How To Spin Your Dinks In Pickleball (3 Ways)

Dinking in pickleball is not just about tapping the ball back and forth and then hitting hard at random. The goal of dinking is to set yourself up for a ball that you can attack on. You're also trying not to give your opponent a ball that they can attack on. And one of the most important aspects to dinking is what type of spin you're putting on the ball. So there's three different types of spin that you can use when you're dinking. And pro players and high level players use a specific spin every time. You're not just going to be getting a random spin if you want to be dinking successfully. So in this video, I'm going to take you through exactly how to get these types of spin. And at the end of the video, I'm going to give you a formula that you can follow so you know what type of spin to go for on every dink. So before I show you the types of spin that you should be using in your dinks, you need to think about the different aggressiveness levels and depths on your dinks. So the first type of dink you can go for is what we call a push dink. And a push dink is where you're pushing your opponents back. And the way that you do that is by hitting the dinks deeper into the kitchen. So here I'm hitting my dinks a little bit harder, and I'm going further in the kitchen. Look what Drew, he has to kind of back up if he can't take it out of the air, right? So push dinks are great for getting pop-ups so that you can speed up at your opponent. This is where you're being aggressive and trying to make them pop the ball up and you can attack. The next type of dink is a lift dink. So lift dink is essentially the opposite of a push dink. It's where I'm going shorter to prevent my opponent from attacking. Because if I go shorter in the kitchen, he has a worse angle over the net. Because if the ball is low, he has to hit it more up. So lift dinks, I might be using them when my opponent is using a push dink. And all I'm really doing here is preventing my opponent from attacking by hitting the ball short. So if he's going hard and I'm not in a good position to hit a push dink, I might go for my lift dink, which is essentially just preventing him from attacking. So those are all good examples of lift dinks. And the last type of dink you have to understand is something you want to avoid, which is a dead dink. A dead dink is just one that gives your opponent a ton of time and a good angle over the net. So a dead dink looks like this. Really high. Drew has a good angle to attack. He has a lot of time. The ball is in front of him. You don't want to be giving your opponent slow dinks that are bouncing up high. It's just a bad dink. So a dead dink is essentially a bad dink, and we want to avoid those at all costs. Now getting into the spin that we use on dinks. The first type of spin that you have to understand is slice. So slice looks like this, and slice and backspin are the same thing. So as you can see, on these dinks, I'm spinning the ball back towards me. So we're getting underspin on the ball, which has a few benefits. And one of the first benefits is that when you slice, it sort of feels like the ball is staying lower. The reason for that is it bounces a little bit back towards you, which keeps it closer to the net. So it gives your opponent a worse angle of attack. So when you're using a slice dink, it's a very good way to neutralize your opponent from attacking you. So it's a good dink to use when you're hitting a lift dink, because when you're hitting a lift dink, remember, you're trying to prevent your opponent from attacking. So on a slice, it's a very good neutral dink that essentially just keeps you in play. Another good reason to use a slice is if you're stretched out. So when you see players really stretched out on a dink, usually they're going to use a slice and not one of the later spins that I'm going to show you. And the reason for that is when I get stretched out, a lot of the time, using this slice form is just easier. So it's a lot simpler for me to use a slice, because all I have to do is set my paddle and I can just push forward through the ball. So when I get stretched on my slice, especially on my backhand, I set my paddle so it's already facing my target and I just push forward through the ball. What is the technique of that? Let me show you right now. So in terms of the technique on the slice dink, to get backspin, I need to make sure that I'm coming under the ball. So when I hit the dink, I'm kind of cupping under it like this. So I'm leading with the bottom edge of my paddle. I'm going to have a continental grip when I'm doing this on both sides. That's how you get slice. You're essentially just cupping under the ball so that you get a little bit of backspin and you don't need to overdo it. So you don't need to be like really chopping at it. You're literally just cupping under it so that it gets that backspin. It's really easy to see if you're doing this properly. Just look at the ball and you'll see if it's coming back towards you. And on the forehand, it's the same thing. You're just cupping under the ball with this bottom edge of the paddle. So forehand slice dinks look just like this. It's very subtle motion. You're getting a very subtle amount of spin, but it does have a pretty dramatic effect on the balance and how low the ball is for your opponents. And an important technical thing to think about is that when you're hitting your slice dinks, you want your paddle to be parallel to the court. So your wrist should be cocked. You don't want it to be down like this. This is what we're going to do on that future dink that I'm going to show you in