Padel Injury Prevention

Padel is considered low-to-medium risk among racket sports. A bit safer than tennis, noticeably safer than squash. The court is small so there are no long sprints, the ball pressure is low so shoulder load is lighter than in tennis, and the doubles format means you're never alone defending the whole court. Even so, anyone who plays regularly will eventually feel something: a twinge in the elbow, fatigue in the shoulder, tightness in the wrist. The point of this guide is to catch and prevent those signals before they turn into a real injury.

From what we see on the courts, most padel injuries don't come from unfortunate accidents but from three recurring causes: insufficient warm-up, ill-fitted equipment, and faulty technique. All three are within your control. The remaining small percentage — falls, trips, bad bounces — happens, and you can't fully prevent it. But if you address the avoidable causes, your time on court increases substantially. The sections below tackle each of those three causes in turn.

The most skipped step in padel is the warm-up. Most amateur players show up, take their racket out of the bag, and hope a few rallies will warm them up. They won't. For the first ten minutes your muscles and tendons are still cold, and the fastest ball of the match — the first smash, the first lob, the first lunge for a vibora — almost always falls inside that exact window. A noticeable share of injuries happen in the first quarter of the match, and almost all are tied to insufficient warm-up.

What you need is dynamic warm-up, not static stretching. Static stretching — holding a leg and bending forward, for example — does not reduce injury risk on cold tissue and may temporarily reduce force output. Dynamic warm-up, on the other hand, brings the body up to playing tempo through movement. The goal: nudge the heart rate up, take the joints through their full range of motion, and wake up the racket-arm coordination.

Eight to ten minutes is enough. Treat it as part of the match — promise yourself you will not play a match without it. The flow below can be done courtside with no extra equipment, alongside your partner.

When it comes to elbow and shoulder injuries, the single biggest factor is racket weight. Padel rackets typically weigh between 350 and 385 grams, and that 30-gram spread, multiplied by hundreds of swings per hour, makes a remarkable difference for your elbow. Playing for an hour with a 360-gram racket is not the same as playing for an hour with a 375-gram one. Even a 5-10 gram reduction can be enough to settle a nagging tennis elbow.

The practical rule: if you're a beginner or play less than 50 hours a year, choose a racket in the 350-360 gram range with the balance closer to the hand than the head (low balance). If you're over 40, no matter how well you play, aim for around 350 grams. Control may drop slightly, but joint load drops a lot more. There's a concept called the "ego racket" — amateurs buying the same 375-gram, stiff, head-heavy rackets the pros use. The amateur body is not built to absorb that force in repetition, and the result is almost always the elbow or shoulder. Padel is solved with technique, not with racket power.

The dominant movement in padel is lateral — constant side-to-side, stop-and-go, sudden direction changes. Playing padel in running shoes is a direct invitation to a sprained ankle. Running shoes are designed only for forward motion; they offer no lateral support and the outsole won't hold the foot against side force. On the first lunge or low lob your heel slides, and the ankle rolls. This is the most common one-second injury we see in padel.

The fix is a court shoe with lateral support — and ideally one designed specifically for padel (look for an "omega" or "herringbone" sole pattern), which grips better on artificial turf. Another frequent mistake: playing for years in the same pair. The upper may look fine, but once the sole wears down the grip is gone. For someone who plays twice a week the realistic life of a padel shoe is 6-9 months. If you notice yourself slipping more, even on shoes that look intact, it's time to replace them.

Bad technique rarely produces an injury from a single bad shot. What it does is this: the body uses the wrong muscles at the wrong angles, small repetition loads accumulate, and weeks later your elbow or shoulder gives out. The three highest-injury-risk shots in padel are the bandeja, the smash, and the serve — all overhead, all involving trunk rotation. If you're hitting the bandeja with your arm only, if your feet aren't turning on the smash, if you're compensating with the wrist on the serve, the body collects an invoice somewhere and eventually presents it.

This is where lessons earn their keep. A handful of private lessons a year cost far less than a course of physiotherapy for tennis elbow. A lesson is not an expense, it's an investment. A bandeja angle a coach corrects in ten minutes can be the reason you spend the rest of the season on court rather than off it. Self-teaching also works — but the typical sequence is that you injure yourself first and then fix the technique.

The off-court half of injury prevention is recovery, and the foundation of recovery is sleep, nutrition, and hydration. Seven to nine hours of sleep does more for tendon and muscle repair than any supplement. If you keep playing at the same intensity through a poorly-slept week, cumulative fatigue builds up, and the first thing to give out is usually the elbow or shoulder. On match days don't skimp on protein — 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day is a solid target for muscle repair. Hydration matters especially in summer heat: above 30°C you can lose 500-750 ml of water and electrolytes per hour.

Another critical point is consecutive days. If you're over 35, try not to play more than two days in a row at the same intensity. Tendons take 36-48 hours for full repair, and re-loading before that turns micro-damage into chronic damage. On the home-exercise side the foam roller is genuinely useful: a few minutes of rolling the legs and back lowers muscle tone and improves the next day's range of motion. None of this is magic; it's just listening to the body and being consistent.