Coach — film a stroke, get one fix

Coach is a padel technique coach that lives in the Hermes Padel iPhone app. You film yourself hitting one stroke, and it finds each repetition, measures the same checkpoints every time, and gives you one thing to fix — plus a drill to fix it with.

It is deliberately not a highlight reel. Twenty bandejas filmed from behind the back glass tell you far more than a whole match does, because every rep is the same shot and the numbers can be compared.

How a session goes

Pick the stroke you're about to practise — bandeja, víbora, smash, forehand or backhand volley, forehand or backhand off the back glass, or serve.
Set the phone up and hit. You don't tap start and stop between reps. Coach splits the clip into repetitions by hearing the ball on your strings.
Tap yourself on the first frame. There are usually four people on a padel court and Coach only coaches one. Tapping yourself as early in the clip as you can gives it the strongest lock, and it follows you from there.
Read the review. You get your rep count, your checkpoints, a skeleton overlay you can scrub through rep by rep, and one fix with a drill.

Filming setup

This is the whole difference between useful numbers and nonsense. Four things:

Behind the back glass. Stand the phone outside the court, looking down the tramline on your side. A fence mount, a net post or a bag propped against the glass is plenty — it just has to be steady.
Head height, about 2 m up. Chest-to-head height reads your contact height best. Any lower and your own body hides the strike.
Landscape, feet in frame. Turn the phone sideways and check your ankles are inside the picture. The split-step lives down there, and it is one of the things Coach looks for.
Sound on. Don't cover the microphone. Contacts are detected by ear — silent video gives Coach nothing to split the clip with, and you'll get "we couldn't find any strokes".

One more: film your own court, not the one two courts over. The strike has to carry to the phone.

Drill mode — one stroke at a time

Coach asks which stroke you're practising before you film, and it measures against that stroke only. That's on purpose. A bandeja and a smash want opposite things from your contact height, so a coach that had to guess which one you just hit would have to hedge on both. Telling it up front means every checkpoint is judged against the right target.

So film sets, not matches: pick a stroke, hit twenty of them, review, do the drill, film the same stroke again next week. The progress screen tracks each stroke separately and follows the fault you've been working on, so you can see whether it actually moved.

One fix, not a list

Coach can measure nine common faults — late preparation, no split-step, body square to the net, contact too low or too high, a collapsing elbow, no weight transfer, a rushed swing, and slow recovery. It will only ever put one of them on the card.

That's a coaching decision, not a limitation. A list of nine things to fix is a list you ignore, and one bad rep out of twelve isn't a fault at all — everybody shanks one. A fault only makes the card if it showed up across enough of your reps to be real, and if you've already been told about the same thing three sessions running, Coach moves on to the next one and comes back to it later.

When Coach couldn't see something clearly it says so rather than scoring it. "We couldn't measure this" and "this was fine" are different statements, and only one of them would be true.

Privacy — it all stays on your phone

Nothing is uploaded. Ever. The video, the body-tracking data and the coaching text are all produced on your iPhone and stay in the app's own storage:

The clip is recorded to your phone and never sent anywhere.
Body tracking runs on-device with Apple's Vision framework.
The written coaching comes from Apple Intelligence, running on the device itself.
Your practice history — rep counts, which fault you're working on, your streak — is stored locally on that phone only.

Because it is all local, it is also all yours to delete: remove a clip and its analysis goes with it.

What you need

An iPhone. Coach is iOS-only for now, and it needs iOS 17 or later. It is part of the native Hermes Padel app, not the web app — the browser has no access to the camera formats and on-device models it depends on. (That native app isn't on the App Store yet; the rest of Hermes Padel works in any browser in the meantime.)
iOS 26 and an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone for the written coaching. This is the one part with a higher bar. If your phone can't run Apple Intelligence, or you have it switched off, Coach tells you plainly and falls back to written feedback built from your own measurements and the drill library. All of the measurement still works — you get the same rep count, the same checkpoints and the same fault, just in words that were written in advance rather than composed for you.
A steady spot for the phone. A fence mount is ideal; a bag against the glass works.

If something looks wrong

"We couldn't find any strokes." The analysis ran, it just never heard a ball struck. Check the microphone wasn't muted or covered, and that the phone was beside your own court.
A "fair" or "poor" clip badge. Coach is telling you how much of the clip it could actually see you in. Bad framing is the number one cause of odd numbers — re-film with your feet in frame and the phone steadier before trusting a reading.
The wrong player is being tracked. Re-analyse and tap yourself earlier in the clip.

Coach is new, and the measurements it reports are honest about being taken from a single camera — they are the checkpoints a coach standing behind the glass would look at, not lab motion capture. Have a look at the FAQ for the rest of Hermes Padel.