How to Take the Net in Padel: Mastering the Subida

Most club players treat the net like a reward for volleying well. It isn't. The net is a position you take, and taking it is a separate skill from anything you do once you're standing there. Spanish padel coaching has a name for it — the subida, literally "the climb" — and it decides more points than any single shot in your bag.

What the subida is, and why it decides points

The subida is the move from the back of the court up to the net. Both pairs want to be there, only one can be, and almost everything else in a rally — the lobs, the bandejas, the wall exits — is machinery for winning or defending that piece of ground.

The research is blunt about why. Escudero-Tena and colleagues coded 2,756 rallies across the 2021 World Padel Tour season and found that both men and women tended to finish rallies with a winner when they were in the net zone, and with an error when they were at the back of the court. Their conclusion, stated plainly: wins in padel are closely related to time spent at the net (Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2023). You aren't up there to hit highlight-reel volleys — you're up there because the geometry turns your ordinary shots into winners and your opponents' ordinary shots into errors.

Here's the part most players get wrong, though. When a subida fails, it almost never fails at the net. It fails three seconds earlier, at the shot that started it.

The shot comes first, the run comes second

You don't decide to go to the net. Your shot decides for you.

The subida is not an act of enthusiasm — it is permission, and your approach shot either earns it or it doesn't. Hit the right ball and the run is almost automatic; hit the wrong one and you simply arrive in time to be hit at. Three shots earn the trip.

The deep cross-court lob

The primary trigger, and it isn't close.

Muñoz and colleagues coded 416 baseline-to-net transitions across 14 men's matches — eight World Padel Tour finals plus six first-category championship matches from the Extremadura Padel Federation circuit. Players chose a lob for 60.6% of their net approaches against 39.4% for everything else. More useful than the popularity figure: the point continued 65.9% of the time after a lob, against 47.0% after other approach shots (Retos 31, 2017).

Read that second number carefully. The lob is not the shot that wins the point — it's the shot that keeps the point alive long enough for you to get where you're going. A hard approach forces a resolution, and roughly half the time that resolution goes against you. A good lob buys time, and time is exactly what the subida costs. The women's game reads the same: across 1,324 defensive actions from the 2018 WPT season, the lob was the most effective shot for taking the offensive position (IJERPH, 2020).

What turns a lob into an approach shot: height that clears the net player's racket at full stretch, depth within a metre of the back glass, and a cross-court direction. Cross-court is the longest diagonal on the court, so it buys extra air time and drags the opponent furthest from where they want to be. If your lob isn't reliably doing all three, start with the lob technique guide before you worry about the run.

The high wall exit

When you've dug a smash out of the back glass and the ball sits up, you get a free choice most players waste. A wall exit played high and deep does the same job as a lob, with one advantage: your opponents have usually crept in to pressure your defence, so there's more space behind them than there was a shot ago. Going over them from the wall flips a defensive rally into an attacking one in a single stroke. If yours mostly come out low and short, that's a defence problem rather than a transition problem — work through defending the smash first.

The low, hard drive at the opponent's feet

The riskiest of the three, but it earns its place. A flat drive at the volleyer's shoelaces is not a passing shot — passing shots barely exist in padel, the walls see to that. What it does is force a low volley played upward from below net height, and an upward volley is a ball you can attack as you arrive. Use it against a pair that stands tight to the net, and use it sparingly: miss the height by six inches and you've handed them a sitter while you're mid-run.

The shot that does not earn the trip is the short or flat lob. A lob landing near the service line is an invitation, not an approach — it gives the opponent a smash from inside the court while you're caught between zones. If your lob comes out short, stay back. That's not timidity, it's the correct read.

The footwork: arrive stopped, not fast

Hit the approach shot. Move forward with short, quick steps rather than a sprint. Split-step as your opponent strikes the ball. Land balanced, racket up and in front, knees bent.

Short steps beat a sprint because a sprint commits you to a line and a speed, while short steps let you change your mind — stop early, angle off, drop back — based on what the ball tells you a half-second after you started moving.

The split-step is the piece that actually separates players. It's a small hop that lands you on the balls of both feet at the instant your opponent makes contact, and it works because a body that's momentarily still can move in any direction, while a body mid-stride can only continue in the one it already chose. Arriving stopped and balanced a metre short of the ideal spot beats arriving fast and flat-footed right on top of it, every time.

Where exactly you stop is a separate question — the court coverage guide covers the zones. What matters here is finishing in a volley-ready stance, because the first ball after a subida is usually the rally's hardest volley.

Going up as a pair

The player who hits the approach shot owns the decision — they know better than anyone whether the lob was good. But the partner has to read the shot, not the ball. If you watch the ball, you see the lob's quality at the same moment your opponents do, and you start late. Watch your partner's racket face and body at contact instead: an open face and a full follow-through means height and depth are coming, and you can be two steps forward before the ball reaches its apex. That half-second is the difference between arriving together and arriving separately.

When your partner commits forward and you genuinely can't follow, say so. One word does it. Hand signals are for the serving pair before the point; mid-rally you need your voice.

The one-up-one-back trap

One up, one back is the weakest formation in padel and the easiest to fall into by accident. The problem is the diagonal: your pair covers four quadrants badly instead of two well, and the opponents don't need a clever shot to exploit it. A ball down the middle or a lob over the net player's head both leave your deep player running a diagonal they can't win.

The fix isn't "always go." It's "go together, or neither goes." Most of the doubles strategy that follows is downstream of that one agreement.

The four mistakes that send you straight back

Advancing behind a bad lob. The most common failure by a wide margin, and the only one you can diagnose before you move.

Running with your eyes on the ball only. You arrive knowing where the ball is and nothing about where the opponents are standing. Glance up once mid-run.

Sprinting past the split-step. Speed without a stop is momentum in the wrong direction.

Going up alone. The mistake that hurts your partner rather than you, and a fixture on every list of beginner mistakes.

Three drills to groove the subida

Serve and go. Serve, then immediately move forward and play the first volley. The serve is the one shot where you go up every time, which makes it the cleanest way to rehearse the movement without having to judge the approach shot first.

Lob and run. A partner feeds a deep ball into the corner. You lob, advance, play one volley, recover. Ten reps per side. The point isn't the lob or the volley — it's the three seconds in between.

Split-step timing. Move forward on a signal and have your partner feed a ball at an unpredictable moment as you arrive. You'll be caught mid-stride at first; the drill is done when you're not. Add it to whatever practice routine you already run.

When not to take the net

Against a pair with a reliable bandeja and good lobs of their own, a premature subida just hands them the point. They'll take your mediocre lob out of the air, put it back deep and low, and you'll spend four shots scrambling backward through the position you just left.

Sometimes the right play is to stay at the back and build: trade lobs, make them hit one more bandeja, wait for the short ball that gives you a real approach. Patience at the back is an attacking skill, not a defensive one. The pair that goes up on the right ball and stays down on the wrong one beats the pair that goes up on everything.

Ready to work on it? Find a court near you and give yourself ten minutes of lob-and-run before your next match.