Mental preparation is a big factor in padel matches. Here are some tips to prepare yourself in the best way for your next padel matches.

Use Affirmations and Internal Dialogue

Practice these techniques during training as well as during competitive matches. During the tough moments of a match, encourage yourself with internal Diageo such as “I can do it!”. Don’t allow thoughts such as “My adversary seems to be better than I am” to enter your head. If you serve a bad ball or make a silly mistake in a volley, keep calm and move forward. Select a phrase that you can go back to during tough moments.

Utilize Breathing Routines

Regularly practice full breathing exercises. Before a match it’s very helpful to listen to music that aids in calming you down and breathe deeply. You can also select a visual image to go with this breathing routine. For example, you can imagine yourself returning a ball in spectacular fashion. This will ensure that you enter the match fully focused and confident in your abilities, while at the same time getting rid of debilitating states such as anxiety and stress.

Relax

After tough training sessions practice progressive relaxation to rid your muscles of the tension that naturally builds up. Keep in mind that while playing and training you are also using your brain and that is also a resource that gets depleted, just like your legs. You need to sleep well and enjoy periods of relaxation so that your mental status returns back to the very best before you approach your next training session or match.

Practice Visualisation

The top athletes of any sport make heavy use of visualisation. Basically this consists of visualising yourself playing in a match and going through the motions. Imagine you are serving in a particular way, and how your opponent will return the ball and where you will place the next shot. This will help internalise certain tactics and they will come out naturally during the actual match.

Under this heading we can also put watching top players in their matches. On YouTube you will find the recordings of the finals of the World Padel Tour, and you can also watch them live if you wish. I like to pick a side during matches so that I will feel all the pressure that they would feel if they are on the losing end, and also keep the concentration when they are winning. A very common mistake is that of having different levels of concentration during matches, and watching other matches while making the effort to maintain full concentration of each ball will help you in your own matches.

Consider Your Opponents

Try to obtain as much information about your opponents as possible. You can watch videoclips of them playing, or watch them playing in previous matches of the tournament that you are playing in. If none of those opportunities present themselves, make sure you use the warming up time of your match to observe how your opponent hits the ball and what are his weak and strong shots. Make sure you exchange information with your partner, as he will be warming up in parallel with the other opponent.

Use Video Recordings

Try to record your matches and later analyse them to see what your weaknesses are. Many times we think we are doing something one way, but when we see ourselves on video we realise that our image doesn’t match at all with our actual behaviour. That is a sure indication that something is off and needs correcting. Your coach will also help you in identifying these weaknesses and help you correct them.

Create Your Winning Imagery

Imagine yourself winning the match and how you would behave, and feel the happiness that comes with it. Go into your match with a definite expectation that your visualisation is a future reality, and the rest of the match is just the journey that will take you there.

Create a Pre-Match Routine

Anticipate distractions, prepare for them and minimise them. Familiarise yourself with the court you will be playing at, check out the weather and the sounds. Thirty minutes before the match, make sure you start your routine and enter your zone of maximum focus. Use whatever tools you prefer, such as a breathing exercise, listening to a particular tune, etc.

Hope you will find these tips on mental preparation for padel matches useful. Do you use any other techniques? Let me know!

As winter approaches, we will have to deal with rain and wet padel courts. It is usually possible to continue playing under light rain conditions, but if a court is soaked then it is better to stop playing or not start in the first place.

Let’s consider a few factors that change drastically when playing in wet weather, and how you can deal with them.

Let’s start with your preparation for the match. Make sure you wear warm clothes, preferably water proof ones. Wearing a cap will prevent rain from coming into your eyes and thus enhance your visibility. If it’s cold apart from rainy, make sure your warmup is longer than usual. Please also ensure you are wearing shoes that have excellent grip, as the surface will be more slippery than under dry conditions and the chances of slips and injury are thus greater.

