Padel fitness: strength and mobility that keep shoulders and knees healthy

Shoulders and knees in padel suffer from volume, not from one big hit: the overhead pattern repeats all match, and braking happens in almost every point. What protects them is thoracic mobility and strength inside the range you actually play in. In practice that means two short strength sessions a week and five minutes of warm-up before you step on court. Plus knee control when you stop.

What actually loads the shoulder and the knee in padel

Padel is rarely about hitting as hard as you can. The main overhead shot is the bandeja, played side-on with the arm at head height or above, and it repeats over and over. The smash shows up far less often. Volume of bandejas does to a shoulder what a single shot never will.

The second position that puts the shoulder in an awkward place has nothing to do with power: the ball coming off the back glass. The player turns, the arm travels behind the line of the torso, and the shot is taken from behind the body in end-range external rotation. I ask clients to copy that movement standing, without a racket, and many of them cannot take the arm back without arching the lower back. On court they do exactly the same thing, only at speed and with a racket in hand.

The knee does not get loaded by running. The court is 10 by 20 metres, there is nothing long to sprint, but there is the stop in the corner and the step back from the net. Plus the lunge to the glass for a drop shot. Every one of those stops is single-leg braking, with the front of the thigh working while it lengthens, holding a body weight that is already moving forward and down.

Shoulders and knees are the two most common complaints padel players bring to a first session with me. I am not going to quote injury percentages: the published padel numbers disagree with each other and I will not present them as fact. The order of complaints has been steady for years, and the mechanics above explain it better than any story about someone being weak.

Shoulder: thoracic spine first, then the scapula and the cuff

The arm does not go overhead on the shoulder alone. Part of the range comes from the thoracic spine extending and rotating. When the thoracic spine is locked up, and after a week of desk hours and long-haul seats it usually is, the body still finds a way to raise the arm. It arches the lower back and pushes the shoulder into its end range. The load lands where nothing is available to hold it.

What I look at in a first session: the player sits on the floor, legs crossed, hands behind the head, and rotates the torso to one side. If the rotation only happens because the pelvis follows along while the ribcage stays put, the work belongs in the thoracic spine, not in the shoulder.

Here is what that work looks like, step by step.

1. Open book. Lie on your side, knees bent and resting on support, the top arm leading the ribcage back towards the floor. Eight to ten reps per side, breathing out at the end. The point is the rotation you feel between the shoulder blades, not touching the floor.
2. Thoracic rotation sitting on the heels. One hand behind the head, the elbow leading up and back. The pelvis is pinned by your own body weight here, so it is harder to cheat.
3. Wall slide. Stand with your back to the wall, lower back flat, forearms sliding up. The moment the lower back lifts off, your range has ended. This is a drill and a test at the same time.
4. External rotation with a band. Elbow against the ribs, the shoulder turning the forearm outwards, 12 to 15 reps with no jerking. This is the cuff that keeps the head of the humerus where it belongs during a bandeja.
5. Pulling. Rows, lat pulldowns or pull-ups. The scapula needs muscle around it, otherwise the shoulder faces the shot on its own.
6. Overhead work. Single-arm seated dumbbell press. I only give it to people whose arm goes up without the lower back arching. If the arch is there, pressing overhead reinforces the exact fault they repeat on court.

Sequence matters more than load. Range first, control inside that range second, weight third. Loading a shoulder in a range the player does not own is a bill that arrives later. That is why the first weeks of sport-specific strength work for a padel player look boring: a lot of rotation and pulling, not much weight on the bar.

Knee: braking, glutes, and where the shin goes

Braking is muscle working while it lengthens: the quadriceps absorbs rather than pushes. That has to be trained on purpose, and a standard squat does not cover it, because in a squat you descend on two legs and set the speed yourself.

What earns its place:

1. Bulgarian split squat with a slow descent. Rear foot on support, three seconds down, normal speed up. Eight reps per leg, and the last one should look like the first.
2. Step-down. Stand on a box on one leg, lower the other heel slowly towards the floor, come back up. Everything shows here: the knee drifting inwards, the hip dropping to one side, the foot rolling in. Film yourself from the side and the front, it is more honest than a mirror.
3. Lateral lunge. Step to the side, weight on the working leg, knee tracking over the foot. Padel lives in sideways movement, while most people only ever train forwards and backwards.
4. Single-leg Romanian deadlift and single-leg bridge. Hamstrings and glutes. When the glute does not hold the thigh, the knee falls inwards at every stop and the joint absorbs the rotation.
5. Banded abduction. Simple and dull, and it is the muscle that stops the hip dropping when you step sideways.

What this looks like on court: the player runs into the corner, stops, and for a fraction of a second the knee travels inside the line of the foot. Once is nothing. There are dozens of those stops in a match and hundreds in a week with three games. The point of the strength work is that the fortieth stop looks like the first one.

