How to Hit Topspin, Slice, and Lift Dinks

Hi welcome to Brionis Pickleball. My name is Jordan Brionis and in today's video we're going to go over three essential dinks that you're going to need to dominate up at the non-volley zone. Now let's jump right in. All right so let's get right to it. These are the three essential dinks that you're going to need to dominate up at the non-volley zone line. We're going to go from beginner to intermediate to advanced dinks and we're going to show you a couple progressions on how you can practice them and also why you would want to hit each of these dinks. All right this is level one. We're going to start with basic flat dinks. Now what I call a flat dink is a dink that doesn't have a lot of spin on it. You're just lifting more of a lift or push motion and you can still hit very effective dinks this way but there's just not a lot of spin. So flat dinks look kind of like this. Here we go. Bones out of the air. Drop back a little bit. Okay so notice here these dinks are really well hit dinks like I'm keeping them low and I'm not moving Katrina too much right now but with flat dinks you can see that I'm for sure lifting from my shoulder low to high motion on my forehand and backhand side and you can hit really good and aggressive flat dinks. Just because your dinks don't have spin on them doesn't mean that you can't hit aggressive dinks. So if you're used to just hitting just flat dinks that can be okay. Just make sure that you're lifting from your shoulder. You're not using your wrist. So everything is from low to high and I'm lifting it or pushing it the same kind of motion from low to high from here to here and if you're going to be hitting mainly flat dinks you want to make sure that you're mixing up short and deeper dinks and also pushing it closer to the line towards your opponent's forehand and backhand. Okay so nothing wrong with flat dinks. They don't have a lot of spin on it or any spin rather but you can still hit pressure flat dinks. Okay I'm going to show you again. Here we go and I'm going to try to hit some more aggressive ones here. Okay just by hitting flat. Good. Nice. Out of the air. Nice. Okay good. All right last one here. So you can see in that rally there I didn't hit any of those dinks with any kind of spin. I'm just lifting them from my shoulder low to high with a lift and or push motion from here to here and on my on my backhand it's from here to here but my location was really good. So I'm moving it to her forehand to the backhand making her volley some and also making her having to let some drop. So that's the key to good quality dinking and that's what's going to force errors and pop-ups from your opponent. So remember nothing wrong with flat dinks. These are the dinks that are easiest to hit when you start and again you can be a really great player just by using flat dinks if you have good location and you're hitting good targets. All right so now we're going to move on to level two and these are slice or underspin dinks. All right you may have seen lots of players hitting slice and the benefit of hitting slice or underspin is that the ball stays low and tends to you know kind of skip on the ground or not bounce as high. So with slice and underspin that's really good because you know as that ball stays low it forces a lower contact for your opponent. All right so I'm going to show a couple examples of some slice dinks here. Here we go now Katrina and I are cross-court from each other even side to even side. All right here we go that's a good underspin that's good slice good okay. All right so those were some good slice or underspin dinks. Notice that when I'm hitting more of a slice it does stay you know fairly low to the net because I'm trying to keep that low bounce on the other side and just technique wise a lot of people think that slicing it means you have to really really cut it like this okay. As you saw in those examples my swing is actually pretty short and compact. The other thing that you're going to notice is when I hit these slice dinks I really have to move my feet stay low because I'm going to be coming across my body from my right to my left okay. So I'm going to use a shuffle step here I'm low okay I'm in good position and it's just from here to here okay. So I'm not taking it way up and I'm not cutting at it like that it's not really high to low but it's more from here kind of like from this position here and I'm just carrying it across from here to here from here position a to b so from here to here so it's not a really long stroke it's actually pretty short and I'm going to show you one last time again I want to stay low and I want to move my feet and I want to contact it and catch it early or out in front right here it's just from here to and notice when I hit my slice I move back with a shuffle step so that's really really important so let's see this again all right here we go okay all right so there you saw some really good examples of me hitting some good slice dinks staying low to the ground very short and compact stroke coming across my body and again I'm not using my wrist those were really good examples just from here to here my wrist is nice and relaxed and it's cocked here and again I'm hitting these cross court okay so this is where I tend to use a lot of slice dinks trying to keep the ball low Katrina why don't you head over here to this side all right so from here you know