6 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your Spin in Ping Pong

Last Updated on May 2, 2024 by Alex Horscroft

Spin and ping pong go hand in hand. In fact, I don’t know of any other sport where spin is as important. By understanding spin and having a good command of it, you elevate your ceiling as a player. Yet becoming a spin wizard isn’t something that happens overnight — it’s a gradual process.

After playing table tennis for over a decade, I’m finally in a position where I consider myself to be an elite player when it comes to spin. Below I detail six ways to take your spin game to the next level.  

1. Upgrade Your Equipment If Needed

Although I’m a big believer in skill over equipment, there’s no escaping the fact that your equipment plays a big role when it comes to spin in ping pong. 

I produce more spin than most players at my skill level, but give me a crappy paddle, and my spin will be woeful. Put simply, your racket can bottleneck spin output, so make sure you purchase one that is decent quality. It’s mainly the rubbers you need to worry about, and you don’t have to spend all that much. 

There are lots of great options from around $20-$40 per rubber sheet, and you can even spend less than that if you wish. 

As a side point, swap out your rubbers if they’re old. They’re killing your spin and you might not even realize it. Generally speaking, your yearly rubber change should be around the number of times you play per week. So if you have two sessions, change around every six months or so.  

2. Use Fainter contact

If you spend any time in social table tennis spaces, you probably hear the term “Brushing motion” fairly often. This refers to the process of generating heavy spin.

When brushing the ball, you’re focusing on faint contact. This ensures more of your input energy translates to spin rather than speed. It also helps to use a fluid motion. If you’re stiff the job is a lot more challenging.

To use faint contact, you need to adjust your racket angle and stroke to make it more open. For example, if you are going to loop a backspin ball, your angle should be more open and your stroke should be more upright than forward.   

3. Strike the Ball Faster

While faint contact will increase the spin you produce, the ball won’t be all that spinny if you use a slow racket motion. Speed is proportional to spin, so you need to use fast strokes if you want to be a spinny player.

The difficulty is that it’s hard to both be fast and produce faint contact on the ball, but with practice, you’ll soon get used to it.

4. Engage More Muscle Groups

A lot of players put far too much reliance on their playing arm for strokes. It’s not the correct way to strike the ball, and it results in a slower, lower-quality stroke.

Instead, you should engage all of the necessary muscle groups. This will result in a much more forceful stroke, and you may also find you recover quicker given you are using the correct technique. 

The best topspin stroke in table tennis is the loop, and It’s generally easier to produce high levels of topspin for the forehand than the backhand. This is because it uses more muscle groups. Unlike the backhand side, the forehand requires loading your weight onto your back leg and pivoting at the hips. This results in a much more explosive motion.

As for backhand, you may not get loading on the back leg or hip rotation, but there’s still plenty going on. Rather than just using your arm, instead, use a slight squat, and engage your elbow and wrist. Combined, these will result in way more spin.

If you want to learn how to loop, I recommend you give my forehand looping guide and backhand looping guide a read. 

5. Flick Your Wrist

I feel the use of the wrist in table tennis deserves its own little section as it’s really important. While you don’t use it all that much for forehand topspin, it’s very important for backhand and serves. It acts as the final focus point when you make contact with the ball. 

To engage the wrist properly, extend it away from its finish position almost as far as it will go, and then just before contact with the ball, snap your wrist outward. 

Remember, fluid motion is key. It will feel weird at first, and you may find that you are lacking control, but this will dissipate with practice. Engaging the wrist is a lot like throwing a frisbee. For a good throw, you need to properly coil your wrist and extend it outward using a fast and fluid motion.  

6. Choose Different Shots

A good way to increase your spin production is to either introduce more spinny strokes or increase the amount you use them. 

Let’s take topspin as an example. The fundamental topspin table tennis stroke is the drive. It’s easy to do but it only produces light to moderate topspin. To kick things up a gear, you can switch to loops. These produce heavy topspin but are harder to execute. Ultimately, they are well worth learning as they are the most popular shot in table tennis by a landslide. 

Closing Thoughts

Having a strong command of spin in ping pong makes you a much better player. And while I’d like to say that there is some cheat code to become a spin master, the truth is that it takes a lot of work. However, I feel that the six strategies I’ve outlined above are a good way to speed up your development.

I also recommend you check out my ultimate table tennis spin guide. Here, I break down spin much more thoroughly. 

*Cover image provided by XIAOYU TANG under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license | unedited