The ball becomes heavier and loses its bounce when it gets wet. This is the first thing you will have to keep in mind. Given these conditions, it will be much harder to smash the ball and take it out of the court, which in Spanish is called sacarla x3 and sacarla por 4. The same applies for returning the ball to your side of the court after a smash (traerla a tu lado).

With the ball and racket being wet, there will be no grip when you hit the ball. You therefore have to forget about using topspin or underspin/backspin/slice. Use plain shots to make sure you get maximum power transfer and give the ball as much direction as possible under these low grip conditions.

Next, we will have serious problems with the ball bouncing off the walls. Since the walls are also wet, we again have a no grip issue. This will cause the ball to bounce in unnatural ways. Usually a medium to low powered shot will just fall off a wall in a dramatic way, leaving you expecting a ball that never gets anywhere near your racket. The solution to this is to flex your knees even more and prepare your racket lower to be able to catch balls even after irregular rebounds.

If the opponent hits the ball very strongly, you might get a rebound off the wall that is even faster than what you’re used to under dry conditions, and therefore it’s another thing to keep in mind. Using the walls under wet conditions is very tricky, so it might be a better idea to try to avoid walls altogether and play a kind of mini-tennis.

With the walls providing us with little support and lots of menace, it is better to avoid defensive play and always try to stay in the attacking position, close to the net. Try to volley firmly and deep into the opponent’s side to force them into playing off the walls. As we have seen, the walls are very unpredictable and so you will have a much higher chance of the opponent making mistakes. The same applies when serving. Under these conditions, it’s best to serve less balls towards the T and to the feet, and more of them into the corner where the opponent will be forced to play off the wall’s rebound. It will be very hard to return such serves. If you are able to apply some underspin, serving with low power towards the T can also be hard to return as the ball will bounce very low, making it very hard to return.

How about shots where we hit the wall on our side to return ball? This move is called contrapared in Spanish and is quite common in padel. When the walls are wet and the balls that heavy, you need to hit the ball in a softer and more controlled way. If you hit a backwall shot as you normally do in dry conditions the effect will be incredibly exaggerated, so nice and gentle is the way to go.

The so called globo is one of the best shots to use on rainy courts. Remember that it is really essential to position ourselves in the attacking position, since defending on wet courts is a loser’s game. Globos can help us gain the attacking position from our rivals, who will be forced to drop back into defensive positions.

For those of you who can understand Spanish, here’s a good video that explains how to play padel on wet courts:

Of course, if you can avoid playing in wet padel courts, do so even if it means paying a bit extra for indoor courts or covered ones. You will enjoy your games much more in dry conditions. If it rained before you start the match but the sky is now clear, it’s a good idea to dry off the walls so at least you’ll have an off-wall bounce that is similar to dry conditions (the ball will still be wet and affect the bounce). If you can’t avoid playing in wet conditions, then use the above tips to your advantage and gain an edge over your opponents.

Do you regularly play in rainy weather? Do you have any other tips to share? 

First off, let me start by saying that while I mention padel balls specifically in this post, it applies equally to tennis balls. So with that in mind, off we go.

One of the biggest costs of playing padel, after the cost of renting courts, is that of buying padel balls. Padel balls start losing their bounce as soon as they are taken out of their pressurized container, and during the match, as they are hit around they lose even more bounce. The result is that after two or three matches you will notice a clear difference in the bounce, indicating that it is time to open a new tube and throw away the old balls.

Obviously, that can get expensive pretty quickly, especially if you play a lot of matches every week. Also, during the second and third match, you will already be playing with non-standard balls as they would have already lost some of the bounce. This will affect your game as you will lack the constancy of a regular bounce. So we have the problem of cost and the problem of lack of consistency between one match and another. Keep in mind that throwing away so many padel balls isn’t so good for the environment either. Clearly, this is a significant problem that all padel players would love to find a solution for.

The good news is that I have finally found a great solution that is allowing me to keep using the same balls for up to twenty matches at a time. I can now keep my balls at the official pressure and enjoy the same bounce during every match. I eventually have to replace the balls not because they no longer bounce, but because the felt is so worn out.

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