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Yonex Arcsaber 11 Racquet Review

YONEX ARCSABER 11
This racquet is right for me right now. Six months from now, who knows?
As my readers already know, I have returned to badminton recently after a break of several years. Over the first month, I experimented with an number of Yonex ™ badminton racquets before finally settling on the Nanoray GlanZ as the best frame for my game at that moment.

That decision was made a month ago. At the time, the GlanZ offered me exactly what I needed. After a long break, my timing was off and I was not hitting the shuttle directly in the center of the string bed. Since the GlanZ is a forgiving racquet with a large sweet spot, it was perfectly suited to my game at the time.

Now, a month later, my game has progressed and it is time for a new frame. So last week, I tried a variety of Yonex frames including the Arcsaber Flash Boost, the Voltric Z-Force II and the Nanoray Z-Speed.

Racquet Selector For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE RACQUET SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.

The Flash Boost I tried was a 5U weight, which was far too light for me. The Nanoray Z-Speed was heavier (4U), but still wasn’t heavy enough. As with the GlanZ, my clears with both of these racquets were not deep enough to push my opponents back. Instead, they were dropping five to six feet inside the court, which was setting up too many successful smashes for my opponents.

My experience with the Voltric Z-Force II was the opposite. Instead of dropping inside of the court, I was actually hitting the shuttle out the back and sides of the court. (To be fair, the Z-Force II I played with was a 3U, which is quite heavy and which may be the reason I was hitting out. I did not try the 4U or the 5U.) The head heaviness of the frame coupled with the 3U weight was just too much for my stroke. This racquet is too powerful for me right now.

Much to my surprise, the Arcsaber 11 turned out to be perfectly suited to my game at this moment. While it is a 3U like the Z-Force II I was using, it is not head heavy. In fact, it is evenly balanced. Strung at the bottom of the tension range (for maximum power), my clears with this racquet were dropping about four inches inside the baseline whenever I hit them cleanly. My drops and net shots were exactly how I like them and the racquet was much better for smashing than the lighter GlanZ.

One of the major features of the Arcsaber series is versatility. I am playing in a drop-in group where some of the players are better than me and some are not as good. So every game is a little different. Sometimes I am on the attack; sometimes I am on the defensive. The Arcsaber series is designed for exactly this scenario. While the Voltric series is designed primarily for offence and the Nanoray series is designed primarily for defence, the Arcsaber series is balanced. It is a compromise that allows for a little bit of both.

Right now, given the state of my game, the Arcsaber 11 is the perfect frame for me.

Racquet Selector For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE RACQUET SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
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Dealing with Common Injuries – Bursitis

Battle Creek Ice It Shoulder SystemBursitis (bur-SY-tis) is a painful condition that affects fluid sacs that cushion the bones, tendons and muscles near joints. It occurs when these sacs become inflamed.

The most common locations for bursitis are shoulders, elbows and hips. However, it can also develop in knees, heels and at the bases of big toes. Bursitis often occurs near joints that perform frequent repetitive motions, such as the hitting/serving shoulder in racquet sports players.

Treatment typically involves resting the affected joint, icing it and protecting it from further trauma. In most cases, bursitis pain goes away within a few weeks with proper treatment, but recurrent flare-ups of bursitis are common.

For racquets sports players, especially tennis, squash, pickleball and badminton players who play frequently, bursitis is a common injury. If left untreated, it can also become a debilitating injury that keeps players off of the court for weeks at a time.

As a coach and player who is frequently on court for twenty or more hours per week, I can speak from personal experience regarding the consequences of leaving bursitis untreated. In my younger years while teaching and playing racquet sports, I estimate that I missed several hundred matches and lessons.

Since then, however, I have developed a very effective strategy for preventing the development of bursitis and for healing it quickly once it occurs. In fact, I now rarely miss matches or lessons due to bursitis.

My strategy is very simple. I keep a freezer full of ice packs and I use them every time I get home from playing or teaching. Specifically, I keep three shoulder packs and three general purpose rectangular ice packs in the freezer. I use the shoulder packs after every match regardless of whether I am feeling pain or not. The shoulder packs help me cool the shoulder joint down quickly and prevent inflammation from developing in the fluid sacs.

The other, rectangular ice packs I use only when I am feeling pain in a particular non-shoulder joint, such as my knee or the base of my foot. At the first sign of pain in these areas, I ice, ice, ice until the pain goes away — because this is the best way I have found to prevent inflammation from settling in and becoming a longterm problem.

Top 3 Tips for Dealing with Bursitis

Here are my Top Three Tips for players who want to treat or prevent bursitis:

1. Keep at least three ice packs in the freezer. The trick is to rotate each one 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off. A single ice pack is not enough because it takes six hours to freeze again after you use it. Having three allows you to ice for about 60 minutes after every match.

2. Large ice packs are better than small ice packs. I look for ice packs that are long, wide and thick — about twice as big as I think I need. The small ones melt too quickly and don’t provide penetrating cooling. This is especially important in the shoulder where the fluid sacks are deep in the joint below several layers of muscle. Small ice packs will cool the surface, but the cooling will not reach the joint.

3. Shoulder systems are extremely convenient because shoulders are difficult joints to ice. Using a harness system like the one in the image above allows me to ice my shoulder while moving around. In fact, I am wearing one now while I am typing this piece. If I wasn’t wearing it, this would be difficult to do.

Preventing Bursitis

Preventing bursitis is infinitely preferable to treating it. An hour of ice after every match is simple and effective but allowing it to develop and settle into your shoulder may result in weeks of ice, drugs and physiotherapy. My best advice is to avoid getting it in the first place.