this video. But for these dinks, you want your wrist to be like this on both sides. So see how my paddle, when I'm hitting these dinks, is sort of sideways with the court. It's facing the same direction, and that lets me get under it with my bottom edge of my paddle. So it's sort of impossible to hit a good amount of slice if you don't have your paddle off to the side like this. And all I'm doing in terms of my stroke is pushing my paddle directly towards my target. Before I hit the ball, I set the angle of my paddle towards where I want to hit it, towards my target. So if I want to hit straight in front of me, it's going to be like this. If I want to hit cross court, it's going to be like this. And to hit the ball, I just push towards the target with my shoulder. So I don't really use much elbow. I just hinge my shoulder while cupping under the ball to go straight towards my target. So you're minimizing the variables. You're really just using your shoulder to hit the shot, no wrist or elbow. You're cupping under it. This is how you stay accurate with this shot. So you don't want to be over-complicating it by moving your body or moving your elbow too much. You're literally just hinging with your shoulder towards the ball. So the next thing that you have to understand if you want to ever be an advanced player is tops. So tops and dinks are our aggressive dinks, and they're how we lure our opponents into giving us pop-ups that we can attack. The problem is if you don't have a gritty paddle, you're not going to be able to grab the ball enough to make your tops and dinks effective. If you're looking for a paddle that has more grit, but you don't want to break the bank, highly recommend checking out ours right now, because for Black Friday, they're all on a crazy discount. This is our brand new paddle, the Duo. Right now, if you use code FRIDAY, you can get it for $45 off. This is one of the best paddles on the market. It competes with all the paddles that are like $280. Right now, you can get it for $45 off, which makes it $155, which is way too good of a price for this paddle. So if you want to get one with our Black Friday discount live, head to our site now and use code FRIDAY. If you're watching this on Black Friday weekend, you can get a free pack of balance pods with any paddle that you purchase. So if you get one of these, you get that crazy discount, and you get one of our free packs of balance pods so you can weight the paddle up. If you're looking for a new paddle, guys, I highly recommend you go to our site now and get one of these. So topspin dinks are essentially the exact opposite of slice dinks. Here, I'm riding up the back of the ball, going up to spin the ball away from me. And when I do this, a few things happen. The first is that when the ball bounces, it jets off towards my opponent. So it does the opposite of slice. It jets towards them, which makes it harder for them to time it. So if I can hit a really spinny topspin dink, I can actually create my opponent to hit a miss hit, right? They might miss the center of their paddle because the ball jumps off more, and they might hit a pop-up or miss it in the net. Also, when you're hitting topspin, technically the ball drops faster. It doesn't drop that fast since we're not spinning as much as we are from the back of the court, but it does drop a little bit faster, which gives you the ability to hit it slightly harder. So I can hit the ball harder, and it jumps off my opponent when it hits the ground. So overall, these are just more aggressive dinks, and you want to be using them as push dinks, meaning you're hitting them deeper in the box so that your opponent sort of gets pushed back, and you can move them around so that your opponent gets stretched. So as you can see there, I hit one towards Drew's backhand, and I go cross-court towards his forehand. I'm sort of just moving around with my topspin dinks, trying to get him to give me that pop-up so I can attack. And in terms of the technique you want to have to make this happen, you want to have that same cocked wrist that you have when you're hitting your slice dinks because it's really hard to hit topspin if your paddle is pointing down like this. You want it to sort of be sideways like this, and you really are just riding up the back of the ball. So when I'm hitting my topspin dinks, I'm lifting up with my shoulder as I'm going forward. So a slice, I'm cupping under it. On a slice, I kind of finish with my paddle facing up. On topspin, I finish with my paddle facing a lot more forward. So I don't have my paddle facing up, which forces the top edge to ride up the back of the ball. So I'm not really going under the ball like I am with my slice, which also makes the topspin dink a little bit more linear because I'm having my paddle facing more straight towards my opponent. On a slice, it's more up, so I get a little bit more lift when I hit my slice. So topspin dinks are generally harder because I'm hitting them more linear like this. And you really want to keep things simple, so you might see pros doing some topspin dinks where they're like lifting up their hand like this after they hit the ball. That's a good thing to do if you're advanced and it'll give you more spin, but if you're just getting the hang of a topspin dink, make it simple on yourself. Minimize how much wrist you're using, and just really try to lift with your shoulder. So to hit a topspin dink in the simplest possible way, you just are lifting up like this. You don't need to be windshield wiping, you don't need to be lifting up with your elbow that much. Literally just lift up with your shoulder and go up the back of