Padel after 40: keep playing pain-free for the next 20 years

The single best decision you can make as a 40-something padel player is to stop training like a 25-year-old. Your body still wants to play. It’s capable of better tennis at 45 than it was at 25 — more economy, better tactics, smarter shot selection. What it doesn’t want is the casual abuse you used to get away with. Skipping warm-ups, playing four nights in a row, ignoring the small ache in your hip until it’s a limp.

The good news is the work to keep playing pain-free for the next twenty years isn’t huge. Twenty minutes a day, the right strength sessions twice a week, and a weekly schedule that respects how your tissue actually recovers. The bad news is most amateur players never do any of it, and they’re the ones who quit at 55 because their back went.

This is the long version. What changes after 40. The five joints that matter for padel longevity. A weekly schedule. And the four mistakes that take down most over-40 players.

What actually changes after 40

A handful of physiological shifts that nobody tells you about because they sound like a doctor’s lecture, but they decide whether you’re still playing at 65.

Tendons get stiffer and slower to remodel. The collagen turnover rate in your tendons drops noticeably after about 35. A 25-year-old who tweaks an Achilles is back in six weeks. A 45-year-old with the same tweak is back in twelve, and that’s with good rehab. This is not pessimism — it’s biology, and it’s why prehab matters more than rehab once you’re over 40.

You lose roughly 8% of muscle mass per decade after 40 if you don’t resist it. This is sarcopenia, and it’s the single biggest predictor of how athletic you’ll feel at 60. The fix is not running — running doesn’t build muscle. The fix is two strength sessions a week. We’ll come back to this.

Recovery between sessions slows by about 30%. A tough match at 25 is a 24-hour recovery. The same match at 45 is closer to 48-72 hours, depending on what you do in between. Players who play four nights in a row in their forties are accumulating fatigue that isn’t showing up as fatigue — it’s showing up as a stiff lower back on Thursday.

Connective tissue dehydrates more easily. Cartilage, fascia, the IVDs in your spine — all of them are less resilient to sustained sitting and need more daily movement to stay supple. If your day is desk-then-padel-then-desk, you are loading old tissue cold every single time.

Sleep architecture changes. Deep sleep — the phase where most physical recovery happens — drops by about 50% between 30 and 50. You need more cumulative sleep to get the same recovery dose, and sleep loss hits over-40 athletes harder than it hits 25-year-olds.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. The catastrophe is when a 45-year-old trains like they’re 25, sleeps like they’re 25, and recovers like they’re 25 — and then is genuinely confused when their body protests.

The five joints that matter most for padel longevity

If you only have twenty minutes a day, spend it on these five in this order.

1. Thoracic spine

The most under-trained joint in adult padel. A stiff thoracic spine forces your lower back to rotate more than it should, and forces your shoulder to abduct more than it should — which is why so many 40-something padel players get back pain and rotator cuff impingement at the same time. Daily thoracic rotation work is non-negotiable.

We covered the warm-up version in the seven-minute warm-up. The daily version is two minutes of open books plus one minute of foam-roller thoracic extensions, every morning.

2. Hips

Padel is a low athletic stance, repeated for forty minutes at a time. If your hips don’t flex, internally rotate, and extend well, your lower back picks up the slack. After 40, the desk-padel-desk cycle systematically locks down the hip flexors and rotators.

Daily: 90/90 hip rotations, three minutes. Couch stretch, two minutes per side. That’s it.

3. Shoulders (specifically the rotator cuff)

The shoulder is the joint with the largest range of motion in the body, which is exactly why it’s vulnerable. After 40, the rotator cuff loses elasticity and the deeper stabilisers — supraspinatus, infraspinatus, subscapularis — weaken without specific work. The bandeja, the víbora, every defensive lob loads these muscles at end-range.

Twice a week: banded external rotations, 3 × 12 each side. Y-T-Ws prone on a bench, 3 × 8 each. Five minutes total.

4. Wrists and forearms

The whole elbow pain conversation lives here. After 40, the wrist extensors are a chronic site of overload, and the fix is direct loading work, not stretching.

Twice a week: eccentric wrist extension with a 1-2 kg weight, 3 × 12 each side. Heavy carries for grip endurance, 30 seconds × 4. Three minutes total.

5. Ankles

The single most ignored joint and the one that, when it goes, takes you off the court entirely. A 45-year-old with a calf strain is two months out, easily. Padel asks your ankles to brake, accelerate, and rotate constantly.

Daily: ankle dorsiflexion stretch against a wall, 30 seconds each side. Calf raises, slow tempo, 3 × 10 (off a step if you have one). Two minutes total.

A weekly schedule that respects how your tissue actually recovers

If you’re playing two to three padel sessions a week and you want to feel younger at the end of the year than the start, this is roughly what it looks like.

