phone's random number generator; replace the disguise check in Drill 2 with a phone propped at receiver height and reviewed between sets. For the rest of a no-partner session, our solo badminton practice guide covers what else is worth doing with the same court time.
Take this into your next session
Log every score, even a bad one. Six drills, one number each, written down after every set, is what actually shows whether a serve is improving, not the feeling that today's session went well. Start with Drill 1, hold yourself to the pass marks above before shrinking any target, and let the numbers decide when a drill has been earned rather than the vibe of the session. Once your scores are solid, our singles serve return strategy guide covers what to do with the point once the serve itself has stopped being the problem.
Leave a comment
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.