When you’re training hard and competing regularly in padel tournaments, you need to make sure that you are also taking care of your body’s nutritional needs. You want to make sure that you have enough energy to cover all your expenditure during training and playing, as well as taking in enough protein for muscles to repair themselves and grow if needed to adjust to higher demands.

Here’s what I recommend.

Protein Shake

I take a daily protein shake to help cover my protein needs. This can be taken right after your training session or padel match. After such hard exercise, your muscles will have many micro tears that need to be repaired, and protein is what your body needs to be able to do so.

Optimum Nutrition is the number one brand for protein shakes. I’ve tried their Vanilla, Cookies & Cream and Double Chocolate flavors. Double Chocolate is my favorite, and Vanilla is also pretty decent if you want to keep it plain. I wasn’t a big fan of the Cookies & Cream flavor, although it’s bearable. Some flavors work well with milk and water, while others are only tasty if combined with milk. Double Chocolate tastes great either way.

I buy the 2.2kg tub which serves me for around 2.5 months.

Here in Spain, I buy my shakes from one of these two shops, depending on which one of them has the best pricing at that point in time:

• Bulevip
• MasMusculo

Amazon also carries most variations of this protein shake, but the other two shops tend to have better pricing and occasional freebies.

Fruit

I know these are not really considered supplements, but it’s important to mention them as they are some of the major sources of fuel during intense activity like long padel matches. Bananas are my favorite food during matches together with dates.

BCAAs

I use BCAA powder to mix in with my water during intense workouts. While I haven’t found obvious evidence about this, my friend Andrew from MirrorFriendly recommends taking BCAAs, so I am currently doing so. The idea is that they protect your muscles from breaking down during intense activity.

Vitamins

I’ve experimented with vitamins over the years but have never found any obvious results due to their intake. The scientific opinion these days seems to be that unless you have major nutritional deficits you should be able to obtain all the vitamins you need from your feed and some daily exposure to sun. I do regular bloodwork to make sure that all my levels are good. A good doctor will easily identify any issues there and suggest which supplements to take, if any.

What supplements have worked for you? I’m curious to know, just leave a comment below.

If you want to improve your footwork and agility, you need to concentrate on stability, resistance, speed and mind body co-ordination.

These videos will show you a plethora of exercises that will get you there. Although they are made for tennis players, they apply perfectly well to padel players too, as padel is very similar to tennis as a sport.

Agility ladders are one of my favorite exercises for improving agility.

Speed ladder drills are about quality and form rather than producing overload. The drills are not meant to leave you fatigued or breathless in the way that shuttle runs might, for example.

It is better to perform these drills at the start of a session after the warm up. Your muscles should be fresh to ensure good quality of movement. And because they will not leave you exhausted you can perform resistance or endurance training afterwards.

When performing agility ladder drills, keep in mind the following:

• Push off from the balls of your feet (not the toes)
• Pump your hands from shoulder height to hips (men) and from chest height to hips (women)
• Keep your elbows at 90 degrees at all times
• Keep your arms, shoulders and hands relaxed
• Try to keep your head still as much as possible

If you’ve ever watched boxing matches you’ll have observed that boxers have fantastic agility and footwork. That’s why we have a lot to learn from these athletes. Check out this video for some fantastic tips that can be applied to padel. When you think of it, moving in a padel ring and moving in one half of a padel court are not that different.

What other exercises and techniques do you use to improve your footwork and agility in padel?

Physical preparation for padel is very similar to tennis. I would say that padel is perhaps less demanding than tennis; in fact in the top 16 players of the World Padel Tour you will see some players who are noticeably overweight. It’s impossible to see the same thing in tennis. These players are obviously super talented in their tactical acuity and accuracy with shots, and they compensate for their extra weight with these attributes. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not important to take great care of your fitness and physique if you want to be a top player or just improve at this sport.

As in tennis, your grip is very important as it will facilitate hitting the ball in a consistent manner, thus avoiding the unforced errors that many times are the main factor between losing and winning a match.

Another problem with playing padel is that you will be using your dominant side of the body all the time with your shots. That can lead to imbalances in your body and which in turn leads to a greater chance of injuries. It could also look a bit funny, you don’t want your forearm on one side to be double the size of the other 🙂 It’s therefore important to work on keeping your body in balance. A great way to do this is to use bodyweight exercises or kettlebells. These two methods of training employ many muscles at one go and hit both sides of the body.

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An essential part of every padel match is the warm-up phase. You should arrive at the venue around 30 minutes before your match and warm up before you enter the court to play.

The five minute warm up we see during World Padel Tour matches can be misleading. The players aren’t actually warming up during those 5 minutes. They are not even sizing out their opponents. The only purpose is to get used to the bounce of the court and the general atmosphere of the venue. The actual warm up for these professional players would have started around an hour before the match in another court.

Injury prevention is as important to the pros as it is to amateurs, and that means that we all need to warm up properly before our matches.

Warming up serves two primary purposes:

• Lets us perform at our max right from the start of the match.
• Helps prevent injuries due to muscles and joints not being warmed up.

A mistake that many players do is to stretch before a match. This doesn’t help and can even hamper your performance. Here I am referring to static stretching specifically. When you perform static stretching, it goes against what you will be doing in the match itself. You are stretching specific muscles, while in the match those muscles need to be contracting.

What we want to be doing is warming up those muscles and move them through the movements we will be doing in the match. Once the match is over, our muscles will be all tightened up, and that is the correct time to perform static stretching to return the muscles to their natural relaxed state.

The pre-match warm up doesn’t need to be done in a padel court, so there aren’t really any excuses.

You should maintain your activity intensity at around 10-20% of the match intensity.

I usually do around 20 minutes of warm up in summer and 30 minutes in winter, because Barcelona can be quite chilly in winter, and it takes more time to warm up the body.

Here’s a typical warm up routine that I follow:

1. Jogging for 5 minutes.
2. Different kinds of movements that mimic the ones used in padel, for another 5 minutes. Typical movements would be lateral runs, backward runs, crossovers, knee ups, butt kicks etc.
3. One minute of short sprints, change of directions and virtual padel shots.
4. Five minutes of dynamic stretching.
5. Five minutes of rallying in the court or outside volleying with my partner.

As mentioned earlier, remember to do some static stretching after the match. This will keep your muscles in good shape and aid recovery.

Here’s a static stretching cheat sheet for padel:

What are your favorite tips for warming up and cooling down for padel?

Many amateur players place a great emphasis on hitting sliced shots while in attacking positions.

We have to ask: Why do we do this and what do we achieve? Unfortunately, in many cases, all we achieve is to give the sliced effect to the ball but at the cost of the real quality that an attacking shot should have, which is none other than power.

When we hit such sliced shots, we want to see the ball hit the back wall and have a very low rebound. A powerful and deep shot will give very little time for the opponents to reach, and rebound lower than a sliced shot that is hit weakly.

So something to think about: is it better to hit a fast shot without much of a sliced effect or opt for the slice effect risking a weak shot? It is clear that in matches we will gain more points with a fast shot.

Of course, the ultimate aim is to be able to combine both power and effect in attacking shots, but this is an advanced technique that most beginners and intermediate players struggle with. So we should seek to continue improving the sliced shot together with hitting fast shots in training, but in matches where every point is important, we should concentrate more on hitting fast shots.

This is a tip I learned from top padel coach Javier Casadesus.