Is padel a good workout? What the science actually says

Nobody books a padel court because their doctor told them to. You book one because three mates are free on Thursday, and the hour disappears in rallies and laughing, and afterwards there’s a decent chance of a beer. Which raises a slightly awkward question for a sport that a million Britons now play: if it’s this much fun, is it actually doing anything for you?

It’s a fair thing to wonder. Padel’s whole sales pitch is that it’s easier than tennis — underarm serves, a smaller court, walls that keep the ball in play. Easier is why beginners love it. Easier is also, you might reasonably suspect, code for “not really exercise”. So it’s worth looking at what sports scientists have measured when they’ve strapped heart rate monitors and GPS units to padel players — which, thanks to the sport’s boom, they now have. Repeatedly.

What your heart is doing out there

The short answer: more than you think, and in a rather clever pattern.

A 2025 systematic review of padel research in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching pulled together the match-play data, and the picture is consistent. Players spend a match at an average of around 74% of maximum heart rate, spiking to roughly 85% of maximum in the hardest passages of play. Around nine-tenths of playing time sits in the aerobic zone — the steady, fat-and-carbohydrate-burning intensity a spin class spends most of its time chasing — punctuated by short bursts of something much fiercer.

That pattern has a name in gym-speak: interval training. Padel points are short and sharp, separated by a few seconds of walking back into position while somebody retrieves the ball. Work, brief recovery, work again, for an hour. Nobody on a padel court thinks of it that way, which is rather the point — it’s the exercise structure personal trainers charge to inflict on you, administered without your noticing.

The distances are modest but honest. Players cover roughly three kilometres per match, around eleven metres per point, and more than half of all movements are lateral — the shuffling, side-stepping, lunging work that running and cycling never touch. Top speed in a padel match rarely exceeds a gentle jog’s sprint finish, which tells you what padel is not: it is not repeated 20-metre sprints. On a court ten metres wide shared between four people, there’s simply nowhere to sprint to.

The calorie question

Calories burned is where fitness claims usually go to inflate, so let’s be careful. There’s no single agreed figure for padel, because it depends on your weight, the standard of the match and how much of your hour is genuinely spent playing. Match analysis suggests the ball is in play for about half the booked time — better than tennis, where the figure is famously lower, but still a long way from continuous effort.

Sensible estimates for an hour of doubles padel cluster around 400 to 600 calories — in the same neighbourhood as an hour of brisk cycling or tennis doubles, below an hour of running or singles squash. A competitive match between decent players sits at the top of the range; a sociable knock with generous pauses for point post-mortems sits under it.

If your only goal is maximum calories per minute, padel is not the optimal choice, and no honest article will tell you otherwise. But calories-per-minute is the wrong ledger. The relevant comparison isn’t padel versus a track session — it’s padel versus what you’d otherwise have done on Thursday evening, which for most of the million new British players was not a track session.

What it builds (and what it spares)

Padel is a leg game. Watch a good player for five minutes and you’ll see the sport’s real currency: split-steps, lunges, low positions held while waiting for the ball to drop off the glass, and hundreds of small accelerations of a metre or two. Research on regular players has found measurable improvements in sprint speed, grip strength and lumbar (lower-back) strength — that last one notable, given how much of modern life is spent destroying exactly that.

Just as interesting is what padel doesn’t do to you. The serve is underarm, which removes the single most shoulder-wrecking movement in racket sport. The rallies reward placement over power, so nobody has to hurl themselves at the ball. National Geographic’s look at the sport’s health effects noted that padel is generally less physically punishing than tennis, particularly for beginners, with an injury rate of around three injuries per 1,000 hours of play — the usual suspects being elbows, calves and knees, and the usual cure being the warm-up most players skip. (We’ve filed “warming up properly” under mistakes every beginner makes, because it is one.)

There’s a cognitive dividend too. A padel point involves tracking a ball off two walls, a partner’s position and two opponents’ intentions, at speed — sustained spatial processing that researchers link to raised levels of BDNF, a protein that supports brain health. You will not notice this happening. You’ll be too busy swearing at the back glass.

