Marcelo and Rulo, Katha’s coaches in Madrid, didn’t need particularly long to reach their first conclusion. Katha knew how to hit the shots, they said. Now she just had to learn how to play padel.
At first, that sounds a little like telling someone who has just graduated from high school that, at least, they’ve got the alphabet down pretty well. It was meant to be less devastating than it sounds. The technique is there. So is the athleticism. What’s missing is the part that doesn’t look quite as impressive in slow motion: making the right decision at the right moment.
Padel isn’t simply about placing the ball as precisely as possible where nobody happens to be standing. It’s about knowing why you’re playing it there. When a shot buys you time. When it takes time away from your opponent. When to attack, when to wait, and when the most spectacular shot is spectacular mainly because a more sensible one would have been the better idea.
In her first few days, Katha learned several new shots. And with every new shot, not only did her repertoire grow, but so did the number of opportunities to choose the wrong one at the wrong moment. After all, progress is rarely the pleasant experience of suddenly being able to do more. More often, it begins with becoming much more aware of everything you’re still not getting quite right.
So they trained. Group sessions in the mornings, individual sessions in the afternoons, soon with additional time in the gym. In between: coffee, car rides and the daily realisation that Madrid feels particularly enormous when the padel club happens to be on the other side of it. The days quickly settled into the reliability of a school timetable: get up, get coffee, train, eat, train again, review footage, edit, plan. And tapas in the evening – less out of tourist curiosity than the pragmatic realisation that their own kitchen wasn’t necessarily a place they needed to spend any more time in than absolutely necessary.
While Katha was learning to reorganise her game in Madrid, Lena was back in Germany trying to get her knee back into something resembling working order. Doctor’s appointments, physiotherapy, training, new assessments. The first forecasts sounded more like patience than plane tickets.
Athletes, however, have a particular relationship with forecasts like these. They hear “several weeks off” and immediately start wondering just how flexible the word “several” might be.
So there was treatment, mobilisation and careful testing. Katha and Lena spoke on the phone several times a day. One talked about shots she hadn’t known before. The other about movements that were slowly becoming possible again. Two training plans, only one of them taking place on a court.
Then came the news that Lena could carefully start again. No long rallies yet, no quick changes of direction and preferably no unnecessary heroics. But some first shots, technical training and small doses of physical load. Enough, at least, to book a flight.
And just like that, the story found another direction we hadn’t known about a few days earlier. The unplanned solo could become the doubles team we had originally set out to follow after all. Not quite the way it had been written in the concept, but much closer to what this documentary was really about in the first place.
While Katha had to learn which ball to play when, Lena first had to find out when her body was ready to play along again. One was working on her understanding of the game, the other on trusting her own knee. Both can be trained. Neither can really be rushed.
And then Lena was back in Madrid.
What that will mean for the training, for the two of them and for the journey they’re on together remains to be seen.
We could have written a better transition into the next episodes.
Just probably not a more honest one.

The plan had been fairly straightforward: Katharina Hering and Lena Plümer would travel to Madrid together. Two of Germany’s best padel players, a few weeks of training at a professional level, and a small film crew following them along the way. Not to turn the best-looking footage into a heroic success story afterwards, but to answer a fairly simple question that seems to come with a surprising number of complicated answers: What does it actually take to get better?

Madrid seemed like a good place to find out. After all, padel there isn’t just played at a different level, but with a kind of ease and familiarity that Germany is still developing. The rallies are faster, the training more intense, the pressure higher. If you’re pretty good in Germany, it only takes a few training sessions in Madrid to discover that “pretty good” is a remarkably flexible unit of measurement.

Then Lena got injured during a tournament. And what was supposed to be a shared flight suddenly became one ticket and a lot of unanswered questions.

Katha has since travelled to Madrid on her own. Lena is working her way back to fitness, hoping she might still be able to join her. Whether that will happen, we don’t know. What we do know is that our originally planned documentary found a new storyline faster than we ever could have written one.

Perhaps that’s actually quite fitting. Because progress rarely unfolds as neatly as we make it sound afterwards. Anyone familiar with sports documentaries also knows their preferred formula: setback plus hard work equals success, add a little music, some slow motion and, ideally, something silver to hold up at the end. Unfortunately, real-life professional sport is considerably less reliable when it comes to following a script.

With “Vamos KathaLena”, we’re currently producing our first social-first documentary series following Katharina Hering and Lena Plümer. The original idea was fairly straightforward: two of Germany’s best padel players go to Madrid, train at a professional level and find out what happens when German elite performance meets the everyday reality of Spanish padel. We follow them along the way.

We’re not waiting until the story is over to tell you what happened. We want to be there while it’s happening. When Katha first discovers what international pace actually feels like. When a new shot suddenly works – and the next one doesn’t work at all. When confidence turns into a reality check, frustration perhaps into insight, and “I can do this” becomes, at least temporarily, a slightly more modest “Looks like I still need to learn this.”

