Badminton: Hustle from in and Out

Badminton, like many other sports, involves a great quantity of nuances, where various and tenacious game plans along with fluid skills are crucial to the triumph of the match. Badminton is very physically demanding, not only depending upon intense movements from various body parts, but also requiring active responses from the nervous system. Throughout a match, the nervous system of a player has to be at its full capacity, sending commands to body to achieve physical movements while processing stimuli from the surroundings. With the help of neurons and resulted chemical response, players push their limits to the full extent in an enticing game for themselves and the audience.

Every play of a badminton match-up starts and ends with the work of peripheral nervous system. To give an example, consider a player who positions his or her body to the right side of of the back court whose opponent drops a short hit to the left side near the net. As the player focuses on the shuttlecock, his or her eyes receives the electromagnetic waves, or lights, that reflect off the shuttlecock that bounces off the opponent’s racquet and clears the net. The electromagnetic waves enter the player’s eyes through the pupil where the lens focuses these waves onto the retina (Gade, 2018c). Then, the process continues with the functions of rods and cones, specialized cells that absorb the lights. The rods respond to the motion of the shuttlecock, and at the same time, the cones fill in their roles of receiving details from the environment (Kalat, 2017). After this, optic nerves transport the signals from the rods and cones to the back of the brain, where the nerves will carry on processing the visual information, analyzing the situation and then forming responses. In the case of badminton, the responses is to run across the court to land a hit on the falling shuttlecock (Gade, 2018b, 2018c). This response is transmitted down the spinal cord as sequence of signals, passing through countless nerves in the peripheral nervous system which links to a massive array of muscles in various parts of the player’s body, where the signals is stimulated by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and results in the fast speed motion needed (Kalat, 2017).

A variety of sensory cues comes into play prior to the player’s reactions to his or her opponent’s dropshots. Eyes of the player take in visual details about the position of the ball, the opponent, as well as his or her own position, sending neural signals to the occipital lobe located in the back of the brain. The brain then decodes the tangled signals to form a coherent visual image, realigning the inverted visual information and filling in the blind spots of the retina (Gade, 2018c). In addition, his or her ears listen to the sound of the opponent’s racquet as it contacts the shuttlecock, and specialized cells receive the resulted vibrations and transports signals to the temporal lobe of the brain (Gade, 2018b). Throughout the body of a badminton player, nerves deliver signals about sensations of touch, such as the grips onto the racquet, or of temperature, such as the high heat of the court, to the parietal lobe (Gade, 2018b). After each lobe reforms the signals into accessible pieces of information, the frontal lobe begins to process this information, thereby forming responses to the incoming situation (Kalat, 2017). In the case of badminton, the left hemisphere of a player’s brain is responsible for analyzing the situation, understanding that the opponent has just hit the shuttlecock which will be landing far from the player’s current position, and logically making decision that he or she needs to sprint across the field to reach the shot (Kalat, 2017). At the same time, the right hemisphere gets creative. It attempts to form the ideal response to leave the opponent in a tough situation while making sure that the player has a low chance of missing the challenging shot (Kalat 2017). Once the brain forms a complete response, it sends signals to the muscles of body parts, creating a physical reaction: sprinting towards the shuttlecock and thrusting it hard to the far side away from the opponent, allowing the player to recover his or her position and be ready for the incoming shots. (Gade, 2018b; Kalat, 2017).

While the communication between the brain and the peripheral nervous system is key for any badminton player’s responses, the individual neurons also contain important characteristics that ensure the functionality of the body. Focusing on the same scenario mentioned above, when a player is responding to the opponent’s shots, reaction time is a determining factor in reaching the ball. Reflexes can shorten the travel distance of a signal by bypassing the analyzation of information by the brain, and the rate at which neurons transfer signal is just as important (Gade, 2018a). This process can be viewed in two portions. The first is the build-up of action potential from neurotransmitters moving across a synapse from the axon terminal of one neuron to the dendrites of another neuron, and it is followed by the transfer of the potential down the axon by the movement of sodium and potassium ions across the membrane (Kalat, 2017). While neurons are in charge for transporting signals throughout the player’s body, glial cells complement it by concatenating or accelerating the signals. Oligodendrocytes around neurons help coordinate the transfer of neurotransmitters from multiple neurons to a single neuron to create more sophisticated action potentials (Gade, 2018a). Alongside of Schwann cells, these glial cells help myelinate the axons of neurons to speed up signals that are transferred down it by reducing the number of ions that need to cross the axon’s gates (Gade, 2018a). The Two processes mentioned above oversee the formation of faster reactions essential to badminton.

Badminton is very physically demanding and relies heavily on various functionalities of the player’s nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is responsible for delivering sensory information to different lobes of the player’s brain, which then reforms this information together to plan responses. The myelination and synchronization of neurons along with the glial cells is essential for accelerating communication throughout the nervous system to achieve faster responses.