Improve Your Padel Rating in 30 Days (Step-by-Step Plan)

It is absolutely possible for you to raise your rating level in 30 days. Most players don't really know what to focus on, they don't know how to work on certain areas, but in this video we're going to break it down, what you should be doing in 4 weeks if you want to get to that next rating level. Now I want to break a bit of a myth that playing more doesn't necessarily mean you will get better. At the beginning, when you play a lot, you get a little bit better because you understand the rebound, you understand your objective within the points, but because you don't learn technique or tactics, you end up plateauing. And at that stage, to play more, all you're going to do is ingrain more bad habits. I bet that most people watching this are playing socially a few times a week, and it is random. They are having random opponents, often a random partner. Maybe they're playing an Americano or socially with friends, but without proper structure in their training, it's inevitable that they won't actually progress. And all it takes is for you to lose to a friend that you shouldn't do, and frustration builds because you know you should be winning that, but you don't really know why, and you can't pinpoint it on your game. When I look around the clubs, I see very chaotic padel being played, everyone having an amazing time, but then you also see that frustration that people lose to people they shouldn't because they don't know what they should be doing tactically or with their techniques. So my solution is to give you a very simple 4-week plan that you can implement to incrementally improve your rating, whichever rating app you are using. Now I know this works because we've done it with thousands of players over the years, both in person and online. And if players look at it in this light, I know that they can actually work on their game, get progress, consistent progress, and improve. So my name is Sandy Farquharson, I'm founder of The Padel School, and I've worked with players over the last 15 years, right the way from beginners— we've worked with thousands of beginners— all the way up to national players and coaching the men's GB team as well as playing on the GB team myself for 10 years. So I have definitely worked with players of your level and one system that we have used, our Padel School Performance Cycle, is a really simple way that we work with players both on court and on digital on our platform, but we work with them online so we give them education where they can learn. We also have a focused practice or training section and then we also get them to work on their match and their tactics and their performance side as well. And that cycle is a really simple way to help you focus on your game. You take what you need to learn, you work on the training court or the practice court to improve those skills, and then you work at implementing them on the match court. So in week 1, we're going to focus on 2 main areas. The first is clarity around what your main weakness is. And I don't mean, I can't finish with my smash and I want to hit my smash harder, which is seems to be the answer to everyone's problems. But actually, where are you making mistakes in your game? If you could remove unforced errors from one part of your game, what would it be? And start from there. And when you find that shot or area within the court, what is causing you to do those unforced errors? And getting real clarity on that. Now, we have a Padel School journal, a match and training journal. You don't have to use that. You could use your own journal. But in that journal, we ask a few tactical questions and technical questions around what you need to focus on and setting your goals. Now, whether you do this on your own or you do it within the journal, it's really important that you are super clear on your biggest weakness, as opposed to saying, "Well, I want to improve 25 different things in my game." You want to have 1, maximum 2 specific focuses that you're gonna work on to improve. If you are not sure what your weakness is, there's a couple of ways to deal with this. First, You can set up a phone on a tripod and record your game, and you can look at it yourself and you can say, oh, what am I doing? And try and work out yourself what you're doing on the court. You could have a coach look at that match with you, or you can have a coach watch your game and give you advice. Ideally, someone with experience and knowledge. They understand the game and they can give you the root of the problem. I don't recommend asking other players for advice. I see it all the time at clubs. Loads of players giving each other advice about what they should do with their shot based on what they know. And really, it's like a bad game of Chinese whispers. You end up practicing the wrong techniques and get yourself into worse habits. So ideally, find someone who understands the game and has the knowledge. Now, if you're a PowerSchool member, you can put that video that you've recorded into our platform, and myself and the other coaches, we will give you the tips and the feedback that you need. But really, you want to get to the root cause of the technique that you need to focus on. When I'm talking about the root cause, I am talking about the technical issue that you need to fix. So to give you an example, Imagine I am trying to hit flat on my backhand and my balls are all going out and I