Badminton Target Drills: How to Score Your Own Practice

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

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What to Use as a Target, and What Has to Come Off Court

A target can be anything flat enough to see and safe enough to leave alone: tape on the floor, an existing court line, or a taped box. Hoops, cones, boxes and baskets work for static feeding, but Law 13.3.5 makes touching any object outside the court a fault, so pull three-dimensional targets off before any live rally.

BWF's own Shuttle Time coaching programme recommends targets specifically because they keep players motivated, and lists hoops, cones, boxes and baskets as standard materials for marking one out. Those work well for static feeding, where one player repeats a shot into a fixed spot and nobody is chasing a return around the object.

Once a drill turns into a live rally, a different rule takes over. The current Laws of Badminton make it a fault if the shuttle touches any object outside the court while play is live, and the law carries its own note letting local authorities write bye-laws for exactly this obstruction case. Pull hoops, cones, boxes and baskets off before any drill turns into a real back-and-forth, both for the fault and for the more obvious risk of landing on one mid-lunge.

Flat marks avoid the problem entirely. Floor tape, chalk, or an existing court line can stay down through both feeding and live play, and under the same Laws every court line forms part of the area it marks out, so a shuttle landing on the tape counts as a hit, not a miss. For a full six-zone map of the whole court rather than one target at a time, see our court target zones guide. Whatever you mark, agree three outcomes before the first attempt: a hit (lands inside the line), an error (net, out, or missed the shuttle entirely), and an in-court miss (landed fine, just not in the zone). Only hits count toward the scores below.

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Size the Zone So the Score Lands Between 40 and 80 Percent

A scoring zone is doing its job when a focused player lands roughly four to eight of every ten attempts inside it: under 40 percent teaches failure, over 80 percent teaches nothing new, and that 40-to-80 window is Badminton House's own design guideline, not a published research benchmark.

The logic behind the band is simple. A target nobody misses proves nothing, and a target nobody hits teaches the wrong lesson (that the shot doesn't work) instead of the right one (that today's target is one size too small). Aim for the middle, where most attempts still take real focus but a clean rep is genuinely possible. Finish a set above 8 of 10 and shrink the zone, or move it to a harder corner, before the next attempt. Finish below 4 of 10 and widen it back until the score climbs into the band.

Do not borrow an elite number for this. In one study, 19 internationally ranked players hit a named target zone only about a quarter of the time under continuous, random, fatiguing feed at match intensity, with error rates near one in five. That describes a much harder task than a hand-fed, single-shot drill against a stationary target, so a club player scoring 25 percent on a calm feed is not performing at an international level. They are using a target that is still too small for where they actually are.

Net shot into a service-box corner: start with a zone about the size of a shoe box, sitting just inside the front corner where the short service line meets the sideline, 1.98 m from the net on both halves under the current Laws. Feed 10 straight net shots at it. Score 8 or higher twice in a row and the box is too generous, so halve it or move it to the far corner. Score under 4 and widen it to roughly the front third of the service court, then rebuild from there.

Clear depth to the back tramlines: mark the shallow strip between the doubles long service line and the back boundary line, roughly 0.8 m deep under the current Laws' own court diagram, then feed 10 rear-court clears at it from mid-court. Landing in that strip 4 to 8 times means the difficulty is right. Landing there 9 or 10 times means the player is ready for the full-depth target instead, all the way back to the boundary line with no forgiving strip in front of it.

Low serve: the same sizing logic applies, but a full worked set already exists. Our serve practice target drills guide runs a shoe-box target at the same front corner through six scored drills, complete with scores out of 20 and escalation triggers, so use that guide directly rather than rebuilding it here.

Defensive lift: agree a line roughly one-third of the way back from the net (there is no official line here, so mark or call one out loud), then feed 10 attacking smashes or drives at a defender who must lift back past it. A lift that lands short counts as an error even if it stays in play, because a short lift gets attacked again immediately. Four to eight clean lifts past the line means the pressure is calibrated; nine or ten means it is time to move the feed closer or faster.

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Write the Pass Mark as a Hit Rate, Not a Feeling

A pass mark is one number, written down before the first shuttle: land at least this many of ten (or twenty) attempts inside the target, or string together this many clean hits in a row. Decide the number in advance, so nothing gets rounded up after a good set.

Turning a stroke into a scored task is not an invented gimmick. BWF's own coach education material lists a progression that runs from shadowing a stroke, through hand-fed and racket-fed repetition, into an unpredictable rally, and finally into a game that awards bonus points for the stroke played successfully, placing scoring near the end of a designed ladder rather than treating it as a shortcut. A pass mark simply writes that same idea down as a number instead of a feeling.

Two formats cover almost every drill. A fixed-count pass mark states a target out of a set number of attempts, for example 7 of 10 clean net shots before adding movement (a Badminton House example, not a published standard). A streak pass mark instead asks for a run of clean hits in a row, resetting to zero on any miss, which reproduces match pressure better because one loose rep costs the whole set, not just a point. Our serve practice guide runs a full streak-based pressure set with a reset penalty if you want a worked example.

Write the number down before the first attempt, not after a good one. BWF's coaching guidance is explicit that a player should not move on until reasonably competent at the current level, and a hit rate is how that gets checked honestly instead of by feel. If today's set landed 9 of 10 and yesterday's landed 3 of 10, the pass mark is the only thing that keeps the difference from disappearing into "it went okay."

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Log Every Score and Retest, So the Zone Shrinks Over Time

Once a drill clears its pass mark in two separate sessions, make it harder in exactly one way (a smaller zone, a tougher corner, a faster feed, or added movement), then reset the count to zero and retest. Changing only one variable means a failed retest tells you what actually broke.

Keep the log simple: date, drill, target size, score, pass or fail. Two consecutive passes on the same target is the trigger to make it harder, and only in that one way. For the net shot example above, that might mean halving the shoe-box target or moving it to the far corner. For the defensive lift, it might mean moving the feed half a step closer or asking for a faster attack. Whatever changes, reset the score to zero and run the drill again as if it were new.

Change only one variable at a time. If a smaller net-shot target and a faster feed both go in on the same day and the score collapses, there is no way to tell which change caused it, so the next session wastes time undoing the wrong one. It is the same discipline behind any coaching progression: build competence at one level, confirm it with a number, then move exactly one step.

The log also protects against overcorrecting. A single bad session (tired legs, a borrowed racket, a noisy court) is not a reason to widen a target that has been passing consistently for weeks; check the last three or four logged scores, not just today's. A target that keeps failing after several honest attempts at the same size is not a discipline problem. It means the size is wrong for where the shot actually is right now, so widen it, log that decision too, and try again next session.

Banner photo: Murray Foubister, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped.