Perfect Padel warm-up
¿What is too much?
¿Three series too little?
¿How long?
Often neglected a fair warm-up is essential for our bodies to perform its best every time we ask to.
Just like an opera singer does not warm up the same way a ballet dancer does, though they both do in advance of their performance, a padel player should not warm up in the same way a golfer does. Warm up is a must for all serious sports players both amateur and professional, but even more so, a targeted warm up for each sport is what will ensure its´ main objective: “bulletproofing” your body as much as possible to prevent injuries and aches.
“The biggest mistake is to overdo the warmup” explains our very own Daniel Dios, head coach at Padel Trainer. If there is any science to a warm-up is for it to live by its´name. What we want our warm up to do is increase our body temperature, activate our neural response getting our nerves ready to go while alerting our joints of all the hustle that will be coming next. Before planing on which moves execute to warm-up, be totally honest with yourself about your fitness level and the goal of your workout. Always keep it safe and don´t over do it. We want to make sure you make it through the warm-up, the workout and round up with a nice and gentle cool down.
The aim of a warm up is to gradually get your whole body prepared for work. An effective warm up will: Prevent injury to muscles, tendons, and ligaments. … Increase blood flow and temperature of muscles so they will react quicker.
5 moves that rise the heat.
Before entering the court make sure you have 10 minutes for a warm up. In this post we will cover individual warmup, saving our ideas for the duets warmup challenge for a coming entry. We usually tend to believe a bare minimum is 5 minutes, and if in those 5 minutes our heart is pumping and our face starts to flush we think we are all set. Not the case people. Keep in mind your warmup should frame 5 core areas:
- Cardio Routines
An active range of motion movements that tend to be similar to what you will be doing within the court can be a very good place to begin. Cardiovascular exercises will get blood pumping to your muscles and ready them for a more intense workout. You should work at a talk test pace: meaning, you can carry on a conversation without loosing your breath. Make sure you have at least two series of two minutes of each of these proposed. These moves are showcased for you to pick and choose. Variety serves us all well.
- Dynamic stretching. The idea behind it is using motion to prepare your muscles for action. Not any motion will do. Sports medicine experts suggest performing a few short intervals of the exercises to be undertaken at a lower intensity leads to increased endurance. Therefore, for padel players we resemble in “slow motion” what we will do inside the court during the game.
- Pump it up. I know we are not surfing a nice swell. But a swell of movement is what will be coming in a decent padel game. Explosiveness is key. The jumps and the kick-offs are an asset for padel players. Just like horse power, our bodies need to be reminded and pushed in a fairly small period of time of what it will be asked for. Burpees, plank jacks, frog jumps, high knees, alternating front lunges, elevated mountain climbers, box jumps (or anything you can come up with that for a split second reminds you of temporary torture will suffice). The case is to spend a good minute or two reminding our nervous system of speeding in 0,10seconds to its fullest. At our basecamp we enjoy a few of these, maybe you could try them at home. Anyone fancy?
- High Intervals. Think about responsiveness. Peak performance just when we need it the most. Defense and offense require that spur of the moment that seems to come out of nowhere. Well it comes from a complete interval comprising several short, alternating periods of both higher and lower intensity exercises. From lower to higher intensity periods of the same duration, this warm up technique suits both beginer and experienced athletes. What we shift is the heart rate threshold according to experience. Therefore, when warming up by yourself it is important to remain true to one´s own physical condition. 2 to 4 minutes of explosive intervals should be enough to prepare our bodies for the intensity, responsiveness and awareness of padel.
- Change of direction. Just like hand-eye coordination is important when small tasks are handled, a complete padel warm-up should waken up our body´s information inlets: visual, auditory and kinesthetic(movement) information sources. How do we do this: through shifting direction we push our body to sort out the best physical solution to reach, grasp and touch out of regular comfort zone movement. awake and aware is the end result. A warm up in this regard achieves best results while performing inside the court.
All set then? We can´t thank enough our dearest Billie Gadjic, our basecamp friends at Real Club de Padel Marbella for taking part in the production of a lot of the things we do. Ready people? Let´s go and play a good ball, see you in our court ; )
