How To Hold a Table Tennis Racquet

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jared on behalf of Expert Village and in this part of the film I want to show you how to grip the racquet. And there's two main ways. The first is called the "shake-hand grip". And it's just like it sounds. If you were to come in and shake someone's hand, that's how you grip the paddle. You come in like this, grab it around like this, wrap your three fingers over, with your thumb on top and on your back leave your pointer finger across. This is your shake-hand hold and you're going to grip the racquet as tight as you can, up as high as you can. So you're going to choke it. This is your shake, and the other is called "pen-hold", as if you were going to write with a pen. You come in and you're going to grab it like this. You have your three fingers on the backside, and on your front side you'll have your pointer finger and your thumb, gripping over the handle like this. And so each has different advantages. For shake-hand, this has a better backhand because you can switch like this. You'll have more power and you can attack with your back hand. As apposed to a pen-hold, you're going to primarily use your forehand and you can't really hit like this. You have to switch to one side. Now the advantage of the pen-hold is getting the, you have a better range of motion. You have a big wrist motion like this, so for serves you can do all kinds of things. The shake-hand, you're a little more restricted. So those are going to be your two major grips of the racquet. And so now I want to show you the four basic strokes of the game. The first I'm going to show you is called "the hit". It's also called a "drive" or if you put more power on it, it can be called a "smash". The second kind of stroke I want to show you is called the "block". And this is more where you're going to put your paddle there and let them do all the work and you're just going to send it back. The third kind of stroke I want to show you is called the "chop" or "push". This is going to generate under-speed. So, the forth kind of stroke I want to show you is more for advanced players and that's called the "loop". And this is going to look somewhat like this. And you're going to generate a lot, a lot, a lot of spin on the ball by barely grazing it with your racquet."