A rally of badminton consists of a series of legal shots. Points are scored when a legal shot is not played. A legal shot is one that throughout its trajectory, up to and including hitting the floor, complies with the rules. This adds to the above definitions: the attacking factor decreases your opponent’s chance of playing legal shots, and the defensive factor increases your chance of playing legal shots.

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The rally consists of the physical actions of the players and the interaction of those actions with the environment (the court) and the shuttle.  The players' actions dictate the course of the rally.  Although an action is clearly a physical process it is important to understand that it is controlled by a mental process.  We shall start by examining the role of mental processes in the game of Badminton and their implication for playing and learning to play.

During the rally, a player performs three types of mental process:

• Stimuli acquisition
• Decision making
• Motor control

Stimuli acquisition is the process of obtaining information for the environment.  For the purposes of this text, the environment in Badminton is the court and everything in it (players, shuttles and net).  The information we can gain from the environment includes:

• Positions and movements of the other players
• Racket movement of the opposition
• Shuttle position and movement

Motor control is the mental process that produces physcial actions through the use of muscles.  Motor control is commonly referred to as technique.

Decision making is the choice of motor action to initiate.  Decisions are based on the following sources of information:

• Stimuli acquisition
• Memory of passed events (e.g. previous shots in the rally, successes and failures in previous rallies)
• Psychological biases

The decision chosen by the player follows rules that we call the player's tactics.  Tactics can be separated into general tactics and specific game plans.  Game plans are modifications to general tactics that relate to particular situations such as playing to opposition weaknesses.

Tactics represent a framework of how the game should be played and so are a good place to start.

Decision making for a given situation is a two stage process.  Firstly a set of possible options must be constructed.  An action is possible if it is physically possible and is legal in the rules of Badminton.  The second stage is to select a preferred action so that the aim will hopefully be approached.

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When a player executes a shot they should already have selected what shot to play.  During shot execution little or no decisions are made.  Shot execution is therefore a largely empty tactical period of time.  After playing a shot and until playing the next shot, the player must make decisions from the available options based on the information available.  From this basis we can construct three time periods a player can be in:

• Shot phase: this covers the time from the start of shot execution to the point at which kinetic energy that has accumulated during the shot can now be brought under control for the RP phase
• Recover and Position (RP) phase: this covers the time from the end of the shot phase till the moment the opponent strikes the shuttle
• Prepare phase: this covers the time from the moment the opponent strikes the shuttle till the moment the shot phase begins

In singles, a player will follow the time phases in order and repeat until the rally ends. In doubles, one player will cycle through the phases whilst the other exists in a prolonged RP phase. This continues until it becomes time for that player to play a shot in which case the roles reverse. See figure opposite