The eastern forehand grip: what it does, why the tour left it behind, and why it still wins matches
The eastern forehand grip is the classical shot the modern tour has mostly left behind. What it does to the ball, why it fell out of fashion, and the pros who still play it.
Rafael Nadal's forehand cleared the net by an average of seven feet six inches. Roger Federer's, over the same era, cleared it by five feet ten. The twenty inches between the two shots is twenty inches of arc, twenty inches of ball flight, twenty inches of intent, and it explains most of the visible difference between them. Nadal was manufacturing shape with a grip closer to bevel four-and-a-half and around 3,200 revolutions per minute of topspin. Federer was manufacturing pace with an eastern-plus grip on bevel three and closer to 2,500. The two shots ended up in roughly the same place on the court. They got there by different physics.
In the modern era Federer's grip is the exception. For most of the twentieth century it was the rule.
This is a piece about the eastern forehand grip: what it actually does to the ball, why the tour has mostly left it behind, and the good reasons a serious club player might still choose it over the semi-western default the game has settled on. The three forehand grips flagship covers the whole family; this one goes deep on the oldest and most historically decorated of them.
What the grip actually is
The eastern forehand grip sits on bevel three of an eight-sided racket handle. If you would like a proper visual reference for how the bevels are numbered, the flagship grips piece shows the octagon and where each grip lands on it. The eastern is the second position round the handle from the continental (bevel two), one bevel back from the semi-western (bevel four), and two back from the full western (bevel five).
The best physical description of it is the one every coach eventually reaches for. Hold the racket out at arm's length with the grip vertical, then shake hands with it. The index knuckle and the heel pad of your hand come to rest on bevel three, palm behind the handle, thumb wrapped naturally round the front. That is the eastern.
The racket face, in this position, sits close to vertical at contact. Not tilted forward the way it does in the semi-western. Not tilted heavily forward the way it does in the full western. Close to vertical, meeting the ball roughly perpendicular to the intended flight path.
If your handle also happens to be the wrong size for your palm, none of this feels right. The grip size chart explains what your handle should measure before you go changing anything else about how you hold it.
Why the tour left it behind
For most of the twentieth century, the eastern was the standard forehand grip on both tours. Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Björn Borg (a slight variant), Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf: every era's dominant player until roughly the mid-2000s hit an eastern or a small variation on it. The grip is not obscure. It is the classical position, and the game was built on it.
Two things ended its monopoly at the top of the professional game.
The first was the polyester string revolution. Modern co-poly monofilaments (Luxilon ALU Power was the pioneer; Head Lynx Tour, Solinco Hyper-G and Babolat RPM Blast the modern descendants) hold their shape at high tension and grip the ball harder at contact than the natural gut and multifilaments the earlier eras used. That grip on the ball allows a player who can swing fast enough to add ferocious topspin. The semi-western and full western grips, which tilt the racket face slightly forward at contact and force the swing path to travel low-to-high across the ball, exploit that grip on the ball to produce the modern heavy topspin forehand. The eastern, with its more vertical face, does not.
The second was the surface homogenisation of the tour. Grass and older, faster hard courts favoured the flatter, penetrating eastern forehand because pace through the court is worth more than shape over the net when the ball skids and stays low. As the tour slowed grass down (Wimbledon, from around 2001), speeded clay up only marginally, and standardised most hard courts into medium-slow conditions, the incentive shifted. Higher bounces reward heavier topspin; slower surfaces reward the extra margin the semi-western gives you over the net. The equipment and the courts, in the same twenty-year window, both pointed the same way.
By the mid-2010s the semi-western was the tour's modern default and the eastern had become a specialist choice.
What it produces at contact
Six practical things happen when you hit a forehand off the eastern grip.
Trajectory is low and driving. The natural ball flight comes off the strings closer to level than upward-arcing. Net clearance is smaller than a semi-western will give you (perhaps two feet, sometimes less) and the ball takes a shorter path to the opponent's baseline. Less air time. More pace onto the returner's racket.
Spin is modest, penetration is high. You still get a small amount of natural topspin from the swing path, because no one hits a forehand on a perfectly level plane. But the eastern forehand at four thousand RPM does not exist. The eastern trades revolutions per minute for miles per hour, and the miles per hour end up in the corner faster.
Contact height is comfortable between the knee and the shoulder. Ball at hip is the eastern grip's home. Ball at chest is fine. Ball at shoulder is manageable. Ball above shoulder starts to hurt: to lift the racket face and clear a high-bouncing kick serve or a Nadal-forehand-off-clay, the eastern player has to add wrist and improvise, and the shot becomes unstable.
Contact height low is the easiest of any grip. A ball that skids low on a fast court or clips the top of the net cord and dies is naturally an eastern-grip ball. The near-vertical face at contact means you can drive it through, not scoop it up. This is why grass-court and old-fast-hard-court eras all had eastern grips at the top: the low ball was the norm.
Wrist stays close to neutral. Where the semi-western asks for a cocked wrist that releases through the swing, the eastern does not. The wrist is loaded lightly, released lightly, and the load on the wrist and forearm through a long match is meaningfully lower. This matters more the older you get.
The stroke's power source is the shoulder and core. Not the wrist snap. The eastern forehand drives forward from the ground up through the body and out through a relatively stable racket face. It rewards good body rotation and punishes players who try to arm the ball.
Who used to play it, and who plays something else now
The current top of the men's game is dominated by semi-western players. Djokovic, Alcaraz, Sinner, Zverev, Medvedev with a variant, most of the tour depth. Alcaraz drifts toward full western on clay but semi-western remains his anchor. Iga Świątek's forehand grip is a full western that reaches toward the Hawaiian, one of the reasons she generates the RPMs she does on clay.
