In the second part of our special series at the start of 2026, Dr Coach Kelli looks at the most common injuries that pickleball players might experience.
We asked her – what are the most common injuries you see in pickleball players, and how can they be avoided?
Part of why people who play racquet sports live a healthy 10 years longer is because of the community.
One of the things I love about pickleball is like, most of the time, every pickleball player I meet is nicer than the last one that I met.
And I’ll tell you a quick story. When I went down to Florida for a business conference, I was just starting to get into pickleball. I pulled up to a court at 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday.
Three fellas there. Got their chairs out. They’re in their 60s or 70s.
I walk over. I say, “Hey, I’m just learning this game, can you teach me a thing or two?”
And they said, “Well, probably not, but get over here!”
And we played for half an hour, and it was awesome. It was such a cool experience.
And I could see how that — people got attracted to it, people get addicted to it, and they want to play every day for the rest of their lives.
I get it. It’s a really fun game.
Where People Need to Be Smart
So, that to be said, we do need to warm up.
We do need to cool down properly.
We do need to gauge how often we are playing and be smart about the dose that we’re starting with.
Like everything else, you can overdose on pickleball.
And we have to be smart about how we’re allowing our body and its tissues to adapt and respond.
There are contact injuries and overuse injuries that we see most commonly in pickleball.
The contact injuries are usually when someone’s going after a lob or a ball that they probably have no business going after in the first place, and they end up falling and they break a wrist or a hip or they tear something — they tear a hamstring, that kind of thing.
Those are what we call the contact injuries. The “shoot, I did this thing and it happened and I know exactly what I did to cause the pain or the problem.”
That being said — no ball is worth a fall. If somebody gets a good shot off on you, you tip your hat, you say great shot, and they take that point or they get the serve back.
But my goodness, no ball is worth a fall.
Do not break your wrist.
Do not break a hip.
Do not tear a hammy in pickleball.
Recreational pickleball — the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
Those are the common contact injuries we see.
As far as the overuse injuries, this is what happens — and I wish every pickleballer who started knew this. They learn the game on Monday and they fall in love with it, and they play two hours every day until Saturday. And then the following Monday, my phone rings.
And they say, “Hey Kel, I picked up pickleball and now my elbow hurts,” or “now my knee hurts,” or “now my foot hurts,” or “my shoulder hurts.”
And I usually say, “Well, you picked it up — what does that mean?”
“Oh, I learned it on Monday and I played every day.”
And I have to sit there on the other end of the phone and go like — what did you think was going to happen?
You haven’t moved your body like that in five years. Six months. Fifteen years in some cases.
What did you think was going to happen?
It is not because they’re old.
It is because they haven’t allowed their body to adapt to the demands that they’re now putting on it in playing pickleball.
So they can be avoided by adequately preparing your body for those demands and the kind of fitness you have before you get into it.
If you are active — if you walk, if you’re able to get up and down off the ground, if you lift weights, if you go to the gym, if you dance, if you have adequate health and fitness— you can avoid a lot of things, especially common pickleball overuse injuries.
If you don’t, that’s fine because pickleball is a great way to start getting in shape. People have to be respectful of the way their body responds to those demands that they put on it, and the time it takes, and the repetition that it takes, and the dosing that it takes to be able to do that.
