Badminton: The whip action and loosening up to speed up

 So I noticed that especially when I get frustrated in a game, I will tend to try to "push" shots with the more initial, "bigger" parts of my kinetic chain. People call this, "muscling the shot". Meaning, say in a backhand, I will try to push harder with my arm instead of letting go and letting my wrist take care of the rest. It's this insistence on "more muscle = more power" that is absolutely false in badminton. 

As a test, try the backhand lift. How this should feel is that upon the completion of the move, the arm wants to fly up due to the momentum despite the arm being completely relaxed. That's because energy transfer occurred efficiently: nearly all the energy from the arm transferred to the racket, and the racket now wants to pull the arm up. That's how pretty much ALL shots should be. 

Why? Well try muscling a backhand tap drive. You'll notice that the while accelerating, the wrist is not nearly able to generate that speed, effectively springing off of the forearm rotationally and absorbing that energy from the forearm. That's because it requires more force to complete a shot against that acceleration. It's like jumping off of an accelerating platform. 

It's better instead to apply just the right amount of forward force with your arm so that you wrist stays stationary and absorbs the maximal amount of energy while it is uncoiling. Why? I'm not completely sure. 

All I can say is that when it comes to the stretch-shortening cycle, it's better not to fuck with the forces. For example, don't try to force pronation to go faster by either directly attempting to add additional muscle to a pronation or adding forward acceleration to your arm and trying to press the whole thing forward, which would be accompanied by either: 1. attempted additional muscling of the pronation leading to a weaker shot or 2. slowing down of the pronation movement, leading to incomplete and bad shot. 

If you do 1, you're essentially composing motions. This defeats the purpose of the whip action: the cue is to break up your motion into independent segments. Example: When the body is done rotating, it only serves as a foundation for energy transfer into the arm. And when the arm is done accelerating, it too should stop and only hold enough force to pass its energy down to the forearm, then forearm to pronation, etc. This way a slow, large bank of energy gets transferred into a small, fast bank of energy. That's how you generate speed, and that's the idea of badminton shots (and trebuchets). The SSC is the same concept, but with elasticity: it's capable of converting a lot of potential energy into speed, but only under certain conditions. If you mess with it it doesn't work. 

This idea seems to work for basically any shot: the overhead forehand, backhand, drives, lifts. The shot I'm not completely sure about is the forehand drive, the one shot that seems like more muscle rather than the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC).