A Study of Racket Weight Adaptation in Advanced and Beginner Badminton Players

The jump smash is the most aggressive manoeuvre in badminton. Racket parameters may be the key factor affecting the performance of jump smash. Previous studies have focused only on the biomechanical characteristics of athletes or on racket parameters in isolation, with less observation of the overall performance of the human-racket system. This study aims to explore the effects of different racket weights on neuromuscular control strategies in advanced and beginner players. Nonnegative matrix factorisation (NMF) was used to extract the muscle synergies of players when jumping smash using different rackets (3U, 5U), and K-means clustering was used to obtain the fundamental synergies. Uncontrolled manifold (UCM) analyses were used to establish links between synergy and motor performance, and surface electromyography (sEMG) was mapped to each spinal cord segment. The study found significant differences (P