24 Hours Inside Spain’s National Training Centre

Hello and welcome back to Badminton Insight. You might be thinking this doesn't look like England and you'd be right. We are currently in Madrid in Spain as we've been asked to join the national team for a few days for some sparring. We've also brought something with us. This is the brand new Thruster Ryuga 3 and we thought here would be the perfect place to test it out properly. Yeah we've had the same rackets for a couple of years now so we want to make sure none of the recent releases suit us any better but more on that later in the video. So it's currently Tuesday evening and we are staying in the athlete halls where pretty much all of the players stay and they actually get their food, room and even their laundry completely free which is amazing. Let's give you a room tour. The office, the bathroom and the bedroom. I don't think they have very many married couples staying here because they only have twin rooms. Yeah anyway we'll see you tomorrow for our first session of the day. Okay first session of the day done. I'll give you a quick recap. We started with some 3v1 defence to get comfortable in defence, getting a good lift and also making little turns to move the person at the net which you want to do in doubles. Then we went into some 2v2 mixed stuff starting with the drive trying to get forward and get the attack. Hopefully I'm not speaking too fast for those foreign listeners and then we finished with some 3v2 so extreme pressure the two defenders trying to survive and get the attack. We've just had a little stretch down with everyone, had a debrief of the session and now it's time to fuel up as eating within 30 minutes of the session it's very important to replace those glycogen stores. We are at lunch and on today's menu I have a bread roll for starter, chicken, rice and salad and then watermelon and a yogurt for dessert. It's now 2pm, we've come down to the river for a coffee making the most of this gorgeous Madrid weather and we've got a few hours until our second session of the day where we're going to be training again at 5pm but this time just with Ruben and Lucia so their top mixed doubles pair here and we finished our morning session at 11am not playing again till 5pm. That is a really nice time in between the two sessions maximising recovery and I think they also do that here in Madrid because it does get so hot so keeping the second session later in the day keeps them out of the hot hall in the middle of the day when it's at its hottest. Although saying that yesterday when we were here it was 35 degrees at around 5pm so this afternoon session could be a very sweaty one. A couple of hours work done where we were planning all the details for our China trading weekend in a few weeks time. Now you might not think this takes much planning but we are very particular so we like to go into detail making sure that we've got all the exercises planned, the timing of the exercises, when we're swatching, when we're swapping and then also like the aim of each exercise and how that progresses on until the next exercise and then how that relates to the next session and we also want to make sure that people are hitting with different people but also people of kind of the same or higher standard. So that's what we've been doing. Yeah it's a lot of time but hopefully all of that effort will be worth it and I'm sure it will be. It definitely will be. Before we head back to the accommodation I am going to do some Mandarin practice. I've been trying to do around 10 to 15 minutes every day. It was my goal for 2026 to become kind of fluent, not really fluent, be able to have a basic conversation in Mandarin and with both the camp coming up and also Zheng Siwei's wedding coming up it's giving me some extra motivation to keep practicing. Even though I've been practicing pretty much every day I do still feel like a complete beginner. Rate my Chinese in the comments below. Before we head to the session I'm just going to spend a time putting some second skin on a blister that I have. I've got a big blister on my foot, I won't show you but basically this second skin stuff is a lifesaver. I've used it so many times over the years. You basically put this on and then wrap it up so it's nice and tight and it works wonders. I'm going to do that and then we're going to head down to the session. The plan for the session is to start doing some 1v1 stuff, me with Ruben, Jenny with Lucia, based around what we've noticed they could kind of improve on over the last few days. We won't share it with you though because we feel like that's not really fair because they're active world tour players but yeah then we'll progress into some 2v2 stuff and finish with some matches. Looking forward to it! Just showing you this as we thought it was quite cool. Basically everyone's names on the wall where they've won a medal at a tournament and I'm sure everyone in this group has been inspired by the success that Karolina Marin has had. So I tested the Thruster Ryuga 3 this morning and Greg is going to test it this afternoon. This is the latest racket in the Ryuga series with some new technologies so here are some quickfire specs. Firstly it has a new Freecore 2.0 handle. Now I've actually gripped this up because I used it this morning but I did take some clips before I gripped it up and from those you can see that the end cap is now integrated into the handle and there's also an extended front design up here and that is to hopefully have a more direct power transfer and it's still got that head heavy balance and stiffness that the Ryugas are known for. Oh and in the first production batch in the handle here depending on how you look at it you can either see a Victor logo or a dragon. How cool is that? Anyway time to start our warm-up and we'll give you our full thoughts on this racket after the session. I can't move. See you in the morning Lucia. Okay second session of the day finished. That was a really fun session, really enjoyed it. Both Ruben and Lucia are great to work with. I think you'll have seen from the clips they're really receptive to anything that we were saying, took it on board and they're both really keen to learn and progress their game and we've both now played with the new Ryuga 3 for about an hour each. My thoughts are that this is actually really good which in all honesty I was a little bit surprised by because I don't have that aggressive really attacking style that the Ryugas are typically made for but from my testing this morning this didn't feel quite as head heavy as the previous Ryugas so in my rear court shots I felt like I could generate a lot of power but my defence and those flat fast exchanges at the net didn't seem to be negatively impacted at all so for me the jury's still out on this racket. I really enjoyed using it today and I'm going to test it even more when I go back home. Greg what did you think of the Ryuga 3? I also did like it again a little bit surprisingly so I want to test it a little bit more because I also have another racket that I quite like the Frusta FC Ultra so a bit more testing needed but very much excited for that and if you follow us on Instagram then we'll let you know what we end up deciding on. Anyway that's what a day with the Spanish national team looks like and we are very much enjoying ourselves so far and what a privilege it is that we can do this and we're able to do this as part of our job yeah and now it is time to go back to our accommodation rest up fuel up stretch up stretch down before we go again tomorrow before we go again tomorrow but if you've enjoyed this video then make sure you smash the subscribe button and we'll see you on another video very soon bye