11/08/2026
The Hygiene Hypothesis
We are increasingly dealing with players who are hypersensitive to just about anything you can think of. A good friend of mine is a physiotherapist, and we often talk about what we encounter during badminton training. I notice that players have less resilience, give up faster when things get tough, and have lost all connection with nature or outdoor life in general. Children are being raised in an overly protected environment, and I recognize two different types of protection that are both unhealthy. The first occurs when we speak of "overprotection" in the context of allergies; this is not about helicopter parents or emotional overprotection, but about the child's physical living environment.
In this regard, it is essential that children can get dirty, come into contact with bacteria, and build up resistance. Avoiding or failing to come into sufficient contact with these “good” dangers has consequences for the rest of your life, a fact often overlooked in this increasingly clean society when it comes to personal hygiene. The immune system has nothing to do when children do not come into contact with mud and other things found in nature. To find something to do, the immune system starts to view harmless things as enemies, making children sensitive to the most innocent factors. When natural resistance is not built up, children suffer from all kinds of allergies. Medications like antihistamines are used to try and resolve these allergies, but they do not tackle the root problem because they only combat the symptoms. Washing your hands before eating might have made sense in the past because everyone had their hands in everything, but in today's sterile, clean world, it has become completely redundant.
The Second is Biology: Pain Tolerance and the Nervous System
This one is caused by curling parents or helicopter parents. Children are not allowed to experience anything that hurts; they are not allowed to actually fall, scrape themselves, or take a hard bump, and bleeding is completely out of the question.
Yet, just like the immune system (from the hygiene hypothesis), the nervous system also needs input to learn how to deal with stimuli. The brain needs pain input to learn what real pain is and what pain is that teaches you something. We also see this problem in badminton; players call something pain where I think…… what?! To get players who can take a hit, we will also have to do something about the pain threshold, and if you do not want to integrate this into training, it should at least become a standard testing habit. Just as we test players on technical skills, we will have to look at what their pain threshold is and whether it can be expanded—in other words, can we train the pain threshold? If the pain threshold is too low or cannot be pushed, you should seriously consider not including this player in a national selection. It takes too much effort to get hard training into their system, and you end up with a player who is constantly dealing with minor aches and pains, thus developing themselves with the handbrake pulled.
These are two parenting consequences that have a major impact on children's development. The first—the hygiene hypothesis—is something that we as coaches can do nothing about; this plays out in the early years, and we can only hope to get players who were able to play outside and did not just sit indoors on their phones. This, too, works to Asia's advantage because even though players here also spend a lot of time on their phones, life here takes place largely on the street, and it is dirty everywhere. You can see the effects of that dirt when European players come here to train; they react to everything that is foreign, suffer from insects, and have allergic reactions. Parents back home react with concern, while their children's bodies are actually just busy adapting to the environment and thereby strengthening their immune systems.
With the second—the biology of pain tolerance—we can still do something, but here we run into societal resistance. Most coaches reacted with shock to my opinion; they agree with it, but find it difficult to take a stand. I believe it is absolutely necessary for the future of our sport in Europe.
