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, together with using a jump rope.

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?

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.

This summer I discovered a new sport that I love to play on Barcelona’s beaches. It’s called Frescobol. 

Frescobol is unique because instead of an opponent, you have a partner, and the goal is to support your partner rather than to try to win or score points. At the most basic level, it is a fun and intense workout that will elevate your fitness level and sharpen your reflexes.  The exercises and movements during Frescobol engage the whole body in a way similar that a personal trainer might help you to achieve in a gym – many different muscle groups that work together are used during the game. Frescobol is normally played on the beach but can be played anywhere you have some open space.

Frescobol is sometimes confused with Beach Tennis – a mix of tennis, beach volleyball and badminton. It uses a net, and unlike Frescobol, the objective is to score points competitively against opponents.

As partners, Frescobol players stand facing each other, approximately 5 meters apart. First, players can start out hitting the ball back and forth slowly to get a rally going while establishing a rhythm. The ball is kept in the air as long as possible, the objective being the greatest amount of powerful, accurate strokes per player, not to score points but to support your partners defensive and offensive strikes.  The distance apart depends on individual experience level, beginning with a closer distance with a controlled volley and increasing distance and speed as technique improves.

After some practice, players may begin hitting the ball with much more pace. The key, just like other racquet sports is to concentrate on the ball, keeping the eye on it all the way until it meets your racquet. After some practice, players get to fast pace rallies of 20 or more strokes.
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