Doug Kegerreis: Hi! I am Doug Kegerreis, President of Chantilly International Tennis, and today you are learning how to play tennis.

We are now talking about the essentials of the forehand and backhand, and in this clip we are going to talk about grips.

I am often asked what grips do I use, what is the perfect grip? And the answer is; there is no perfect grip. In fact, I do not even teach grips that much. I teach different tennis learning activities, and I watch the result, and if I have to tinker with the grip, I do.

What I do with grips is, I usually give my students a target, I ask them to point their strengths to the target, and I let them grip the racquet, however they want to in order to point their strengths to the target. If it works, thats great, thats one last thing they have to thing about. If they are having a hard time getting their strengths point to the target, I might tinker with the grip.

Generally, the conventional thinking with grips is that the palm of your hand is behind the racquet grip as you are swinging forward, and on the backhand regardless of whether use one or two hands, the palm of your hand is pretty much on top of the grip or on top of racquet as you are swinging forward.

There are lots of different modifications; thats the general thinking. You find the grip thats comfortable for you and you stick with it.

Next, we will move on to our next essential, the forehand and backhand, and that is controlling your swing speed.