Topic > Badminton: Hustle Inside and Out

Badminton, like many other sports, involves a great deal of nuance, where varied and tenacious game plans along with fluid skills are crucial to the triumph of the match. Badminton is very physically demanding, not only dependent on intense movements of various parts of the body, but also requiring active responses from the nervous system. During a match, a player's nervous system must be at maximum capacity, sending commands to the body to perform physical movements while processing stimuli from the surrounding environment. With the help of neurons and the resulting chemical response, players push their limits to the limit in a challenging game for themselves and the audience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Each match of a badminton match begins and ends with the work of the peripheral nervous system. As an example, consider a player who positions his body on the right side of the back court and whose opponent hits a short shot on the left side near the net. As the player focuses on the shuttlecock, his or her eyes receive electromagnetic waves, or lights, that reflect off the shuttlecock, which bounces off the opponent's racket and clears the net. 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 light. The rods respond to the movement of the shuttlecock, and at the same time, the cones perform their role of receiving details from the environment (Kalat, 2017). Next, the optic nerves carry signals from the rods and cones to the back of the brain, where the nerves will continue to process visual information, analyze the situation, and then form responses. In the case of badminton, the response is to run across the court to hit the falling shuttlecock (Gade, 2018b, 2018c). This response is transmitted along the spinal cord as a sequence of signals, passing through countless nerves into the peripheral nervous system that connects to a wide range of muscles in various parts of the player's body, where the signals are stimulated by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and result in the necessary high-speed movement (Kalat, 2017). A variety of sensory cues come into play prior to the player's reactions to his opponent's dropshots. The player's eyes acquire visual details about the position of the ball, the opponent, as well as his own position, sending neural signals to the occipital lobe located at 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 retina's blind spots (Gade, 2018c). Additionally, its ears listen to the sound of the opponent's racket when it comes into contact with the shuttlecock, and specialized cells receive the resulting vibrations and carry the signals to the temporal lobe of the brain (Gade, 2018b). Throughout a badminton player's body, nerves transmit signals about sensations of touch, such as the grip of the racket, or temperature, such as the high heat of the court, to the parietal lobe (Gade, 2018b). After each lobe reforms the signals into accessible information, the frontal lobe begins to process this information, thus forming responses to the incoming situation (Kalat, 2017). In the case of badminton, the left hemisphere of the player's brain is responsible for analyzing the situation, understanding that the opponent has just hit the shuttlecock which will land far from the player's current position.