What does a week of padel coaching actually do to your game?

Three things, roughly in that order. It fixes where you stand, which is the fastest improvement available and usually lands in the first session. It makes the back wall routine rather than frightening, which cuts your unforced errors sharply. And it gives you the bandeja — the shot that lets you keep the net, and the one almost nobody teaches themselves correctly. What it won't do is change your fitness, or turn a beginner into a competitive club player in five days.

How much can you improve at padel in a week?

More than you would expect on positioning and shot selection, less than you might hope on technique that genuinely needs months of repetition. Most people come home noticeably more consistent — fewer errors, better court position, comfortable playing off the glass. Whether it holds depends on playing again reasonably soon afterwards; a one-off week fades.

Do you need to be a certain standard to go on a padel coaching holiday?

No. Coaching holidays suit every level, from people picking up a racket for the first time to club players sharpening one specific shot, and sessions are pitched to the players in the group. Where levels differ a lot, clubs typically group players by standard for the drills and mix them for the games.

Is a padel coaching holiday worth it if you already play every week?

Often more than it is for a beginner. A regular player has usually baked in a couple of specific habits — sitting too deep, smashing when a bandeja was the shot, no lob in the locker — and a week with one coach watching every session is the most efficient way to find and fix them. Arrive with one or two things you want to work on, and say so on day one.

What a Padel Coaching Week Actually Does to Your Game — Euro Padel Travel

What a Padel Coaching Week Actually Does to Your Game

16 August 2026 · 11 min read

"You'll come home a better player" is the easiest promise in travel to make and the hardest to hold anyone to. So here's the honest version. A week of padel coaching does change your game, but not in the way most people expect, and not evenly across everything you do on court. Here's what actually shifts in five days, what stubbornly doesn't, and how to set the week up so the change survives the flight home.

The first thing that improves isn't a shot

Almost everyone arrives assuming coaching is about learning strokes. It isn't, not at first. The biggest single change a coach makes in the opening session is where you stand. Most self-taught players — and nearly everyone who came to padel from tennis — live in the wrong part of the court: too deep to attack, too far forward to defend, and drifting away from their partner instead of moving as a pair.

Fixing that is unglamorous, and it's also the fastest improvement available to you. You don't hit the ball any better on day two than you did on day one; you're simply standing where the ball arrives. People consistently describe this as the moment padel "slowed down" for them, and it usually happens before they've been taught a single new shot.

Midweek: the walls stop being an emergency

The glass is the part of padel with no equivalent in any racket sport you've played, and untrained players treat a ball heading for the back wall as a lost point. It isn't. It's one of the most reliable balls in padel, because the wall hands it back to you at a predictable height — often easier to hit after the rebound than it would have been on the full.

What coaching does here is convert a reflex into a routine: turn side-on early, let the ball go past you, travel back with it, hit through it after the bounce. That takes repetition rather than talent, which is exactly what a concentrated week supplies. By midweek most people have stopped flinching at the back wall, and their error count falls off a cliff — not because their hands got better, but because they've stopped giving points away for free.

The bandeja, and why the week is really about it

If a coaching week has one signature shot, it's the bandeja: the flatter, sliced overhead you play instead of a smash when a lob goes up over your head. It exists for one reason. In padel, whoever holds the net tends to win the point, and a full-blooded smash from deep drags you backwards and hands the net straight back. The bandeja keeps you where you want to be.

It's also the shot nobody teaches themselves. The swing path is unlike anything in tennis, the contact point sits further behind you than feels natural, and getting it wrong quietly costs you the net all match long. Hitting thirty of them in a morning under a coach's eye is worth more than a season of grooving it wrongly at home — which is why this is usually the point in the week where improvers, not just beginners, decide the trip paid for itself.

What a week won't do

Now the limits, because they're real. A coaching week will not make you fit: five days is nowhere near long enough to change your engine, and if anything you'll play the last two days tired. It won't take a beginner to competitive club standard — the ceiling on genuine improvement inside five days exists, and no amount of court time removes it. And it won't fix anything you then stop doing. The shots you drill in Spain begin to fade within a few weeks if you go home and don't play.

The people who get most out of a week are the ones who arrive with one or two specific things to fix rather than a general ambition to get better. Tell the coach on day one that your bandeja keeps landing short, or that you're getting lobbed every second point, and you'll get a week built around it. Turn up with no brief and you'll get a good general week — enjoyable, but far less pointed.

Why a week abroad beats a term of lessons at home

The arithmetic is most of the argument. An hour a week at home is a series of disconnected hours, each starting cold, with a coach re-learning your game every time. A coaching week gives you more court time in five days than a weekly club player gets in two or three months, with the same coach watching every session — and, crucially, a real game straight after every drill.

That last part is what makes it stick. Drilling a shot and then playing points with it an hour later is a completely different learning loop from drilling it and going back to work. It's the reason we build most trips as padel coaching holidays rather than court hire alone: the coaching is the part you can't replicate at home, and courts are just courts.

Mixed groups: what actually happens

The most common worry about a coaching week is the group, and it's a fair one — most groups of friends contain a couple of people who play weekly and someone who has held a racket twice. In practice, clubs handle it the same way: players are grouped roughly by level for the drills, where the gap matters most, then mixed up for the games, where padel's format hides it well.

That works because a small enclosed doubles court is genuinely forgiving of ability gaps. Pair a stronger player with a weaker one, rotate partners between games, and the matches stay close. It's the same quality that decides the padel versus tennis comparison in padel's favour for a mixed group. If you're the beginner in the party, our first padel holiday guide covers what to expect; if everyone is new, a beginner trip is the cleaner place to start.

The unglamorous logistics that decide the week

Two practical things do more damage to a coaching week than any coaching decision. The first is heat. A hard technical session at two in the afternoon in July on the Costa del Sol is largely wasted, because you're learning while cooked. Coaching weeks work best early morning and late afternoon, which leaves the middle of the day genuinely yours — good news, but only if the schedule was built that way deliberately.

The second is travel. Two sessions a day turn a fifteen-minute transfer into an hour of your day, every day, and it's the cost people underestimate most when they book. On every hotel we list we publish the real drive or walk time from the door to each club you'd play at, and which of your games happen where, so you can see that before you book rather than discover it on day one. If you'd rather remove the problem entirely, hotels with padel on site is the shortlist where the courts are on the property or a short walk away.

So is it worth it?

If you already play and you've plateaued, a coaching week is the most efficient thing you can do to your game — you'll come home with your positioning, your back-wall play and your bandeja noticeably better, and a clear idea of what to work on next. If you're a beginner, it's the difference between spending your holiday chasing balls and spending it playing actual points. The improvement is real and so are the limits, and anyone promising more than that is overselling it.

The cost sits alongside the rest of the trip rather than on top of it — we've broken a full week down line by line in what a padel holiday actually costs. Tell us your level, who's coming and the one thing you'd most like to fix, and we'll build the week around it.