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Court Shoes: Yonex vs. Adidas

YONEX SHT PRO ALL COURT GREY 2015 1Yesterday, we had a customer come into our southwest Calgary store to buy a pair of shoes. He wanted to use them for tennis, volleyball and dodgeball. He only wanted to buy one pair of shoes.

We started, of course, with questions so that we could determine his needs. Q: Where do you play tennis? A: Indoor at The Tennis Academy and outdoors on public courts. Q: What kind of floor do they have where you play volleyball? A: Hardwood. Q: What kind of floor do they have where you play dodgeball? A: Rubberized all-court surface.

So here we have a client who plays on three different surfaces: acrylic, hardwood and rubberized all-court. Normally, we would recommend carbon rubber for acrylic, natural organic rubber for hardwood and synthetic rubber for all-court. But in this case, the customer wants to buy one shoe that will work in all contexts. So what do we do?

ADIDAS BARRICADE COURT BLACK BLACK SILVERQuite simply, all we can so is offer information on the pros and cons. We cannot, in this case, make a recommendation. Carbon rubber will stand up well on acrylic, but it may be dangerously slippery on hardwood. Natural organic rubber provides excellent traction on hardwood, but will quickly be ground down by acrylic. Synthetic rubber offers the best all around compromise, but offers poor traction on hardwood and poor durability on acrylic.

In the end, the customer tried on more than a dozen pair of shoes in two sizes. Some were rejected on price. Some were rejected on colour. Some were rejected on comfort/fit. Eventually, it came down to two pair: Adidas ™ Barricade Court at $95.00 and Yonex ™ SHT PRO at $150.00. Our expectation was that he would opt for the cheaper shoes.

So what did he do? After 20 minutes of thoughtful consideration, after switching both pair back and forth, one on the left, one on the right. After much pacing and dancing around the store playing imaginary dodgeball, he chose the Yonex SHT PRO. His words: “They just feel better in every way. They just feel like a better shoe. Normally I wouldn’t bother paying the extra 50 bucks, but these just feel like they are worth more.”

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Yonex Glan Z – 3 Things We Like About It

YONEX NANORAY GLANZ 1
The Nanoray Glaz was designed for older players who need additional power from their racquet.
The “3 Things We Like About It” product review series was created to give customers a brief summary of the three most important features of new products in our southwest Calgary store. All products in this series are available in-store and online at the time of publication.

The Yonex ™ Nanorary Glan Z was released in Canada in April of 2015. It was created for doubles players who need a little help from the racquet in the power department. Specifically, it was created for older players who may not have the swing speed they once had. As a result, we expected this racquet to be a “little old ladies” doubles racquet.

Much to our surprise, however, it’s not. Instead the Glan Z turns out to be an excellent racquet for players of any age who want to improve the depth of their backhand clear shots.

Technically speaking, this racquet was created to offer power and consistency at lower swing speeds. Both the isometric shape of the head and the Vertical-A Concept grommets work to enlarge and maximize the power of the sweet spot. At the same time, the aerodynamic head shape combined with a thinner profile lower frame and a wider profile tip give the Glanz optimum repulsion, especially at lower string tensions.

VERTICAL-A CONCEPTSo when you think about it, it becomes obvious. It really doesn’t matter what level the player is at; their backhand swing speed is always slower than their forehand swing speed. That just a biomechanical reality. So when Yonex designs a racquet that offers more power at slower swing speeds, of course they end up with a racquet that improves power on the backhand.

This improvement is just one of the things that we like about the Glan Z. What we also like are the weight and the balance. Unlike many high performance racquets which are so light that they contribute to the development of tennis elbow in recreational badminton players, the Glan Z averages a sensible 83 grams. In the balance department, meanwhile, the Glan Z is head light, which makes it perfect for clearing and dropshots.

Overall, this racquet is best-suited to defensive players who need a little help on their backhand clears. Infused with the new REXIL FIBER material and built based on the Torque Power Theory, the GlanZ sends the shuttlecock even further than other racquets in the Nanoray series. It is available in Brilliant Black. Demos are available in-store right now.

Racquet Selector For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE RACQUET SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
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VCORE TOUR F 93 “Best Performance Frame”

YONEX VCORE TOUR F 93 TENNIS RACQUETYONEX USA MEDIA RELEASE
3 MARCH 2015

The VCORE Tour F 93 has been selected as the racquet with the best high-performance frame in Tennis Magazine’s 2015 Racquet Guide, published in its March/April issue.

Testing was comprehensive, with many samples of each racquet sent to a panel of diverse playtesters, ranging from tennis coaches, former players, and racquet technicians. With racquets strung to the respective manufacturers’ standards, playtesters examined the racquets in areas such as power, control, comfort, manoeuvrability and playability. Playtesters also received evaluations from playing partners, students and customers to form a well-rounded opinion on the racquets.

“This frame is about precision and control,” praised the review, “Nowhere was that more evident than at net, where the small head size, easy handling and superb feel at contact made for great volleying.” The slightly larger VCORE Tour F 97 also received a mention in the category of high-performance frame.

Read the full review on Tennis Tuesday here: http://issues.tennistuesday.net/02-24-2015/p/8

Members of Team Yonex ™ are seeing remarkable results with the VCORE Tour F. In the recent Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, rising Croatian tennis talent Borna Coric (VCORE Tour F 97, POLYTOUR SPIN) played an outstanding match against Australian Open runner-up Andy Murray, which the teenager seized in straight sets.