BOB HUNT: In this clip, I'm going to show you how to hold a badminton racket. Now, this is probably the most important part of playing badminton, because a bad grip will create a bad hit, a bad swing and not make contact with the birdie and not really create a great game. So, what you want to do is you want to hold your racket, so it's straight up and down. And basically what you want to do is you want to shake hands with the racket. If you shake hands with the racket, what happens is it creates a V in your hand. You can see that where it creates a V. So that V goes straight down the racket. Now, this is for a forehand shot. That's all you want to do with the forehand shot, is hold it just like you're shaking hands and that's how you want to grip the racket. Another important piece about holding this racket and gripping this racket, don't squeeze this as tight as you can. What you want to do is you want to hold it, so that you've got that grip, but hold it loosely in your hand, because what happens is, when you swing the racket as you come closer to the shuttlecock, you're going to grip that racket the harder that way. If you're already gripping it hard this way and you swing around, you're not going to have a good feel for the racket. You're not going to make good contact with the birdie. Now, on doing a backhand and this is where it gets difficult. If you're shaking hands with the racket and you've hit the shuttlecock with your forehand, you may have a shot coming back to the backhand. Well, what you have to do is you basically have to switch your grip every time. So what you want to do is you basically want to put your thumb on the racket here and twist your hand around, so that your actually thumb is going right down the racket. That way, it's almost like shaking hands but you just move the racket a little bit around. So if we start from the forehand position and we simple move the racket to about a 45-degree angle. If you look, we're now holding the thumb on the racket where it's up and down and that allows you to hit a nice smooth backhand. The problem with this and not really a problem if you get good at this game is you want--and that's a reason why you want to hold the racket in your hand gently, because you want to be able to switch back and forth. You want to be able to move this racket back and forth as you're playing, because you'll never know where that shuttlecock's going to go. So, if you're on the forehand and you hit a forehand, you want to be able to switch that to a backhand and make the backhand grip. Remember, a lose grip, shaking the hands for a forehand, moving it so your thumb's on the racket going for a backhand. It's as easy as that. Once you get the hang of that, you're going to make some great shots in badminton.
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