The honest answer to who plays a pure eastern forehand at the top of the modern game is: nobody. It has cleared out. The generation that carried the grip is either retired, retiring, or off the top of the rankings, and the generation replacing them almost universally chose semi-western or full western.
The recent carriers worth naming, because their forehands are still the reference points for what the grip can do:
Juan Martín del Potro was the modern era's clearest eastern forehand. When it was healthy his was the biggest flat forehand in tennis, capable of hitting cleanly through Federer and Nadal on the fastest surfaces. The 2009 US Open final and the 2016 Olympic silver medal were both built on it. He retired at the Argentina Open in February 2022, wrist and knee gone. The grip was not to blame for the injuries, but it was central to why the ball moved the way it did when the arm was healthy.
Petra Kvitová, two-time Wimbledon champion and one of the great left-handed players of the twenty-first century, played a full eastern forehand through her prime. The flat, penetrating ball flight was the same signature: less shape, more pace, low over the net. Grass rewarded it particularly well, which is a large part of why she was so dangerous at the All England Club.
Angelique Kerber, another lefty and a three-time Slam champion, played an eastern forehand for the whole of her career. She retired after the 2024 Paris Olympics quarter-final to Zheng Qinwen, and she is a case study in what the grip lets a physically smaller player do: absorb pace and redirect it flatly rather than manufacture heavy topspin from scratch.
Steffi Graf is the historical benchmark, and the archive footage still stands up. Her forehand is one of the two or three most-copied strokes in the game's coaching literature, and it was an eastern grip driven with a small closed stance and enormous shoulder rotation. Twenty-two Slam titles, and the shot that carried them.
The pattern is that the top of the professional game has moved on from the eastern. That does not mean the shot has stopped working. It means the ecosystem, the strings, the courts, the ball, the height and physique of the top players, has tilted the incentives elsewhere. The club player is not obliged to follow.
The one thing amateurs get wrong
The most common mistake made by a club player who has been told to try the eastern forehand is to bring the semi-western swing path with it. They keep the exaggerated low-to-high swing arc they were taught for topspin, and they hit into a near-vertical racket face. The ball goes short, high and slow, because the swing path is manufacturing lift the grip does not want to produce. The whole thing feels wrong, and the player gives up on the grip after two hours.
The eastern grip wants a longer, flatter swing path. Take-back is generally lower and further behind you than a semi-western take-back. Contact point is slightly further forward. Follow-through goes forward and up towards the target rather than up and across the body. The stroke is straighter and less coiled.
Where it hurts
Two situations are unpleasant on an eastern forehand.
The first is the very high ball. A kick serve rising to shoulder height, or a heavy topspin forehand from a Nadal-shaped opponent bouncing above the shoulder, forces the eastern player to open the racket face at contact and hope the wrist can time it. The margin for error is small. Semi-western and western players can absorb the high ball naturally because their racket face is already tilted forward at contact; the eastern player is fighting the geometry.
The second is the slow, high-bouncing clay court. Red clay is the eastern forehand's least happy surface. Balls sit up, points last longer, and the semi-western player gets three or four more strokes' worth of rally before something breaks. Federer's clay record was extraordinary given the grip he played with; it is not a coincidence that his one Roland Garros title came in a year Nadal was absent early.
If your club plays predominantly on medium-fast indoor hard, on grass, or on quicker courts generally, none of this matters much. If you are choosing a grip for a life spent on slow European clay in the summer, the eastern is a harder sell.
When to try it
The eastern forehand suits a specific club-player profile. Not everyone. But a profile worth naming, because the tour trend towards semi-western has obscured that this profile still exists.
You are a candidate for the eastern if:
Your court diet is grass, quicker hard, or indoor carpet.
You have a clean, early take-back and prefer to take the ball on the rise rather than let it drop.
You want to come forward more than the modern baseline game encourages, because the flatter drive sets up shorter follow-up balls and easier volleys.
Your arm and wrist do not enjoy the load of a heavy semi-western swing, particularly on stiffer frames with polyester strings. The eastern is measurably kinder to older or history-riddled wrists.
You value pace-through-the-court over shape-over-the-net and are willing to trade some safety for some penetration.
You are not a candidate for the eastern if:
You play mostly on slow, high-bouncing clay.
You already generate good pace and want more spin margin over the net.
Your opponents hit heavy topspin balls that rise above your shoulder consistently, and you have no reliable answer.
Before you change anything
Grip changes are not one-hour fixes. Anyone who tells you they are has not made one. The muscle memory in a mature forehand is a decade's investment, and it will fight a new grip for weeks before it settles. Expect your ball to miss the court in unfamiliar ways for the first three sessions. Expect the shot to feel slower before it feels faster.
The right test is a two-week trial in low-stakes practice, not a switch on match day. Hit hundreds of balls with a coach or a hitting partner who understands the grip. Ask for feedback specifically on the swing path and the contact point, because that is where the semi-western player's old instincts will contaminate the new grip. If after two weeks the shot is producing a lower, penetrating ball you can control and the grip is not fighting your wrist, keep it. If not, revert. The eastern is not a self-improvement badge. It is a tool.
A note for the reader who has read this far
If you are the sort of player who reads eighteen hundred words about a forehand grip you might switch to, you are also the sort of player for whom All Court exists. You put your phone against the back fence, film a session, and upload it. You get a "talking head" session inside your own video from a touring professional. Plus the AI-enabled platform compares those ratings against thousands of shots from hundreds of players graded by the same touring pros and elite coaches. The output is a personalised coaching session on your footage and an All Court Rating for each shot you hit and a cumulative All Court Rating that compounds every time you film more of your play, so that you can see which parts of your game are improving and which want more work. There is no nominator, no joining fee, and no waitlist that closes inside a generation. Join the waitlist at allcourt.club/join.
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