The Groundwork

Most of us come to the warm-up as an apology. We arrive late, change our shoes, walk on cold, and spend the first three games catching up with a match that started without us. Then something aches, and we go looking for a stretch, or a reason, or someone to blame. I have never played that way. I learned padel in Spain, over years, where the moving-about beforehand and the stretching afterwards are simply part of the day, done while people are still talking. What surprised me when I came to the UK was how seldom I saw any of it. So it was a breath of fresh air to sit down with Steve Threadgold, a personal trainer who plays at my club, and hear someone talk about the preparation as part of the sport itself, and not the thing you reach for once the sport has already hurt you.

His word for it is prehab. It is not an elegant word, but it is an exact one: the small, regular work you do so that you never have to do the other kind, the rehabilitation that only begins once an injury has set in. Padel, he points out, asks the body to twist, turn, bend, jump, accelerate, decelerate, lunge and change direction, all at once and all unpredictably, because you never know what is coming next. The better you get, the faster the game, and the more it asks. Playing more and hoping the fitness arrives on its own, he says, is simply not enough. If it works for you, you have been lucky.

Two words that are not the same word

The first thing our conversation corrected in me was a lazy habit of language. I had always used mobility and flexibility as though they were one idea. They are not. Mobility is the ability of a joint to move, actively, through its range. Flexibility is the ability of a muscle to lengthen, passively. They are linked, because a tight muscle will not let a joint travel far, but they are trained differently and at different moments. Mobility is dynamic and active, so it belongs before you play. Flexibility is passive and quiet, so it belongs after, when you want the muscle to release. Most of us do a few static stretches on a cold muscle before a game and call it a warm-up, which is the right discipline at the wrong time.

The calf that ends in the sole of your foot

He makes the point through the ankle, because the ankle is where padel players so often break. The joint is governed largely by the calves, the gastrocnemius and the soleus, which feed into the Achilles tendon and on into the foot. When you push off your toes and lean into a ball you are asking the calf to lengthen fast and then shorten hard. If it is tight, because you never stretch it, it does not want to lengthen, and it pulls harder on the Achilles, and the ankle loses the movement it needs. The body, being stubborn, makes the movement anyway, and the cost is paid elsewhere: the plantar fascia under the foot overworks to raise the heel, or, worse, the Achilles tears. Tendons carry less blood than muscle, so they warm slowly. That is why the mobility comes first. It drives blood into the places you are about to ask to work.

The strength you build off the court

None of that is the whole of it, and here is where my old idea of all this turned over in my hands. The warm-up and the cool-down are only the bookends. The foundation, the thing that decides how much the court can ask of you, is strength, and it is built away from the court entirely. A few bodyweight lunges train the knees that bend to every low ball. Some shoulder work, presses and raises, prepares the joint that carries every bandeja and every smash overhead. Core and glutes steady the hips and the spine, and a steady spine is a lower back that does not seize the morning after. None of it is exotic and none of it needs a gym you dread. It needs repetition, which is the one thing the body reliably rewards.

There is a favourite example in all this, and it happens to be mine too. Novak Djokovic, who at nearly forty still slides into something close to the splits to reach a ball and recovers in time to win the point, did not arrive there by luck. He trains both disciplines, the mobility and the flexibility, and he has been an advocate of yoga for years. Yoga I came to late myself, around 2018, years after I first played padel, and I had always felt the two were speaking the same language without being able to say why. The distinction put the grammar under the intuition. The stretch is not the thing you do instead of moving. It is what lets you move.

Age changes the arithmetic, not the principle. A good deal of this thinking comes from players who took the game up in their fifties, arriving either as complete novices or as runners and cyclists whose bodies were beautifully made for one thing and quite unready for the sideways, stop-start demands of another. In your late twenties the body forgives a cold start. From the forties on, the gap between how ready you feel and how ready you are widens, and the strength work earns its place twice over. The players still on court at seventy are the ones who did the groundwork on purpose.

I grew up around courts in Andalucía, where the ritual around the game always seemed to matter as much as the game itself: the moving about beforehand, the stretching done while people were still talking, the understanding that the caña comes only once you have finished properly. I used to think that was culture. I am now half-persuaded it was physiology all along, handed down as manners.

Ana Del Pino Sastre writes The Body and is married to co-editor Andy Galt. This piece draws on a conversation with Steve Threadgold, a personal trainer who plays at Padel4All Lockleaze, and on padel-fitness notes he has published; The Alborán has no commercial tie to Padel4All or any fitness programme there.