the ball. A good way to practice the technique of hitting the topspin dink is to just get on a windscreen and practice going up like this. So this is what you're doing. This is how you get topspin. You look at the ball, it has topspin on it after I do this. This is just a good way to get that motion, to really understand what you need to do to get that type of spin. Obviously when I'm hitting a topspin dink, I'm doing that while going forward too. So you can kind of back up and practice on the fence. If you look, if I hit good topspin on the fence, the ball goes straight up. So you can kind of see that you're getting a spin by feeding it to yourself like this or having trouble doing it in an actual rally. On the backhand, getting topspin on your dinks is a little bit trickier. You can do it with one hand, which looks like this, but this is not that common. You don't see that many players doing topspin dinks with one hand, but if you want to try it, it does look like this. I'm actually not that good of it because when I hit topspin dinks on my backhand, I do use two hands. So most high level players, when they're hitting topspin dinks on the backhand, they use two hands. To do this, you have your two-hander grip and you essentially just ride up the back of the ball like you do on a forehand topspin dink. If you want to go deeper into the two-hander backhand, I just made a video on that last week. I'm not going to go too deep into that. Just know that topspin dinks are a lot easier for most players on their forehand. On the backhand, you're just riding up the back of the ball in the same way. Don't need to overcomplicate it with a wrist. Whether or not you're using a one-hander or a two-hander, same idea. You're just riding up the back of the ball. The main thing you need to think about is just getting that spin. You might need to do a little bit of drilling to practice the technique of getting the spin so you can apply it to a real rally and a real point. The last type of spin that you need to know is the flat spin, so essentially no spin. Flat dinks look like this, and they're essentially when I'm not hitting any spin on the ball. You might still see some spin because the ball's never just going to be perfectly still, but on a flat dink, I'm not really getting much spin at all. A lot of the time, you're using flat dinks on lift dinks, so you're just trying to get the ball over to keep the dinking rally going. When this is really common in my experience is when you're jammed, meaning the ball is really close to your body, or you're reaching, like you're in a bad position, and you're just trying to get the ball over. Let's say Drew hits a really short dink. If I'm not there, I can just tap it over with a flat dink and stay in the rally, or he hits it right at me. I don't really know what to do. I can just flat dink it right back to him so that I stay in the rally, so I'm not really going for spin here. I'm just trying to hit a lift dink that's closer to the net so I could stay in the rally. Flat dinks are our most consistent dinks because there's the littlest amount of things going on. A lot of the time when I'm hitting my flat dink, my paddle is facing down. I'm literally just pushing my shoulder forward and getting that dink right a little bit short in the kitchen so that he can't attack on it. It's really situational dink. It's not ideal, but it is the most consistent dink and the easiest dink to hit. If you can't get the Thompson dink or the Slice dink down yet, don't feel bad if you're just using flat dinks to start. It's a totally fine way to get the feel for dinking before you learn the other types of spins. It is the more beginner dink, but a lot of advanced players will use this in the situations that I mentioned. Now guys, I'm going to give you the phrase to remember, so you always know what type of dink to hit depending on what situation you're in. What the phrase is, is slice when you're stretched, flat when you're jammed, and top spin when you have time. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're ever stretched out side to side, usually your best option is to go for a Slice dink because here you have the best ability to hit a controlled dink when you're not really in your strike zone because with Slices, you can sort of cup around the ball the best. So if I'm stretched out, I can set my paddle like this and slice under it. So when you see pros that are stretched out, a lot of the time they're using their Slices. Now, as I just mentioned, why we hit flat when we're jammed is because a lot of the time when we're jammed, it's a little bit awkward to hit a spin. So here I can just go for a flat dink because the ball is right into me and it's just a little bit awkward to go for any other type of spin here. And of course, top spin when you have time because when you have time, you want to be going for aggressive dinks and top spin is the best spin to use when you're hitting an aggressive dink. So whenever you have time and you have top spin down, not everyone has top spin down, but if you do, you want to be using top spin when you have time because that's the best dink to push your opponents back, get a pop up that you can speed up on. So when you get top spin down, you want to use it whenever your opponent gives you a dead dink or gives you an easier lift dink that you can attack on and you want to use a push dink. Thank you so much for watching guys and make sure to subscribe if you enjoyed that video and if you enjoyed those tips. If you want to see another video where me and my sister take you through the top amateur mistakes that I see players making at RecPlay, watch this.