How hard is padel, really?

Heart rate and calories from 130 real matches, recorded on Apple Watch by 34 players in 17 countries.

470active calories in an hour

129 bpmaverage heart rate

58%of the time at moderate effort

14%of the time working hard

Ask how much exercise padel is and you’ll get a confident number with no source behind it. The figure you see most often is about 500 calories an hour, and even the sports scientists who quote it call it an assumption, because padel’s energy cost has hardly been measured.

We make Smash, a padel tracker for Apple Watch. Each match recorded with it carries the Watch’s own heart-rate and energy readings, so we added them up. This is what 130 matches between June and October 2026 look like: mostly amateur doubles, 71 on indoor courts and 45 outdoors, from players in 17 countries.

The short answer: a typical hour of padel burned about 470 active calories, or about 580 counting what your body burns anyway. The average heart rate was 129 bpm, and the hardest moment of a match peaked around 160. Most of a match is spent at a moderate, conversational effort.

Calories

Here is every match, by how many active calories it burned per hour. Active calories are the ones on top of what you would burn sitting down, the red ring on an Apple Watch. Hover or tap a bar for its count.

Active calories per hour of padel, one match per count. The marked line is the median: half the matches burned less, half more.

The middle half of matches burned between 410 and 560 active calories an hour. Add the calories your body burns at rest and a typical hour comes to about 580. So the much-repeated 500 holds up, as long as you read it as total calories for an average-sized adult. It is a little high if you count only the active ones.

Your own number depends mostly on your size. A heavier player moves more mass with every step and burns more. The Watch knows your weight from the Health app, and we don’t, so the spread above is partly just a spread of body sizes.

Match length

Active calories for a match of the chosen length: the median of our matches, and the range of the middle half.

Heart rate

The average heart rate across a whole match, rests included, was 129 bpm, and for half of all matches it fell between 119 and 140. The highest reading of a typical match was around 160.

Average heart rate per match, in beats per minute.

A beats-per-minute figure means different things for a 25-year-old and a 55-year-old, so the Watch also sorts every second of a match into a heart-rate zone, as a share of your estimated maximum. Here is where the time goes, averaged over 90 matches that recorded zones:

Share of match time in each zone. Zones are fractions of maximum heart rate, which the Watch estimates as 220 minus your age. The minutes are for a 90-minute match.

Padel is mostly an aerobic sport. About 58% of a match was spent between 60% and 80% of maximum heart rate, the zones usually called easy and aerobic, where you can still talk. Only 14% was above 80%, and the all-out zone 5 accounted for 4%, about 4 minutes of a 90-minute match. That fits what small laboratory studies of amateur players have found: intensities mostly between 50% and 70% of maximum heart rate.

The averages hide a split, though. In 28 of the 90 matches, the players spent at least a tenth of the match above 80% of their maximum. Padel can be a hard workout. Whether it is depends on who you play.

The 90-minute game works hardest

Courts are usually booked by the hour or the hour and a half, and the lengths of the recorded matches show it. There are two humps: short sessions under half an hour, and matches of an hour and a half.

Match length in minutes. We count anything from 20 minutes to 4 hours as a match.

Those 90-minute matches are also the most intense. Their median heart rate was 138 bpm, against 122 for matches under 50 minutes. Short sessions are more often a knock-about or a lesson, and a booked match brings four people who came to win. Even past the 90 minutes, heart rates stayed above the short sessions’.

Median of each match’s average heart rate, grouped by match length.

Do you fade?

The Watch also counts swings, minute by minute, and measures how hard each one is. Its absolute counts include some movements that never touched a ball, so we don’t quote them. But compared within one match those quirks cancel out, which makes it possible to ask whether players slow down as a match goes on.

We cut the first and last five minutes off 67 long matches, for the warm-up and the walk off court, and split the rest into thirds:

Swings per minuteSwing power

Each third of a match against that match’s own average. Median over 67 matches from 29 players.

By the last third, players swung about 10% less often than in the first third, but the swings they did make were only 3% softer. People tire, but they don’t start hitting gently. Fewer swings can mean longer breaks between points or fewer balls reached, and the data can’t tell those apart. Either way, the balls players do reach late in a match get nearly the same swing as at the start.

How we counted

Every match was recorded with the Smash app on an Apple Watch, which runs a workout session for the whole match. The heart rate comes from the Watch’s optical sensor. Active and total calories are Apple’s own estimates, made from heart rate, motion and the age, sex, height and weight in each player’s Health profile.

What counts as a match. We kept recordings 20 minutes to 4 hours long with at least 30 swings. That leaves out recordings started by mistake and a few that were left running after the players went home.
The sample. 130 matches from 34 players. Not every match has every reading: 104 have calories and 105 have heart rate, because some players don’t give the app access to those.
Keen players count more. Every match counts once, so a player who records a lot weighs more. As a check, we also took each player’s own median and then the median of those: 480 active calories an hour instead of 470, and 134 bpm instead of 129. The picture doesn’t change.
Who these players are. People who download a padel tracker are probably keener than the average player, and the sample is small. Treat these as numbers from real matches, not as a scientific study.
Privacy. Only totals across many matches appear here. No match, player or place can be picked out of them.

Questions

How many calories does padel burn in an hour?

In our matches, a median of 470 active calories an hour, and about 580 counting resting calories. The middle half of matches ranged from 410 to 560 active calories an hour. Bigger players and harder matches burn more.

Is padel good cardio?

Yes, mostly moderate cardio. About 58% of a match is spent between 60% and 80% of maximum heart rate, with short bursts above that. A competitive 90-minute match pushes noticeably harder than a casual half hour.

What is a normal heart rate during padel?

The average over a whole match, rests included, was 129 bpm in our data, with half of all matches between 119 and 140. A typical match peaked around 160 bpm. Your own numbers depend on your age and fitness.

How long is a padel match?

Most recorded matches were either under half an hour or about an hour and a half, the common booking length. The median was 68 minutes.