Some of you have waited impatiently for the arrival of the raclette season and are now preparing to open their Advent calendar. All these pleasures, if they are always good morale, can have a little more negative effects on your physical condition.

Rather than "endure" the holiday season, you could take advantage of this period to improve yourself physically and avoid getting out of shape at the first tournament you will do in January.

Do not wait until January XNUMXst to start making good resolutions, start doing a little physical preparation now. Why not take advantage of the extra calories that you will ingest during the holidays to start building muscle? Of course, you don't need to build a Teddy Riner physique to perform well at the padel, but we realize that some WPT players have relatively massive physique (Agustín Gómez Silingo, Mati Díaz, Pablo Lima…). Well-controlled muscle gain could help you gain strength and protect your joints. You can therefore take advantage of the next five weeks to work on increasing muscle mass in the weight room and maximizing your results.

With a view to progress in padel, the exercises to be privileged will be poly-articular (squat, deadlift, bench press, weightlifting movements…) in particular because they develop more strength and will make the heart muscle work more. Isolation drills are not to be thrown away though: they can be very useful for specifically strengthening injury-prone areas in football players. padel, for example the forearms. We can imagine a bodybuilding program like this: two or three sessions per week composed of 3 poly-articular exercises on which we will perform 4 to 6 sets of 10-12 repetitions and then if necessary one or two assistance exercises. We will add at least one cardio session per week, for those who have difficulty developing their legs, the interval training on the bike can be a good option. We will start each session with a good warm-up and a little cladding. For novices, feel free to have a professional teach you the correct technique for each exercise to avoid injury! The sessions can be followed by a little training padel, in order to transfer the gains to the field and avoid a degradation of the technique induced by the increase in force.

For those who do not want to gain weight, it will be necessary to focus training on cardio in order to burn as many calories as possible. For this the fractional seems the best option. Imagine two high intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions and one running or cycling session per week. A classic HIIT session consists, after a good warm-up, of a series of 4 to 5 interval exercises. We will choose the time that interests us, for example 40 seconds of effort, 20 seconds of rest. We will do 3 to 5 sets of this sequence. Regarding the exercises, for the padel, you can choose the squat in all its variants, the jump rope, the burpees, the chased steps, the work of supports etc.

We wish you courage as the holidays approach the end of years and keep in mind that a large meal requires a longer digestion time, so be careful not to train just after eating!

Xan is a fan of padel. But also rugby! And his posts are just as punchy. Physical trainer of several padel, he unearths atypical posts or deals with topical subjects. It also gives you some tips to develop your physique for the padel. Clearly, he imposes his offensive style as on the field of padel !

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