The longevity argument

Here’s the study worth knowing at dinner parties. The Copenhagen City Heart Study followed roughly 8,500 Danes for up to 25 years and asked which leisure activities were associated with the longest lives. Published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the results were lopsided in a fascinating way: tennis was associated with 9.7 extra years of life expectancy and badminton 6.2, while solitary pursuits like jogging, swimming and cycling clustered around three to four, and gym exercise trailed at 1.5.

Padel didn’t exist in the dataset — the study predates the boom — so nobody can honestly claim its numbers transfer. But the researchers’ explanation for the racket-sport advantage is worth hearing: it may not be the exercise alone, but the social nature of it. Sports you play with other people, embedded in relationships and routine, seem to do something for long-term health that miles on a treadmill don’t fully replicate.

If that hypothesis is right, padel is almost a caricature of the winning formula. It is doubles-only, social by architecture, and structurally impossible to play alone. The sport that looks suspiciously like a night out may be smuggling in exactly the ingredient the solitary sports lack.

Where it falls short

Honesty section. Padel alone is not a complete fitness programme, and three things stop it being one.

It won’t make you seriously strong. Match play builds useful leg and core strength for padel, but it is not progressive resistance training, and it does nothing much for your upper body. If strength matters to you, the gym still exists.

It’s only as hard as your four players make it. The intensity data above comes from competitive matches. A social game where every other point ends in a conference about whether the ball clipped the glass will sit well below those heart rate numbers. The workout scales with the standard — as you improve, rallies lengthen and the physical demand quietly rises, which is a pleasant property, but a beginner’s first months are gentler than the averages suggest.

And it’s rationed. An hour of padel counts generously toward the NHS target of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, and match-play intensity comfortably qualifies. But most British players get one court slot a week if they’re lucky — court supply being what it is — and 60 minutes is not 150. Padel is an excellent pillar of an active week. It is not, on its own, the whole building.

The verdict

Is padel a good workout? Yes — a better one than its reputation for being the easy racket sport implies. An hour of proper doubles is an interval session at 75% of max heart rate, three kilometres of mostly lateral movement, and 400-odd calories, wrapped in the one thing exercise science keeps rediscovering matters most: a format people actually come back to, week after week, because their mates are there.

It won’t replace strength training and one session a week won’t hit the NHS numbers alone. But as the anchor habit of an active life — the fixed, sociable, non-negotiable hour that everything else gets built around — it’s hard to think of a better candidate. The best workout is the one that doesn’t feel like one, and padel has made a million Britons exercise on a Thursday night without a single one of them calling it that.

Frequently asked questions

How many calories do you burn playing padel?

Most estimates put an hour of doubles padel at roughly 400–600 calories, depending on your weight, the standard of the game and how much of the hour is spent actually rallying rather than laughing at the last point. A competitive hour sits at the top of that range; a gentle social knock sits below it.

Is padel better exercise than tennis?

Generally no — a singles tennis match is harder work, with more sprinting and more court to cover. But padel is more demanding than tennis doubles for many players, because the walls keep rallies alive and you spend more of the hour actually playing. The best workout is the one you keep turning up for, and padel is very good at being that.

Does padel count towards the NHS recommended 150 minutes of exercise?

Yes. The NHS recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week, and match-play studies put padel squarely in the moderate-to-vigorous zone, with heart rates averaging around 75% of maximum. Two hour-long sessions a week gets you most of the way there.

What muscles does padel work?

Legs and glutes do most of the work — padel is built on lunges, split-steps and short lateral pushes. Research also shows benefits for core and lumbar strength, grip strength and sprint speed. What it largely spares is your shoulders, since the underarm serve removes the most violent movement in tennis.

Is padel a high-impact sport?

It is lower impact than tennis or squash — shorter distances, less sprinting and no overarm serving — but it is not zero risk. Studies put the injury rate at around three injuries per 1,000 hours of play, with elbows, calves and knees the usual complaints. A proper warm-up deals with most of it.