Day	Session	Notes
Monday	Strength A — 45 min	Squat or hinge, push, pull, carry. Heavy enough that the last rep is hard.
Tuesday	Padel	Match play is fine. Warm up properly.
Wednesday	Mobility — 20 min	All five joints. Easy walk after if you can.
Thursday	Strength B — 45 min	Different hinge or squat pattern, single-leg work, rotational work.
Friday	Padel	Same as Tuesday.
Saturday	Padel (optional) or recovery walk	If three sessions a week, this is the third. If two, this is a walk + mobility.
Sunday	Off	Real off. Sleep an extra hour.

A few things to notice:

• Strength comes before padel days, not after. Strength when fresh, padel when slightly fatigued. The padel session is the cardio. The strength session is the structural work.
• Two padel sessions plus two strength sessions gets most over-40 players further than four padel sessions alone.
• The mobility day in the middle of the week is not a rest day. It’s active. Twenty minutes of joint-by-joint work plus a 30-minute walk.
• Sunday is off because a true off day is rare and underrated. You don’t skip the strength sessions because you didn’t sleep — you skip the off day because you have to.

If you’re playing five nights a week, you’re not training. You’re grinding. Half of those nights should be lighter — drilling, social games at lower intensity, technique practice. The body of an over-40 player can absorb maybe two truly hard matches per week. The other sessions need to look different in intensity.

The four mistakes that take down most over-40 players

After working with hundreds of amateurs in this age bracket, four mistakes show up over and over.

1. Treating warm-up like an option

The warm-up costs seven minutes. Skipping it is the single most common reason for the calf-or-quad strain that costs a 45-year-old six weeks. After 40, cold tissue under explosive load is a tax that compounds. Pay it on every session. See the seven-minute warm-up.

2. Ignoring the strength training

“I get my workout from padel” is the most expensive sentence in amateur padel. Padel is cardio and skill, not strength. The muscle mass you’re losing each decade is structural protection. Two heavy strength sessions a week — squat, hinge, push, pull, carry — keep that protection in place. Players who lift twice a week into their fifties are unrecognisable from players who only play.

3. Playing through the small aches

You feel a hot ache in your shoulder after a long match. You play again two nights later and it’s a bit worse, but tolerable. A week later you can’t reach overhead without pain. This is how a manageable two-week problem becomes a six-week problem. The rule for over-40 players: a new ache that doesn’t fade within 48 hours gets one week of reduced volume. No exceptions.

4. Eating like you’re 25

You don’t need a diet. You need slightly more protein than you’re probably eating — around 1.6 grams per kilo of bodyweight per day if you’re training — and not much else needs to change. Most over-40 amateurs are protein-light and underestimate how much it slows recovery. Eggs, fish, chicken, cottage cheese, lentils, Greek yoghurt. Distributed across the day, not crammed into dinner.

What you should feel in 90 days

If you adopt the weekly schedule above and the daily mobility work for ninety days, you should notice the following:

• The first ten minutes of every padel session feel different. Not warmer — capable. You hit your first hard forehand without flinching.
• The morning after a match doesn’t hurt anymore. A bit of pleasant fatigue, sure. But no specific joint pain.
• Your range improves measurably. Toe-touch closer to the floor. Overhead reach without your back arching to compensate.
• You sleep deeper. Strength training and skilled cardio are the two best non-pharmacological sleep aids known. After about six weeks of consistency, players report sleeping through the night who hadn’t for years.

If you’re ninety days in and none of that is true, something is off in execution. Either the strength sessions are too easy, the mobility work is sporadic, or you’re sleeping less than seven hours a night. Don’t add — fix the execution.

Frequently asked

What if I’m already injured?

Then the priority is rehab, not the schedule above. Most acute padel injuries — strained calf, lateral epicondylitis, rotator cuff tendinopathy — are eight-to-twelve-week protocols when handled correctly. Once you’re back to full volume, the schedule here is what keeps you there.

Can I do this if I’m over 50, over 60?

Yes. The same five joints matter. The strength sessions need to be slightly lower-intensity and higher-quality — better movement patterns, more attention to form, sometimes slightly lower load. But over-50 and over-60 padel players who lift twice a week look ten years younger than ones who don’t.

How much does sleep actually matter?

A lot. Athletes who sleep less than six hours a night have measurably worse reaction times and slower tissue recovery than those who sleep eight. For a 40-something, the difference between six and eight hours of sleep is the difference between a body that recovers and one that doesn’t. Treat sleep like a session.

Is running good for padel after 40?

Light running is fine for cardiovascular fitness. Hard running is mostly redundant for padel and adds load you don’t need to carry. Twenty minutes of zone-2 cardio (slow enough to talk through) two or three times a week is more useful than weekly long runs.

What about supplements?

Vitamin D in winter if you’re in a low-sun climate (most players need it). Creatine if you’re lifting — five grams a day, no loading phase, well-studied for over-40 strength training. Magnesium glycinate before bed if you struggle to sleep. Everything else is mostly noise.

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If you want this schedule turned into a coach-supervised program with daily check-ins, the Padel Mobility platform runs three-month structured longevity programs with assessments at the start, the middle, and the end. The articles here are the public version. The platform is the supervised version.