Is Smash Coach a padel match tracker?
No. Smash Coach does not count shots, keep score or show match statistics. It is a fitness app for adults who play sport. You tell it the nights you play padel and the other sports and classes in your week, and with Pro or during your trial its coach plans the strength, conditioning and mobility sessions that go around them, in one weekly plan. The coach is AI, not a person.
What does it plan for a padel player?
Setting padel up takes two steps:
- On You, under SPORTS STACK, tap + ADD and pick padel (add a sport or a class).
- Choose Fixed days and tap the nights you play, since each day you pick is one session a week, or Flexible to set how many times a week you play and let the app pick the days. Then set your usual session length and tap Save (sport settings).
At the top of padel's settings is a line about what the sport does to your body; with Pro or during your trial, that is what your coach is working around. In the help centre's screenshot it reads “Heavy lateral work, high impact on knees, hips and the racket-arm elbow.”
The same screen holds two switches. Coach warm-up and cool-down has your coach, with Pro or during your trial, write a short warm-up and cool-down around your padel, so you are not turning up to the court cold. Add performance training creates a goal for padel, which counts towards your three goals.
Save, and with Pro or during your trial your plan is rebuilt around padel's nights; after that it changes when something real changes, never on a timer (when your plan changes). A friendly someone books for Sunday goes in from the plus at the top of Home or Agenda with Add upcoming session, one session on one day (adding something that is coming).
On the free plan, padel's own sessions still go on its days, but your coach is paused, so the rest of your plan stays as it is.
What does a club padel week look like?
Before the gym comes into it, padel already fills a good part of the week. Three sources give a sense of its size, and of the sport's.
| What | Figure | Who or what was measured |
|---|---|---|
| How often | 2 to 3 times a week, kept up through the year | Recreational players, from earlier studies summarised in a 2022 narrative review |
| How long each time | 60 to 120 minutes a session | The same review and the same studies |
| One match | About 57 minutes and 152 points | 13 matches between 52 amateur men, average age about 36, organised for a 2025 study |
| Players in Britain | 860,000 played at least once in 2025, up from 400,000 by the end of 2024 | Adults and juniors; the LTA's own figure, and how it was collected is not published |
On those figures a recreational player spends two to six hours a week on court. The match figures come from amateur men in matches set up for research, so your league nights will differ, but the scale is the point: padel is a real slice of your training week, not a footnote to it.
Whether any padel gym programme has been tested, and what to lift around your nights instead, is in the gym workout for padel players; how hard a match works your heart is on the padel cardio page.
What do the padel articles answer?
- Gym workout for padel: a sourced sample week, where the gym goes on a day you also play, and the areas padel loads most.
- Is padel cardio: how hard a match is on your heart, how padel compares with other racket sports and what it leaves out.
- HYROX and padel: for players who also race, where a week of padel meets a week of race training.
- Tournament weekend: preparing for several matches in two days, staying warm between them and the days after.
Every other sport, and the situations they share, is on the sports page.
What does it not do?
Smash Coach is not a padel coach in the court sense. It does not teach the bandeja, the víbora or how to play off the glass, it does not analyse your technique, footwork or positioning, and it does not keep match statistics, rankings or results. For your strokes and where you stand, a qualified padel coach at your club is the right person.
It is not a race app for padel either: HYROX is the race you can add today, with ATHX, DEKA, GYMRACE and running races coming soon, so a padel tournament goes in match by match, as the questions below explain. And it will not book a court or find you a fourth.
On a padel night, in the app
After a padel night, open that night's session and tap Mark done: one slider asks how hard it felt, from one to ten, and a note under ANYTHING FOR YOUR COACH says what the number cannot. The help centre calls that effort rating “the single strongest signal your coach has about how the plan is landing” (mark a workout done).
With Pro or during your trial, a padel night carries the gold card marked YOUR OWN SPORT, with one short hint for that day from your coach (read a workout). On the free plan your own sessions show no card.
In the gym, workout mode takes you through a session one step at a time, counting your sets and rest, and runs a move done on each side as a left step and then a right step. It works on the free plan. Exercises are shown as clean illustrations: the movement on a plain background, with nothing extra, so you see what to do at a glance. The team is exploring video and moving images (exercise illustrations).