How to Hold a Badminton Racket

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dave Zarco with USA Badminton and I'm here at Don Shula's Athletic Club in Miami Lakes, Florida. In this segment I'm going to show you how to hold a badminton racquet. Now if you'll look at this racquet, if you see there are two fat parts to the grip that coincide with the face of a racquet. What you do is you take this finger and I'm going to have Yaz over here show you, you take this finger and you put it right here and then on the other fat part you take your thumb and you put it there and then you just curl it on your finger. So you are basically holding it loosely on your fingers and not in the palm of your hand. That is your basic forehand grip. Now to go to the backhand grip, all you are going to do is you're going from this to this and when you do that it turns the racquet and it puts your thumb flat with the face of the racquet on the fat part and you just hold the racquet with your other four fingers on the other side and that's your backhand grip. And then there is one other grip and that is when you're at the net which is especially useful in playing doubles and instead of the forehand or the backhand, instead of holding it down here, what you do is you hold it up here and you're holding it almost right at the throat because at the net you don't need as much power to be able to hit it down. With that grip it's a much faster reaction. And that's how you hold a badminton racquet. Once again this is David Zarco with USA Badminton, thank you for watching."