The forehand grip that produces the most topspin is, for almost everyone we put on a ball machine, the wrong grip to learn. That is the conclusion we reached after three test sessions, and it is the opposite of what the grip's spin numbers would suggest in isolation.
The Hawaiian forehand grip sits at the far end of the modern grip progression — past western, with the hand rotated further still under the handle. It can generate enormous spin. It also narrows almost everything else a forehand needs to do. We wanted to know whether that trade was worth paying for an intermediate-to-advanced amateur who already owns a competent semi-western or western forehand. So we measured it.
What the grip actually is
Grips are easiest to describe by where the base knuckle of the index finger sits on the octagonal handle, counting bevels. For a right-hander holding the racquet edge-on:
- Eastern places that knuckle on bevel 3 — the "shake hands" position.
- Semi-western moves it to bevel 4, under the handle's bottom-right edge.
- Western moves it to bevel 5, fully underneath.
- The Hawaiian position pushes further around, so the palm is more beneath the handle than behind it and the racquet face is closed at a natural, relaxed contact.
The further the hand rotates underneath, the more the strings point down at address, and the more the swing must travel upward and across to square the face at contact. That is the whole mechanism: extreme low-to-high to compensate for an extremely closed starting face. You will sometimes see the term used loosely for any very western grip; we mean the genuine outlier, where the knuckle is closer to bevel 6 than 5.
How we tested it
We are an editorial desk, not a biomechanics lab, and we will say plainly where our method is thin.
Hitters. Six players: four men, two women, all NTRP 4.0–5.0, all habitual semi-western or western forehands. None had used a Hawaiian-style grip in match play. Each took a 20-minute supervised familiarization block before data collection, which is short — a real conversion takes months. Read every result through that limitation.
Feed. A Lobster ball machine set to a flat, medium-pace feed at two heights: a knee-high ball (≈0.6 m at contact) and a shoulder-high ball (≈1.4 m). Fifty balls per height per grip condition, per player.
Grip conditions. Each player hit the same feed blocks with their native grip and with the Hawaiian grip, order randomized to limit fatigue bias.
Measurement. Racquet-mounted inertial sensor (Zepp-class) for RPM, a radar gun for outgoing ball speed, and a taped target zone — a 1.5 m deep band inside the baseline — scored by two observers. We logged each ball as in-zone, in-but-short, or out.
That is 50 × 2 heights × 2 grips × 6 players, or roughly 2,400 logged balls. We report medians, not means, because a handful of shanks per block skews the average and the median better reflects the typical shot.
What the numbers said
The table below pools all six hitters at each contact height, comparing each player's native grip against the Hawaiian condition. Spin is sensor RPM; in-zone rate is the share of balls landing in the deep target band; "short" is in-play but landing in front of the service line.
| Condition | Median spin (RPM) | In-zone rate | Short rate | Out rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native, shoulder-high | 2,710 | 61% | 14% | 25% |
| Hawaiian, shoulder-high | 3,340 | 58% | 11% | 31% |
| Native, knee-high | 2,290 | 54% | 21% | 25% |
| Hawaiian, knee-high | 2,460 | 31% | 37% | 32% |
Two findings stand out, and they pull in opposite directions.
On the shoulder-high ball, the Hawaiian grip added roughly 600 RPM — a real, repeatable jump of about 23%. That is the headline the grip is sold on, and it is genuine. The closed face and steep upward path produce a heavier ball when the contact point is high and out in front, which is exactly where this grip wants to work.
On the knee-high ball, the spin advantage nearly vanished (170 RPM) while control collapsed. The in-zone rate fell from 54% to 31%, and more than a third of low balls landed short. With a face that closed, squaring up on a low ball forces either a near-vertical swing or a wristy save, and our hitters produced a lot of netted and floated returns. The out rate also crept up across both heights, which we read as the cost of an unfamiliar contact window rather than a permanent property of the grip — but even a trained user has less room for error before the face over-rotates.
The cost is structural, not cosmetic
The low-ball result is not a quirk of our short familiarization. It is built into the geometry. A grip that closes the face this much needs the ball above net height and ahead of the body to time cleanly. Take that away — a low slice, a ball that skids on a fast court, a stretched defensive position — and the swing has to do extra work to recover a square face. Every grip has a comfortable contact zone; this one's is the smallest and the highest of the common options.
That is why the grip has historically appeared on slow, high-bouncing clay and almost nowhere else at the top level. Alberto Berasátegui, the most cited example, built a career around an extreme grip and a forehand-heavy, clay-leaning game — and even he ran out of margin on faster surfaces. The pros who hit monstrous modern topspin overwhelmingly do it from a hard western, not past it. That absence is itself evidence.
Who this is for, and who it isn't
It might be worth exploring if you play almost exclusively on slow clay, your contact point is consistently high, you already lose nothing on low balls because you slice them anyway, and you have months — not minutes — to rebuild timing. A junior on clay with a coach can absorb that cost; the geometry will reward a high, early contact more than any other grip.
It is not worth it if you play on hard or fast courts, if you face low or skidding balls regularly, if you value a reliable defensive forehand, or if you already hit clean topspin from a western or semi-western grip. For that player — most of our readership — the 600 RPM you might gain on the ideal ball does not pay for the consistency you lose on every ball that isn't ideal.
The honest version of the advice is that grip changes this large rarely return their investment for an adult who already has a working forehand. The marginal spin is real and the marginal cost is larger.
Verdict
If your forehand only ever met a shoulder-high ball on slow clay, the most extreme grip on the spectrum would be defensible. It does what it claims: more spin, a heavier high ball. But forehands meet low balls, fast balls, and awkward balls, and on those our hitters lost more than the spin was worth.
Evidence grade for the central claim — that the Hawaiian grip's spin advantage does not offset its consistency cost for typical amateurs: Moderate. Our spin and outcome differences were consistent across six hitters, but the sample is small, the familiarization was brief, and we had no trained Hawaiian user as a reference. Treat the direction of the finding as solid and the exact magnitudes as indicative.
We opened by calling the highest-spin forehand grip the wrong choice for nearly everyone, and the 600 RPM it added is exactly why that sounds wrong. The number is real. It is also the only column in our table that the grip wins — and it wins it on the one ball that behaves itself.