Feet and a hard court

A padel court is built simply: artificial turf with sand infill over a hard base. The base does not absorb anything, so the first shock absorber in the chain is your foot.

One detail people notice late: grip changes with the state of the sand. On a freshly topped-up court the foot slides a little, which feels unsettling but takes part of the load away. On a worn court with hardly any sand left the foot plants dead. The body keeps moving, the foot does not, and the rotation is handed to the knee. If one specific court always leaves your knee complaining afterwards, look at the surface, not only at yourself.

What I give for the foot and calf: calf raises with a slow two-second lowering, seated and standing, and single-leg stance for thirty seconds, then the same with eyes closed. Separately, short hops landing softly on the forefoot. Plus one plain thing about shoes: a padel or clay sole, replaced once the tread is gone. A worn sole behaves unpredictably on sand and the knee pays for the surprise.

Mobility versus stretching

Stretching gives you range without control inside it. You can lie down, have someone push your shoulder into a good-looking position, and still fail to hold that position at speed on court, because the muscles there have never worked.

Controlled mobility looks different. You take the joint to its end range under your own effort, no hands and nobody helping, hold it, contract, come back. Then you load the same range: band rotation, press, row. A range that has strength in it is a range the body treats as its own and stops guarding.

I am not against stretching. It works well in the evening after a game, when the job is to settle down. But a long static stretch before a match does not prepare a shoulder for the bandeja or a knee for the stop.

Warm-up before court, and what to do after

Five to eight minutes decide more than people expect. The order I give padel players:

1. One minute of general warming: brisk walking, hops in place, anything that raises the pulse.
2. Open book or standing torso rotation, eight per side.
3. Wall slide or supported arm raise, ten reps.
4. Ten bodyweight squats and eight lateral steps each way.
5. Five to seven shadow bandejas with growing amplitude, no ball.
6. Two or three five-metre accelerations with a hard stop. This rehearses the riskiest movement of the game, and skipping it is a shame.

Afterwards, three to five minutes of easy walking and water is enough. In heat, drink and take salt from normal food rather than from products: I do not recommend or prescribe supplements, it sits outside my work. The ACSM position on exercise in the heat advises lowering intensity when the heat index is high, and that is a common reference point, not over-caution.

Sleep belongs in the plan next to the strength sessions. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reference for adults is seven hours or more. When somebody plays three times a week on five hours of sleep, the shoulder is not hurting because of the bandeja.

A padel player's week

Most people play two to three times a week, and strength work has to fit around court time without eating it. I place two sessions of forty to fifty minutes on non-playing days, or after a game, never before one.

Dubai sets its own calendar. From June to September padel moves into air-conditioned indoor clubs, and the people who stay on outdoor courts play early morning or late evening. Strength work matters more in those months, not less: there is less court time, which makes it the convenient window to sort a shoulder out without rushing.

Then comes the pattern I see every autumn. October and November bring the outdoor season back, people return to the court, and they restart at the level of play they left in May. The body, meanwhile, has spent two or three months barely moving or moving differently. The first game is usually fine, adrenaline covers it. Things tweak after the second or third game inside one week, once the volume has stacked up and recovery has not caught up with it.

The practical answer is unglamorous. For the first two weeks after a break, one game a week and two strength sessions, then back to the normal schedule. With clients I work with remotely I ask for more than weights and reps in those weeks: I want to know what the shoulder and the knee did twenty-four hours after a game. The delayed response tells me more than how someone felt walking off court.

Where to start this week

1. Film two things: a step-down on each leg from the side and the front, and an overhead arm raise standing at a wall. That is your baseline.
2. Put two strength sessions of forty to fifty minutes in the calendar with a day and a time. Not "when there is a gap".
3. Build the first session from five movements: Bulgarian split squat, Romanian deadlift, row, banded external rotation, calf raises. Two sets each, with a load that lets the last rep look like the first.
4. Glue the warm-up to the game. Not as a separate task, but as part of walking onto the court.
5. Write things down: load, reps, and what the shoulder and the knee did the next morning.

How to tell it is working

After three or four weeks, do not look at body weight or at the numbers on the bar. It is working if the knee no longer drifts inwards on your step-down video, if the arms go up at the wall without the lower back arching, if your bandeja technique at the end of the second set looks like it did at the start, if the morning after a game passes without the knee reminding you about itself, and if six or seven of eight planned sessions actually happened.

Those are slow signs and they look like nothing. What they show is that the load is going where it should rather than into the joint. If you want this built around your schedule and your own history with a shoulder or a knee, the five-question quiz on the site reaches me and I reply on WhatsApp the same day; one-to-one sessions start with exactly these tests rather than with a number on the bar.