see it from the video, they're all going out, and the result is not me thinking, oh, I need to actually just aim this in because it's just not so easy to do that. You need to go back to the technique and you look at the technique and you say, oh, maybe I'm taking the ball late, my contact is late. You say, okay, and you look further back and say, well, actually I'm a little bit slow to get into position, that's why my contact is late. And then you go a bit further back and you say, well, actually, I'm not actually split stepping in a ready position, therefore I'm late to move, therefore I'm late on the contact, therefore the ball goes out. And so the root would be getting yourself to focus on your ready position and split step. And you may not even need to change all of the other bits in order to get it in. That might help you be earlier to the ball and therefore hit a better shot. So you are looking for the root cause within the technique that is the biggest weakness in your game. As well as clarity, we are going to give you something else in the first week that will help you immediately improve your game, and that is footwork. We found that players from every level, right the way from beginner all the way to our national level players, if they focus more on footwork, they will become better players. They will get to the ball earlier, they will have better adjustment steps around the ball, they will be more accurate with their shots. Now on the Padel School, we have Faster Feet for Padel course, and that is a follow-along videos, 4-minute, 8-minute, 12-minute videos that you can follow along with me doing the footwork exercises, and you can add that as a warm-up, you can add that in the gym as part of a training session, or just a standalone session. And if you can implement 2 or 3 of these per week, you will be faster on court, I guarantee it. It's already happened to a lot of our players, a lot of our members have improved just by having faster footwork. So I highly recommend doing some of those as part of your routine. The great thing about the footwork is you can focus on this off court and get really fast feet off court, so when you step on court, it becomes automatic and you don't have to think about it. That's what we're looking for. So also in this first week, to give you something to focus on, on the court as well when you are playing your matches, is court position. I look around clubs around the UK, but around the world in these countries where the game is emerging, and players almost all the time are getting themselves into incorrect court position, and that is a major flaw in the tactic. If we can solve that in this 4 weeks, you will definitely raise the level as well. So your focus here is, if you're at the back of the court, stay at the back of the court until you have a good opportunity to come to net, which is usually a lob, and when you get to net, stay at net and hold the net unless you are forced back. Try to avoid this middle zone here, often described as no man's land. At a high level, it's a transition zone. So if we've got any Premier Padel players or advanced players that are watching, yes, absolutely, you can use this as a transition zone. But for the vast majority of us, this is no man's land because we get stuck here. So that is going to be your focus for this first week. Get clarity on the weakness and the root cause of that technique, work on your footwork straight away in week 1, and have a focus of core position when you are playing your games. So week 2 is getting to the bottom of the technical focus. Now you want to identify that root cause like we've done, but we also need to work out how to fix it and also how to practice it. I recommend an experienced, knowledgeable coach. If there's one at your club, fantastic, you could maybe do some exercises or some drills with them. If you go online, you can find one or two good channels on social media, but you will also find lots and lots of poor information. A bit like that idea of players listening to players, we've now got those same players making channels and giving advice online. So you want to try and get to a knowledgeable source if you can and work out what you need to do to make that fix. And once you've worked that out, you then need to practice it. And so many of the techniques can be practiced at home. There is the movement patterns you can practice at home, there's ball control you can practice at home. We developed a whole ball control and grip course to help players with the continental grip and their contact and controlling the speed of the ball. And we don't step on court once during that course. And that is something that you can do again off court. If you improve these areas of your game, these techniques off court, it's so much easier when you step on court and you don't have to pay the expensive court fees to get on there and practice it yourself. So this week is around practicing those specific techniques and those exercises. Put the time in. You won't be able to fix this in a social match. You need the time either hitting against a wall or practicing some shadow work on your own, but either way, practicing the correct technique— and it's all muscle memory— the more you practice off the court, the better you will be when when you step on court. This is key and it will help you build consistency. So this week we're focusing on the practice for that technique and building consistency and