The traditional penhold attacker
Traditional penhold is the style that for decades defined Asian table tennis: a grip that concentrates the whole attacking game on a single face of the bat. Where the two-winged attacker described in 16.1 needs equipment balanced between both sides, classic penhold takes asymmetry to the extreme: one side attacks, the other barely exists. That radical concentration has direct consequences for what equipment makes sense and what is surplus.
The grip — described in 1.7 — allows a freedom of wrist that shakehand does not match. The forehand of traditional penhold travels through a wider arc, with a wrist pronation that generates contact angles impossible for someone holding the bat with the whole hand. That biomechanical advantage has produced some of the most lethal serves and the most devastating forehand loops in the history of the sport. But it comes at a cost: the backhand is reduced to a defensive push — the penhold backhand push — or to a rudimentary block with the back of the bat, without the rubber surface shakehand uses to attack on that side. The player compensates for the weakness with footwork: moving more, pivoting more, covering with the forehand what others cover with the backhand.
The blade. Traditional Japanese penhold uses solid hinoki blades or thick hinoki laminates, light and with a direct feel that transmits every nuance of the impact. Chinese penhold, more widespread today, prefers hard seven-ply blades or ones with outer composite — outer carbon — that deliver speed and stiffness to the full stroke. The Chinese penhold handle, short and without the flanges of the Japanese one, shifts the balance towards the head, which favours energy transfer but demands more wrist control. The differences between outer and inner carbon are developed in 10.3; it is enough here to note that traditional penhold leans historically towards the outer, because the dominant stroke is always at full power and the smooth transition between intensities matters less than in the two-winged game.
The rubber. The forehand side carries, in the Chinese tradition, a rubber with a tacky topsheet and hard sponge — the Hurricane 3 in its various versions is the canonical model — usually boosted to compensate for the sponge's lack of native speed. Section 5.3 develops Chinese rubbers and chapter 14 covers boosting; what matters here is that this combination is designed for a stroke seeking extreme spin through tangential contact, executed with the wrist amplitude penhold allows. On the backhand side, where the rubber barely intervenes, many players mount a thin sheet or an inexpensive rubber that meets the rules without adding unnecessary weight. Weight on the inactive side is dead weight that shifts the balance.
Weight and balance. Concentrating the game on a single side means the assembled weight matters differently from 16.1. Traditional penhold tolerates — and sometimes seeks — a somewhat heavier set-up on the forehand side, because mass helps the full stroke and there is no rapid forehand-backhand exchange to penalise. The total weight usually stays below 185 grams, but the distribution matters more than the absolute figure. Section 11.5 deals with assembled weight in general.
Distance and stroke. Classic penhold operates at mid and short distance, where wrist speed compensates for the missing backhand. The dominant stroke is a spin-heavy forehand loop drive, supported by a short wrist serve that is hard to read and an aggressive game over the table. When the opponent pushes the penhold player back, the weakness of the backhand is amplified and the style suffers. Equipment does not resolve that structural limitation, but a blade that is too slow or a rubber that does not activate on a tangential brush makes it worse.
This style has lost ground at the highest level precisely because the weakness of the backhand is exploitable against elite opponents who attack that side systematically. The evolutionary answer — the reverse penhold backhand — is no minor variant but a change of paradigm calling for different equipment, and it is developed in 16.3. Traditional one-sided penhold lives on in club play and in Asian recreational table tennis, where the freedom of the wrist and the spectacle of the forehand game make up for what the backhand does not give.