How Endurance is expressed in Padel.
In this short article I will try to help you understand what we call endurance in padel, how we should express its variations and what its function is.
I will try to explain it in a simple and clear way that will help you to identify it when you play a game or do a training session.
Endurance manifests itself at a physiological level through the musculoskeletal system and the cardiorespiratory system.
Endurance is largely a specific derivation of your strength combined with your aerobic capacity, thanks to which you can perform actions of high muscular tension for a given time without lowering or diminishing to a lesser extent, the effectiveness of your movements.
More specifically, endurance in padel is often manifested as the ability to repeat power in high intensity actions separated by incomplete recovery periods ranging from 15-20 seconds in a regulation match to 30 seconds in amateur matches.
The more resistance you have, the longer and more often you will have the performance of your muscles available.
Being more resilient will allow you to contract your muscles on more occasions to their maximum capacity, to maintain low defensive positions, sudden accelerations, explosive steps or changes of direction to regain your position.
It will also allow you to adopt better positions throughout the match, helping you to tolerate stress positions such as the correct waiting position in a return or when waiting for a volley near the net.
Being more resistant on the court will also help you recover better between points.
You will be able to restore more quickly the oxygen debt generated in each point, especially in those long and intense ones that generate a debt that can last longer than the regulatory 20 seconds between each point.
Along these lines, it will also help you to lower your heart rate more quickly and this will allow you to start the next point better and make better decisions.
If you improve these ways of expressing endurance you will be able to maintain good levels of quality and explosiveness in your movements from the first action until the final minutes of the match.
All of this can be summarised in the fact that having greater endurance is correlated with the possibility of maintaining a better level of play for a longer period of time in the match, provided that the rest of the technical-tactical factors are in place.
TYPES OF ENDURANCE IN PADEL
Therefore, the manifestations of endurance that we should improve are power endurance and power repetition capacity:
- Power endurance:
- It will consist of maintaining a certain number of repetitions above a threshold for a certain amount of time. It manifests itself in a pure form in sports such as athletics, cycling or any sport that requires a continuous and generally uniform power threshold. When applied to padel, it is expressed in the ability to maintain a constant match pace, tolerate the speed of play throughout the match and even tolerate several matches in one day.
- Power repetition capacity:
- The ability to repeat power is based on repeating separate high intensity actions in incomplete recovery periods. It will allow us to maintain speed levels after successive game actions as the minutes go by. This well optimised capacity will allow us to maintain the explosiveness of our strokes and movements.
HOW WE CAN WORK ON ENDURANCE FOR PADEL
- The first goal to work on our endurance will be to improve the speed of our movements or the power of our movements with relatively low loads.
- From this approach we would first seek to generate peaks of speed or power of a movement and try to maintain these peaks during successive repetitions without rest or very short rest.
- Once we have improved the speed of an action, we will try to improve the recovery between these high intensity actions in order to be able to apply the same power.
Therefore, we will work on endurance with a double orientation:
- Maintenance of these power peaks over a long period of time.
- Reduce the time needed to be able to re-establish peak power.
If you want to know more about this capability, I recommend that you continue learning through the concepts of RPA and RSA.
- Repeat Power Ability.
- Repeated Sprint Ability.
These are terms that we physical trainers put into practice on a daily basis with our players, given the direct relationship they have with the demands we have on the court when they play.
