Get a grip

There are many facets to a good badminton player.  Prioritising one facet over any other is difficult.  Various elements in the areas of technical, tactical, physical and mental abilities can be assessed and trained.  At the most basic level, however, badminton constitutes hitting a shuttle.  In order to do that one must hold the racket.  It could be said that technical abilities are, above all, the most important aspects in badminton.  The reason I say this is that every player starts with the technical challenges of making contact with a shuttle.  If that is true, then it could be argued that the most fundamental challenge of playing badminton is holding the racket.  The word is grip.

Socrates might be inclined to point out that there is no wrong way to hold a badminton racket, and that might be true.  But from the point of view of bio-mechanics, there is one way that lends itself to the transfer of work from the body into shuttle speed.  Grips are divided into two main types; forehand and backhand.  These two grips differ because the hand is asymmetric.  Of the digits the thumb is the principal driver for the backhand.  The thumb is a powerful producer of work in the hand, often standing up to the four fingers on its own.  On the forehand, the index finger serves this function.  Both the forehand and the backhand grips are clearly evident in a golfer's grip.

© Andrew Rice Golf

The lower hand is the trailing hand and is working in a forehand manner.  The upper hand is not so clear from this picture, but it is working in a backhand manner.  The upper hand produces most work in the backswing and the lower hand produces the majority of work in the foreward swing.  Notice the position of the index finger of the lower hand.

If grip is so critical in badminton, how can we know it?  Well, we can look at bad examples of grip.  The most common bad grip on the forehand is called the pan handled grip.  The pan handled grip can be identified by the fact that the plane of the face of the racket is perpendicular to the axis of the forearm.  If you imagine using the bottom of a frying pan to hammer a nail in a wall, a little over head height you might be able to envisage how the pan handler puts his grip to best use.  The result of the stroke is that power is typically restricted, the trajectory is similar to that of the nail in that it is flat.  Producing the stroke requires that the forearm is in motion.  On the backhand, there are many poor grips and the majority of badminton players have poor technique as a consequence.  

How we grip the racket dictates the nature of the stroke that we produce.  This is why the grip determines the shot.  Good grip facilitates good shots, poor grips preclude good shots.   Correct badminton, like golf, is about transferring momentum from the body to the ball or the shuttle.  This concept is called kinetic linking displayed here by one of the world's greatest swingers.

Kinetic linking demands that maximum results are gained from minimum efforts.  This leads us to the notion that at the time of impact, the only thing that is moving to produce shuttle speed is the racket head.  In order to achieve this, we recruit pronation and supination of the forearm. With the racket in hand we produce the stroke through simply turning the hand palm up or palm down.  

The forehand is shown here, along with some shoulder rotation.