At the level of amateur padel can happen to find us more confident with a zone of the field, between those who prefer the bottom of the field and those who instead galvanize being under the net.
In general we know, we are often told that in padel it is important to gain the net because it is from here that the winners are closed.
True in principle, however, it is essential to learn to dominate from the back of the court. Because at an amateur level many points are closed due to general inexperience, but also because there are many opportunities to close even when our level rises. As long as you know how to do it!
A mistake that should not be made is to throw the ball back to the opponents with the sole intent of overcoming them and run to the net because the risk will be more than concrete to serve easy balls to attack. From the top if we look for escape in lobs or volleys that overcome us while we mistakenly position ourselves too far ahead in the field.
In order to become more concrete and offensive, it is important to improve our approach from the back of the court, with more control of our shots but also more diversification.
Here are three tips that will help you to significantly improve your performance when opponents close you down
The first has to do with grip. It is true that with padel you can play with just the continental grip but if we want to grow in level, we must be able to learn all the different nuances of the grips because depending on how we hold the paddle we can give an effect rather than another.
It is an aspect to which perhaps too little attention is paid but it would be worth spending lessons with a good teacher because the difference in the game becomes remarkable. Correcting your grip will help you on groundstrokes as well as being more offensive on shots that require it and being more effective on harder balls.
It’s the equivalent of doing solfeggios when you want to learn to play the piano…it can be tedious but it’s the step that allows us to then play Beethoven’s symphonies beautifully.
It conditions the technical gesture. Seems obvious, in the end we take classes to learn just that right?
Only, we then have to pay attention to our technical gesture during matches as well…and that’s harder to do.
It’s quite common to find yourself taking a lesson to find that the volley is set up differently, both by foot and by arm movement. So, we invest minutes making volley after volley, in amazement at how beautifully taut it comes to us, with little bounce and really hard to rebound.
The sad news is that, in order for this same volley to come out on the court, overriding how we have always made volleys, it takes time. Time in which we insist on lessons and corrections from the master and objective observation of what we do on the court.
In fact, it can be useful to record our games because it allows us to observe the real movement we make in the excitement of the game.
We will find that we hit fewer of them from top to bottom than we would like…but awareness is the first step.
This attention allows us to be more aware of our action in the game and, especially in club games, helps us experiment knowing that we might miss a little more.
After all, if you don’t do it, you won’t do it wrong; if you don’t do it wrong, you won’t learn.
Speed, this blessed one. We have written many times, padel is a game more strategic than a game of strength. The goal is to open up spaces in the court where you can put your opponents through. Of course, the smashes, the porTres, the x4s and the winning stones excite us more, they also give us the feeling of unloading more of the day’s tensions… but if the objective is to unload all our strength on the court, perhaps we would do better to dedicate ourselves to some combat sport.
A strong ball often ends up on the glass and if it bounces correctly, it has the habit of coming back comfortable and high for my opponents.
So I don’t have to smash anymore? Of course not, they are part of the game. However, it should be the decisive shot, which we make when we have created the conditions to prevent opponents from hitting back.
Instead, it happens more often than we realize that knowing how to measure speed, knowing how to give a rhythm and then suddenly break it upwards or downwards, provides us with more wins than some unsuccessful paddling. For some people this may be a sad reality, but you only have to watch any Pro game to realize how the power shot is an asset used with a little bit of luck.
These steps are easier to improve with the help of a good teacher, who can force us to perfect the technical gesture and the rest, as well as observing us in the game or in our recordings.
In any case, applying these three simple tricks immediately offers important improvements in our performance!
Good Padel to all
by Roberta Lozza
