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Court Notes Method

Rally length is a better fitness number than heart rate.

Bucketing exchanges 1–3 to 13+ tells you how a match was actually played. Heart rate tells you how you felt about it.

The PlayDNA team Method 14 AUG 2026 8 min read
RALLIES ARE CARRIED BY THE LEGS
Fig. 01 / RALLIES ARE CARRIED BY THE LEGS

Ask a player how fit they felt and you get weather reporting. Ask how the rallies ran and you get the shape of the match. PlayDNA buckets every exchange — 1–3, 4–6, 7–9, 10–12, 13+ shots — and that histogram says more about your legs than any heart-rate curve.

01 — Work : rest, made visible

Padel fitness is not about how high your pulse went. It is about how little rest you got. Long rally buckets with short gaps between points is a different sport from five-shot bursts all night — and only one of them explains why your legs went in the third set.

02 — The average is a lie, the buckets are not

“8.3 avg shots” hides everything. A match of straight 8-shot rallies and a match of alternating 2s and 15s share the same average and demand completely different physiques. The histogram exists so those two matches never look alike again.

03 — Heart rate still has a job

We show heart-rate zones and session demand because effort context is useful. But heart rate is how your body responded; rally length is what the match asked of you. Read them together, not instead of each other. And as always: descriptive numbers, not medical advice.

The PlayDNA team Match Profile counts every rally and puts it in a bucket you can act on.
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