getting good ball control. A great way to practice this is to use the warm-up of your matches properly. Don't use the warm-up just to smack the ball around and chat to your partner about what's going on in their social life. Use it to practice specific elements of your game. And if we use the example of the backhand, it's going to be like, right, I'm going to use the warm-up to practice those technical things that I'm focusing on. And this is a good way to do a little bit of practice before you step into the match, because week 3 is how do we implement these technical fixes or these technical areas into our match and give it a tactical focus. So in this week, week 3, It is, let's get really clear on our technical focus every time we step on court, what we're working on, as well as putting that into a tactical area of the game. And you don't have to use the journal, but I highly recommend getting clear. We have a, a pre-training and a pre-match section that actually asks you these questions and what you're focusing on and what your tactic is. And then we want to get really clear really clear on that. So if we keep using the example of the backhand, you're going to practice the backhand in the warm-up, then when you get to the game you're going to say, right, every time I get a backhand I'm going to focus on hitting this ball down the middle, for example. So you're making a tactical focus for this technique, and also you want to work on your game plan as a whole. So yes, we're going to work on the backhand, but we're also going to work on our game plan with our partner. So it might be every time I get that backhand I'm going to go down the middle, but also every time I get a short ball, I'm going to hit the lob, which is something that we don't see a lot of recreational players doing. They often get a short ball and they absolutely nail it to try and hit a passing shot, but really the best thing you can do is lob and you and your partner get to net. That would be a tactical focus for your game as well as working on the technical focus of your backhand. I would caveat this by saying it's not easy to work on a technical thing within your game if you are playing an important tournament. If it is a social game with your friends, absolutely, please do this focus because it will help you improve. And only have one or two focuses within your technique and tactics, and that is how you can incrementally improve. If it's a really important tournament, it is difficult to focus on your technique within the game, and I recommend just focusing on strategy and tactics and the mental side of your match. And that way you can perform well in the tournament, but also the rest of the week you could use to work on those areas. Now, week 4, we've only focused on one technical area throughout the first 3 weeks, and ideally you've put in lots of practice off the court. You've been doing the footwork courses off the court, so you're feeling faster on the court. You're doing the ball control course as well, so that you're getting great control on the ball and you know how to slow the speed down, how to really use your hand and grip to control that ball. And now we are really focusing on the tactical element. So not only do you want to put this in as a tactic— we said week 3 the idea was to focus on a single thing— now we want to put it within a pattern. Patterns of play in padel are crucial because every shot you hit is hit with the idea that it is either the start or the end of a pattern. And often if it's the end, it usually means it's the start of the next pattern So for example, if you're using the backhand again and we're going to hit firm down the middle of the court so we can get a weaker ball so that we could lob, for example. And I think that every time you play, you want to have an intention of the shot because it is part of a pattern. So week 4 is really understanding the patterns. Where does this shot and your other shot fit into the patterns? And let's try and apply those patterns under the pressure of a match. At this stage, I highly recommend videoing all of your matches so that you can watch them back, but also because you're starting now to ideally look at another area of the game. If that same area is still your weakness, then you need to go back and you need to spend longer on it, and you need to practice off the court, practice on the court, and get so it's not a weakness, not necessarily becomes a strength, but at least it's not a weakness. And then you want to focus on the next thing that is your weakness. Now, we always say to our members, try to avoid binge-watching and working on so many different areas on the game. Like, on our platform, we have over 700 videos. It's no use watching all the videos and then trying to implement it all on court. Focus on a specific area, a specific technique or tactic that you want to improve understand that it requires learning, which may be online or in person with a coach. It requires practice and training, and then it requires time and focus to put it into a match. If you know what your weakness is, I challenge you to put it down in the comment section and also let us know how you're working on it. Up here I'm going to put a link to thepaddleschool.com where you can get all of our tutorials around technique and tactics, as well as our footwork and ball control courses. And then down here, a footwork video that shows you the important steps you need to take.