Will Hamilton: In this video, we're going to look at Roger Federer's forehand grip. Now Roger plays with the Easter forehand grip, which is the most conservative that you can use in the modern game. Now let's quickly review, what exactly the Eastern forehand grip is? Well, here we have a shot of the tennis racquet handle and the handles divided into eight sides, which are also called Bevels.
If we start on the top of the handle that's Bevel number one and then if we move clockwise around the handle, we get the Bevel number two and Bevel number three. Now, the Eastern forehand grip is where your heal pad and your index knuckle, which is part of the palm; the index knuckle is the first knuckle of your index finger with a heal pad and index knuckle rest on the third Bevel here. So a simple way to find the Eastern forehand grip is, to hold the tennis racquet out in front you like I'm doing here with my left hand, then I grip it like I'm shaking someone's hand. Now that should put your heal pad on the correct Bevel, the third Bevel here, it should also get your index knuckle in the right place again on that third Bevel.
Now, let's look at some pictures of Roger hitting in forehand and see where he positions his hand on the racquet handle. We'll start with the heal pad and move on to the index knuckle. Now this first shot, let's move in on his hand and we're going to highlight the third Bevel of the racquet handle, we'll put a dot on his heal pad. When we do that, you can see that the heal pad is inline with the third Bevel.
Let's move to another forehand and do the exact same thing, moving in, highlight the Bevel, dot on the heal pad and you can see that the heal pad is resting on the third Bevel. For clarity sake, let's do with one more forehand; the heal pad is right inline with that third Bevel. Now let's move to the back perspective and we'll do the same thing, but see where the index knuckle is resting, in what Bevel the index knuckle resting on. When we move in on this first forehand, we'll highlight the Bevel, dot on the index knuckle and you can see that is resting on the third Bevel, in this next forehand again, the index knuckle is on the third Bevel.
Now let's look at the picture of the bottom of the Roger's back swing and moving in on the hand, from this perspective you can see that again the index knuckle is resting on the third Bevel of the tennis racquet handle. From the pictures we just look that, we can definitively say, that as on March 2009 Roger's hit with an Eastern forehand grip. Both his heal pad and his index knuckle rest on the third Bevel of the tennis racquet handle, when he hits a forehand. We have a ton of other pictures that we didn't include this video because they show the exact same thing. One of the things we did, when we are researching this video was try and find specific examples when either his less heal pad or index knuckle did not rest on the third Bevel of the tennis racquet handle.
Out of the 3000 pictures we have that we've looked at Roger hitting, we found one example, one situation when that's little bit unclear and we're going to put that up right now. Now we zoom in on his heal pad, you can't really tell, if he's got his heal pad smacked up on the third Bevel or if he is cheated over a little bit to the edge in between the third and the fourth Bevel. Now it might just be the perspective that we've shot this picture with the perspective of the camera or maybe as grip has been adjusted a little bit further around. But the key point that you want to take away from this video is that where there might be exceptions, the vast, vast majority of the time Roger is hitting his forehand within Eastern grip.
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