Boll's racket grip (波尔的握拍)（英文） - 精英乒乓网-买正品，到精英。买蝴蝶，到精英。

The most important thing in table tennis is the racket grip. A wrong grip is the main cause for a bad technique. Some players are troubled with this during their whole table tennis life without even knowing it.

Let’s have a look at Timo Boll, whose grip is exemplary. That doesn’t mean that everybody must hold the bat like Timo, but we should definitely pay attention to the basic features. Everybody has a slightly different grip, because of the size of hand and the length of the fingers. There are also a number of individual differences, which are tolerable and don’t influence the performance of the techniques negatively. The deciding features should be noticed, because they are the reason for poor technique.

Every coach, who is working with children knows how difficult, sometimes even impossible, it is to get rid of a wrong grip with children, who have played a lot at school or youth clubs before joining a table tennis club. It is just as difficult to change the grip with better players to improve their game. If you want to introduce the change of grip from forehand to backhand or the service grip, you are dealing with very little details and a lot of willpower and endurance of player and coach is necessary.

Picture 1: Timo prefers the classical European shake hand grip, which also becomes more and more important in the leading table tennis nations of Asia (China, Korea, Japan). Let’s look at the backhand side first. The index finger is lying flat at the bottom part of the bat. That way he has got full contact with the blade with the interaction of thumb and index finger. Here some players make the mistake that they only touch the blade with the top of the index finger. The outcome is an instable movement of the bat. The position of the wrist is very important. Looking at Timo, we see that it is in a very relaxed basic position (yellow line), neither bent down too much in the direction of the index finger (mistake F1), nor too much upwards (mistake F2“). Both mistakes occur often and result in the following mistakes:

The basic rule is not to hold the bat too hard – apart from the moment of contact with the ball- because this will lead to a cramped and disharmonic movement.

Picture 1a: Here we see Timo in his typical basic position when he receives a serve, which were are dealing with in our next Newsletter. Again you can perfectly see the natural, relaxed basic position of the wrist (yellow line). But the picture also shows clearly Timo’s individual feature. The index finger is moving a little bit upwards when he is expecting the serve. Here we only need to compare picture 1 with picture 1a. Why? Because Timo often returns the serve of his opponent with his forehand and his forehand grip is slightly different from his backhand grip. When the index finger moves up a bit the bat can be opened more easily for the forehand. With backhand strokes it is directly the opposite. The index finger remains down (picture 1) and the bat is slightly moved inside. This bat angle is better for backhand strokes (push, counter hit, topspin).

The Swedish table tennis legend, Jan-Ove Waldner was the first player, who mastered the forehand – backhand grip change perfectly, which was hardly noticeable for the amateur. You need an enormous amount of feeling and perfect finger co-ordination for this, especially when you think about the speed of the modern game. Among the world class players there is nearly no shake hand player, who doesn’t adjust the grip to their forehand or backhand.

Picture 2: looking at the forehand side we see again the naturally relaxed position of the wrist. Middle-, ring- and little finger are relaxed around the grip, otherwise we would see the tensed tendons around the wrist. Interesting though is the position of the thumb, because it is not on the blade itself as we can see on picture 2a. Especially for the position and the change of position of the thumb we find many individual variations. Some have the thumb a bit further up the blade, others have it on the grip, others again, like Timo take it up only a little bit. In any case Timo’s grip and thumb position support a slight forehand grip and stress his relaxed grip, which is ready for permanent little changes during the rallies.

Picture 3: Timo Boll is one of the best and most dangerous servers among the professionals. He has a very individual grip especially for his forehand serve. His index finger moves almost to the edge of the bat and is almost stretched, but without tension, because that would prevent the mobility of the wrist. The other three fingers are lying like a fan on top of each other almost like in the Chinese penholder grip, with the middle finger having contact with the bat. On picture 3a we can see that the thumb is slightly bent on top of the grip and presses on the bat. The three pressing points thumb, index- and middle finger provide an ideal grip of the bat and allow the wrist optimal mobility like in the Chinese penholder grip. Moving from this service grip back to the normal one takes only a split of a second and demands a high degree of skill and can’t be learnt just like that. Naturally there are many varieties of such forehand service grips. Timo’s is certainly one of the best, because it allows the wrist a lot of mobility and speed. That again produces a lot of spin, unbelievable much spin, which many players can witness.

1、不必纠结于某标准握，要适合自己的手型。

2、利于放松，转换很重要。

3、大拇指在接发球前稍离开拍面，有益于放松转换，选择合适的击球方式。

4、培养好的握拍习惯要坚持，很多错误的动作源于握拍不合理。