Sandy Farquharson breaks down why keeping your feet moving matters in paddle. Most players pause after setting up a shot, letting their heels drop and slowing their reaction time. Stay on your toes, split-step at contact, and move fast on every shot to cover more ground and create better angles.
Chapters
Tip number 3 is keep really intense with your footwork. So often players will set a ball up and they'll put their opponents in a difficult position, and then they think the job will be done, and they kind of stand there, the heels go down, and the ball comes back. And if your heels are down, it means that you can't quickly move to it and cut the ball off and get there fast and take time away from your opponents. So keep active with those toes. You do a split step when they contact, and if the ball is soft and it's floating and you can attack it, if you move to meet the ball, that is covering an extra couple of meters. That's giving them less time. It's going to be easier for you to hit into the space. And so much of it is just really simple. It's just simple fast feet activation. And what you want to do is be like this all the time, not just on this ball but on all of your shots. Now we put together a Faster Feet for Paddle footwork course. So for all of our members that sign up, you immediately get our Faster Feet for Paddle, and that is the first thing you see, because regardless of your level, your footwork is what's going to be controlling your game, both defending and attacking. So if you sign up thepaddleschool.com, you'll get it straight away. The follow-along videos where you follow myself going through 4-minute, 8-minute, 12-minute footwork exercise videos, you can do the court, and that means it's muscle memory when you step onto the court, so you don't have to think about it. Because in this position, you've set the ball up, you've got them in trouble, you want to think tactically, strategically, you don't want to have to think about your feet. But here you need really active feet to step up and put them under pressure.