you could hit down the line slice dinks but it's a lot tougher because we don't have the room right so I can do it but you know it's not as aggressive too that's the other thing I could hit to Katrina's feet but if I sail it too long again let's see it again I'm trying to hit some slice dinks if I sail it too long they're gonna attack it right so that's why when I'm hitting slice I really like to use it the slice underspin usually in cross court rallies because you just have a lot more breathing room so again you could do it here you know down the line but where I really utilize that shot is cross court all right so now let's jump into level three top spin dinks okay if you have played any four five or higher level players you probably have seen them hit with topspin now topspin is you know starting low and ending high and what topspin does it accelerates the ball forward and it actually dips you know because the ball is traveling in a forward motion the ball is dipping down to your opponent's feet a lot faster than something like a flat dink so topspin dinks are very very useful and they're used by high level players and if you can easily hit flat dinks and easily hit slice dinks and you don't have a topspin dink yet I would really urge you to start practicing it because at a higher level it's really really effective all right so now I'm going to show you a couple rallies here with topspin dinks and I want you to notice I am hitting them cross court again because I have more room and I'm hitting them you know closer to that line that non-volley zone line to Katrina's right foot over there and and again when I'm hitting this cross court ball it's going to be taking her and pulling her out and this is another reason why hitting topspin dinks is a really good play all right last one here we go all right so as you saw there that is hitting with topspin and again I'm going cross court I have more room more margin for error and what you can see there it's a low to high motion so again footwork is really really important I need to get my feet shuffled over if the ball is wide and I'm going to drop my paddle to this position okay I'm dropping it low and when I swing up on the ball you know I'm going to be going from low to high and it's not a huge swing right I'm not I'm not doing that big swing like that right it's really compact it's from here to around here towards my left shoulder I'm keeping it nice and tight and then I'm gonna go back to my ready position so from here I'm going to show you from there to there okay so this low to high motion goes a long way when you're trying to develop and create topspin you don't need to have a fast swing speed right it's actually slow to medium swing speed it's just from here to here and that's all you need remember this ball is dipping down towards the feet of your opponent and it is you know going to be kicking towards them or kicking wide towards the sideline of the court so that's why this shot is really really tough and it's very very useful at high levels all right last one all right so as a really good player it is really important and vital that you can recognize what kind of dink that you're going to hit in what situation remember if the ball is really really tough let's say it's really pulling me out and I'm kind of running for the ball that's not one where I'm probably going to hit topspin all right that's going to be really really tough any time I'm more on the defense I kind of want to hit more of a lift dink where I'm just lifting from my shoulder trying to just consistently get it over and when it's more of a dead dink when it's in front of me that's one where I can be more aggressive so maybe I can hit it with some underspin or I can hit it with some topspin now we're going to do one last rally here and I'm going to be mixing it up and you're going to see here how I actually decide pretty early what I'm going to hit and I'm going to pick my spot in my mind but I'll verbally call out topspin underspin or more flat so we're just going to play out a couple points here and you're going to see how I can kind of construct my dink point all right underspin some topspin here underspin okay underspin all right a couple more here we go I'm going to feed it with a flat dink underspin here topspin topspin underspin okay topspin okay all right all right last one here okay underspin cross court topspin cross court topspin down the middle underspin cross court okay underspin cross court there we go topspin cross court topspin cross court topspin middle okay here we go slice middle underspin all right so as you saw there that is a mixture of you know more lift dinks underspin slice dinks and topspin when your opponent is getting all these different kinds of spins different kinds of dinks gives them different looks every each and every time and it's really difficult for them to manage and to handle sometimes so again as an advanced level player or wherever you are beginner intermediate and you're learning different kinds of dinks different kinds of spins go out there and start practicing these dinks and different spins and again it's going to take time but as you learn to construct the point keep the ball down hit it at the feet make the move you're going to find a lot more errors from your opponents and you're going to find a lot of a lot more pop-ups for you to put away thanks so much for watching this video we'll see you in the next one