How To Hold A Badminton Racket: Grips, Pressure, Faults
Most guides on how to hold a badminton racket show you where to put your fingers and stop there. Finger position is the easy half.
The half that decides whether your shots work is how hard you squeeze, and when you let go.
Hold a badminton racket like a loose handshake, with the V between thumb and index finger along the narrow edge of the handle. That is the forehand grip. For the backhand, rotate slightly so the thumb sits flat along the wider face. Keep it loose between shots and tighten only at contact. A grip held tight throughout costs you power and reach at once.
Grip pressure, not grip position.
New players hold on hard the whole rally. It feels controlled and it does the opposite: a locked wrist cannot rotate, and forearm rotation is where almost all of a badminton shot’s speed comes from. The racket stops being a whip and becomes a stick.
Loose between shots, firm at the moment of contact. If your forearm aches after an hour, that is the fault, not fitness.
Start with what you are actually holding. Under the BWF Laws of Badminton, the handle is the defined part of the frame the player grips, and the racket may be no more than 680 mm long and 230 mm wide overall.
A badminton handle is not round. It has eight faces: two wide ones, two narrow ones, and four bevels between them. Everything below is about which face your thumb and index finger are on, so it is worth turning a racket in your hand once and feeling the difference between a wide face and a narrow edge.
Hold the racket out in front of you with the face perpendicular to the floor, and shake hands with it.
Done correctly, the V shape between your thumb and index finger sits along one of the narrow edges, and your index finger is slightly separated from the others rather than bunched. The racket should feel like an extension of your forearm rather than something clamped in a fist.
This grip covers the overhead clear, the smash, the drop and most forehand-side shots. If you learn only one way to hold a badminton racket, learn this one properly.
Rotate the handle slightly anticlockwise in your hand, for a right-hander, until your thumb sits flat along the wider face behind the handle.
The thumb is the whole point. It gives you something to push against, which is where backhand power comes from. A backhand played with the forehand grip has nothing behind it, which is why so many players believe their backhand is weak when the grip is the problem.
The change is small. Roughly an eighth of a turn, not a repositioning of the whole hand.
Between shots, never during.
The switch happens in the gap while the shuttle is travelling, which is why it depends on arriving early. A player who is late never has time to change grip, so they play everything with whatever they have, and that is a movement problem rather than a grip problem. Our guide to improving badminton skills covers the order these things need fixing in.
The mechanic is that the fingers loosen, the handle turns inside the hand, and the fingers close again. The hand does not let go and re-grab. This is why a loose grip is a prerequisite rather than a preference.
If you hold the racket like a frying pan, with the wide face flat against your palm, you have the panhandle grip.
It feels natural and it is the single most limiting way to hold a badminton racket. It works only for shots directly in front of your face, so it quietly caps your overhead, your backhand and your net play in one go.
There is one legitimate use, which is a tight net kill straight in front of you. Outside that, if you can see the whole racket face when you look down at your hand, rotate it.
Think of it as a percentage that changes three times a second.
At rest, about two out of ten. Enough not to drop it. Approaching contact, tighten to perhaps seven. Immediately after contact, back to two.
Good players look relaxed for exactly this reason: they are relaxed, for almost all of the rally. The tension arrives and leaves in the space of one shot, and our guide to mastering badminton shots and techniques shows where in each stroke that happens.
Handle thickness matters more than most players realise, and it is adjustable.
The test is simple: with a forehand grip, there should be a small gap between your fingertips and the base of your palm. No gap and the handle is too thin for you, and you will squeeze to compensate. Too large a gap and the handle is too thick, and the grip change becomes slow.
Replacement and overgrips change that thickness, so you can tune a racket you already own rather than buying another. Worth doing before you blame the racket, and our guide to choosing a badminton racket explains what actually differs between models.
An overgrip also wears out. A slick, shiny grip makes you hold tighter without noticing, which brings the whole problem back.
Ten minutes, no court, no shuttle.
Sit with the racket in one hand and switch between forehand and backhand grips slowly, watching the V and the thumb. Once that is automatic, do it with your eyes closed, then do it while walking.
Then shadow it. Play imaginary rallies with the grip change happening in the gaps. The point is that the change becomes something your fingers do without instruction, because in a real rally there is no time to think about it.
Three things, and players usually blame something else for all of them.
Power. Without forearm rotation the smash comes from the shoulder alone. Our article on improving the badminton smash covers why arm strength is not the fix.
Reach. A locked wrist shortens your effective reach by the length of the racket head, which is the difference between reaching a net shot and watching it land.
Your elbow and shoulder. Squeezing hard transfers impact up the arm instead of absorbing it. Tension is also worth checking here, which our guide to badminton racket tension sets out.
Grip is the fastest thing for a coach to fix and the hardest to self-diagnose, because it feels normal to you by definition.
Thirty seconds of watching settles it. Our badminton trial class is the easiest way to have someone look, and our badminton lessons page lists the formats we run for adults, children and pairs.
A: Like a loose handshake, with the V between thumb and index finger along a narrow edge of the handle and the index finger slightly separated. That is the forehand grip, and it covers most shots you will play.
A: Loose between shots and firm only at contact. A grip held tight throughout locks the wrist, and forearm rotation is where most of a badminton shot’s speed comes from.
A: Roughly an eighth of a turn. In the backhand grip the thumb moves onto the wider face behind the handle, which gives you something to push against. Most weak backhands are a grip problem rather than a strength problem.
A: For a tight net kill directly in front of you, yes. Everywhere else it limits your overhead, backhand and net play at once, which is why coaches work to remove it early.