Our camera doesn’t only keep rolling when things look good. It stays on when the training starts to take its toll, concentration begins to fade and the twentieth ball still refuses to land where it damn well should. We film the fast rallies and the slow realisations. Somewhere between the two is probably what we call progress.

And while balls are flying against glass in Madrid, a second story continues a little further north. Lena is working on her comeback. Whether she’ll recover in time  and turn the unplanned solo back into the doubles team we originally set out to follow, remains to be seen. We could have written a cliffhanger for the series. Reality simply got there first.

Maybe Katha will come back from Spain a better player. Maybe she’ll come back with a much clearer understanding of just how wide the gap to the international level really is. Most likely, both will be true. Because getting better sometimes has less to do with suddenly being able to do everything, and much more to do with understanding exactly what you still can’t do.

That’s what “Vamos KathaLena” is about: not the finished success story, but the rather exhausting part that comes before it. About winning and learning, confidence and reality, Germany and Spain – and two players whose shared journey is currently unfolding very differently from the way they planned it.

The social-first documentary series is currently being produced with a small crew in Madrid, together with our partners HanseMerkur and natural elements.

Padel is full of charming contradictions. From the outside, it looks effortless. Four people. One yellow ball. A glass court. You laugh, play the ball off the walls, apologize for the lucky net cord, and grab a coffee together after the match.

From the inside, though, padel is surprisingly demanding. It’s a sport built on constant changes of direction, explosive reactions, and a body that moves continuously between sprinting, stopping, and accelerating. Anyone who’s played a long rally knows the feeling: it may look easy, but every muscle is putting in overtime. Maybe that’s one of the biggest misconceptions about padel.

Many people think you only get better on the court. In reality, progress often begins where no ball is flying.

It starts with stronger legs that power the next lunge. A stronger core that gives every smash more stability. Time on the bike that prepares you for the deciding third set. Or a mobility session that keeps you from walking like you accidentally carried a wardrobe the next morning.

Padel isn’t a sport that thrives on talent alone.

It’s a sport that rewards the care you give your body away from the court. That’s exactly why we’re excited about our partnership with all inclusive Fitness.

Not because there’s another logo to display. But because two worlds that naturally belong together have finally met. Padel is driven by movement. Fitness builds the foundation for it.

Together, we want to give our community everything they need to improve for the long run: access to modern strength and cardio facilities, functional training, classes, recovery options, and a nationwide network of gyms. Not for the sake of fitness itself, but because every workout eventually finds its way back to where it matters most: the court.

The quicker first step. The faster reaction. The ball you still manage to reach deep into the third set. Or the shoulder that’s still going strong after a hundred smashes. We like the idea that a partnership shouldn’t end where the contract is signed.

That’s where it should begin. For us, partnerships aren’t advertising spaces. They’re playing fields. A chance to rethink the sport, bring people together, create better opportunities, train smarter, and make padel not only more popular, but genuinely better.

Because in the end, there’s only one question we ask before every partnership:

Does it make padel better for our community?

If the answer is yes, it’s more than a partnership.

It’s a perfect match.

And that’s exactly what all inclusive Fitness is for PadelCity.

Curiously enough, there are sports that don’t arrive with a great deal of fanfare. They creep up on you. First, a colleague mentions it. Then videos suddenly start popping up on your timeline. A friend cancels your tennis date because he’s “playing padel today”. And before you know it, you find yourself standing on a glass court, wondering why you didn’t discover this sport much earlier.

Padel is currently following precisely this path. What has long been a national sport in Spain and Argentina is now developing into a movement in Germany too. The number of courts is growing, as is the community. And with it comes the question that many are currently asking:

Padel is a mix of tennis and squash – but with a much lower barrier to entry and a high fun factor. It’s almost always played as a doubles game on a 20 x 10-metre court with glass walls and nets. The key feature: the walls are part of the game and can be used, much like in squash.

The rules are quick to explain, and players often manage their first rallies after just a few minutes. And that’s exactly what makes the difference.

Whilst other sports initially require patience, padel rewards its players from the very first stroke.

Why does padel inspire millions of people?

The figures speak for themselves. More than 30 million people worldwide now play padel. In Spain, there are already more padel players than tennis players. And in Germany, too, the sport is growing at an impressive rate.

But figures alone do not explain why people often book their next session straight away after their first one.

Padel has something that is difficult to measure: it makes you happy very quickly.

The court is smaller than a tennis court, the distances are shorter, and the rallies are longer. This leads to less frustration and more feelings of achievement. You play with each other rather than against each other, cheer each other on, laugh at missed shots and celebrate spectacular saves against the glass wall.

Padel is both competitive and communal.

A sport for everyone. Really. Perhaps that is precisely the secret to its success.

Padel requires neither years of experience nor perfect technique. Whether you’re in your early twenties or mid-sixties, whether you’re a sports enthusiast or getting back into the game: it won’t be long before you experience your first sense of achievement.

Children play with their parents. Friends play with friends. Work colleagues meet up after work. And people who didn’t know each other before often leave the court as new training partners.

Padel simply brings people together, regardless of age or playing ability.