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solidstoday at 10:17 AM2 repliesview on HN

It takes much less time to learn it at a playable level than tennis. In my opinion, learning tennis and being able to hit a powerful drive is much more rewarding, but nowadays people don’t want to “waste” time in improving technique.


Replies

mtlmtlmtlmtltoday at 12:03 PM

Tbf I haven't actually played much tennis, but I've watched plenty of it, and been playing padel for a couple years now. I would agree that tennis has a steeper learning curve, and is definitely more physically demanding. Besides the learning curve though, I'm not sure padel can be said to be any less technical than tennis, at higher levels. Padel seems to me to have a much bigger variety of shot types all requiring specific technique. And positioning is also much more fluid and complex than in tennis. Same thing for leg work.

To be clear I realise you were mostly talking about learning curve specifically; this is not an attempt at refuting what you said, just adding to the discussion.

AlexGerasimtoday at 11:22 AM

After reaching a playable level people start to compete in tournaments and in competitive games on Playtomic and then the technique starts to matter, maybe a bit less than in tennis. There are still plenty of basic padel shots you have to spend 10-100s of hours to master with a coach to be able to compete on a higher ranking.