Alternative views on badminton grips

Why go into this detail?

My main purpose on this site is to help you learn the best badminton techniques. So what should I do when expert sources present me with contradictory ideas?

I think the best response is for me to give you both ideas. It would be arrogant of me to dismiss the teaching of any high-level coaches.

Remember, you don’t need to know about these alternative views. I offer this information more for academic rigor than because I believe it will improve your badminton.

Key tip

Keep this in perspective: we are talking about only minor differences of teaching.

No world-class coaches teach a panhandle grip for forehand clears; some techniques are just wrong.

Badminton grips for forehands

In this guide, the main grip for forehands is the basic grip. This is effective when you are taking the shuttlecock at the side, overhead, and for many strokes in front of the body.

The extended thumb position of the basic grip means that it can be used on the backhand side too.

Some badminton coaches teach a different forehand grip, with the thumb and index finger more wrapped or curled around the badminton racket handle. Unlike the basic grip, this really is a forehand grip, in the sense that it could never be used for a backhand: all backhands require some thumb leverage from behind, and using this forehand grip would cause a floppy backhand.

Tom Causer, who coaches England national juniors, showed me this type of forehand grip. He was giving a workshop on forehand and backhand lifts. Tom’s grip was just like the basic grip, but with the thumb and index finger curled more around the handle, rather than extended.

Lee Jae Bok also teaches this kind of finger positioning, but only for smashes: he explicitly teaches that the thumb should not be straight, but curled.

Lee also adjusts the smash grip towards panhandle—like a mirror image of the basic grip, with the V shape (what’s left of it) towards bevel 8 instead of bevel 2. This change of angle is consistent with my smash grip adjustment. I think Lee is correct about this adjustment, but there are pitfalls to teaching it as the smash grip; it’s better to think of it as an adjustment, not a new badminton grip.

Badminton grips for backhands

I have come across a surprising variety of names for otherwise quite standard badminton grips. Tom Causer showed me what he called an approach grip for backhand lifts; as far as I could see, it was the bevel grip (perhaps slightly shifted towards the thumb grip).

I’ve also heard coaches talk about such exotic entities as the backhand adjusted basic grip. Having a coach introduce yet another new grip, with a fancy name, has a strangely intimidating effect: you wonder whether you’ve missed something, whether your technique might be subtly incorrect. But a name may not signify anything, and most of the time badminton coaches are talking about the same grip using different names.

I think that some badminton coaches have difficulty accepting that we can’t have names for every slight grip variation. It’s better to teach a few simple badminton grips, and encourage players to be flexible in their application, than to attempt a bewildering catalogue of badminton grip names. In my experience, it’s only the coaches who care about the arcane details of grip taxonomy; the players just want to know how to hold the racket.