Common Padel Injuries, and What Prevents Them

Quick Answer: Padel's most reported injuries are the elbow, the calf and Achilles, the ankle, the shoulder and the lower back. Surveys put roughly a third to a half of regular players out with something each year, mostly from gradual overload rather than one dramatic moment. Warm up, add sessions slowly, wear court shoes.

Padel feels gentle. The court is small, the racket is short, the ball comes back off the glass instead of past you, and nobody sprints for 90 minutes. Then one Tuesday in November somebody pushes off for a lob they should have let bounce, and there is a noise, and their season is over.

This is what the research says about that — which injuries, how often, and which prevention measures have actual evidence behind them rather than gym folklore. It is not medical advice and it cannot be: nobody can diagnose an elbow through a browser. What it can do is tell you what padel breaks, and when a niggle stops being a niggle. The rest of what the sport asks of you, from calories to cost, is in the padel life guide.

What the numbers say

Padel's evidence base is young but consistent. Three recent surveys, three countries, three slightly different questions:

The French survey, run through the national tennis federation, also found the lower back was the most common site of ongoing pain even where it was not the most common injury. The Belgian study reported the figure that ought to concentrate the mind: a median recovery time of 30 days. Not a week off. A month of your season.

Read those three rows together and the honest summary is this. Somewhere between a third and a half of regular padel players will pick up something in a year, the lower limb takes the most of it, the elbow takes the most of the upper limb, and the typical cost is around a month.

The five that keep coming back

1. The elbow

Pain on the outside of the elbow, worse when you grip, worse the day after playing. Mechanically it is an overload of the tendons attaching at the lateral epicondyle, driven by repeated impact and vibration through a solid racket and a tight grip — and in padel by the overhead smash in particular.

The important feature is that it arrives slowly. In the Chilean data, 85.7% of elbow and forearm injuries came on gradually. That is a problem with a long warning period, which is why it is the one injury most worth understanding early. Padel elbow covers it properly.

2. The calf and Achilles

The acute one, and the most common single region in the French survey at 18.8%. The mechanism is unglamorous: you are standing near-static at the net, the lob goes up behind you, and you push off backwards from a cold, flat-footed position. Calf muscle tears and Achilles problems in racket sports cluster around exactly that movement, and they cluster in players over 35.

It is also the injury with the clearest cheap defense. Eight minutes of pulse-raising and a few progressive strides make the first hard push-off of the night the fifteenth, not the first. That routine is here.

3. The ankle

Top region in the Chilean survey at 18.5%, and 64.7% of ankle and foot injuries there came on suddenly — the signature of a sprain rather than an overload. Padel courts are sand-dressed artificial turf, the sand moves, and lateral changes of direction happen constantly. Add a shoe with no side support and the ankle is doing a job the shoe should be doing. Court shoes matter more here than anywhere else, which is most of the argument in what to wear for padel.

4. The shoulder

15.2% of injuries in Chile, 33 to 37% of upper-body complaints in a 950-player study. The overhead pattern — smash, bandeja, víbora, repeated for years — loads the rotator cuff exactly as it does in tennis serving, without the pause a tennis serve gives you. Shoulder problems in padel tend to be tendinous and gradual in younger players and more structural in older ones, which is another argument for taking early stiffness seriously rather than playing through it.

5. The lower back

The most common site of ongoing pain in the French data. Padel asks for repeated rotation under load, plus overheads hit with the trunk extended, plus a lot of low volleys taken with a bent back rather than bent knees. None of that is dangerous on its own. All of it, twice a week, for two years, with no strength work in between, adds up.

Knees deserve a mention too: 13.6% in the Chilean data, mostly from twisting and lunging on a surface that grips more than it slides.

The prevention basics that hold up

Nobody can promise you an injury-free season. What the clinical literature and physiotherapy clinics agree on is a short list, and it is short precisely because it is the part that is well supported.

Warm up, properly, every time. A 2023 narrative review in Sports Medicine concluded that "warm-ups incorporating dynamic stretching and dynamic activity show a reduction in injury incidence", and that they work best when they combine an aerobic element first and dynamic movement after — not stretching alone. Eight minutes is enough.

Manage the load, not just the session. Injury risk in the French survey rose with weekly volume and with playing level. Going from one night a week to three in a fortnight because a court came free is a bigger change than it feels like. Space sessions, put a rest day between them, and if you are planning a season's cadence, the match night scheduler at least makes the pattern visible before you commit to it. How much is sustainable is covered in how often should you play padel.

Wear court shoes. Not running shoes. Padel is a lateral sport played on sand over turf, and a running shoe offers neither the grip nor the side support for that. This is the cheapest injury prevention available and the one most beginners skip.

Get the racket weight right. A 950-player study of upper-body injuries in padel concluded plainly that "adjusting to the ideal weight of the racket, not abusing practice and having experience is beneficial and prevents the appearance of injuries". Heavier is not better. Choosing a first racket covers what the weight actually does.

Strength work off court. Calves, glutes, rotator cuff, forearms, trunk. Twice a week, unglamorous, and the single biggest difference between a forty-five-year-old who plays for another decade and one who does not.

The honest caveat about all of this

One finding from the Belgian study is worth reporting because it is inconvenient: among the factors associated with a higher likelihood of injury was carrying out a warm-up.

That almost certainly does not mean warming up hurts you. It means people who warm up are disproportionately people who have been injured before, who play more, and who take the sport more seriously — a classic confound in any cross-sectional survey, which measures everything at one moment and cannot establish what caused what.

We include it because pretending the evidence is tidier than it is would be the wrong way to write about your body. The recommendation to warm up rests on trial evidence from other sports, not on padel surveys. It is sound. It is also not a guarantee, and anyone selling you certainty about injury prevention is selling something.

When to stop playing

The genuinely useful skill is knowing which aches to ignore.

Ordinary post-padel soreness is diffuse, symmetrical-ish, arrives the next day, and eases as you warm up. That is not an injury — sore after padel explains what your forearms and glutes are doing in your first month.

Stop, and get it looked at, if any of these apply. Physiotherapy clinics that treat padel players list much the same triggers: pain lasting more than one to two weeks, performance or movement that has visibly dropped off, or the same injury recurring. Add the obvious acute signals: a sudden sharp pain with a pop or a snap, swelling or bruising, a joint that gives way, or pain that makes you change how you move.

The specific thing not to do is the padel version of playing on: strapping the elbow, switching to a lighter racket, taking the smash off your game and continuing twice a week for three months. That is not recovery, it is a slow negotiation with a tendon you are going to lose.

See a physiotherapist. That is the whole recommendation, and it is deliberately plain — a clinician can examine the joint, watch you move, and tell you in twenty minutes what no article can. A month off on advice beats six months of managing something that was fixable in March.

FAQ

What is the most common padel injury?

It depends which survey you read, which tells you something. A French survey of 645 players found the calf and Achilles complex most affected (18.8%) with the elbow just behind (18.5%). A Chilean survey of 364 amateurs put the ankle and foot first (18.5%), then the shoulder and elbow (15.2% each). Taken together: the elbow above the waist, the calf and ankle below it.

How common are injuries in padel?

Common enough to plan around. Surveys report between 36.5% and 53.8% of regular players injured over the study period, with incidence rates of 2.81 to 5.4 injuries per 1,000 hours of play. The median recovery in the Belgian study was 30 days, so a typical injury costs about a month of your season.

Is padel bad for your knees?

Less than running, more than swimming. Knees accounted for 13.6% of injuries in the Chilean data, mostly from lunging and twisting on a surface with real grip. The court is small so there is little continuous impact, but the direction changes are constant. Strong glutes and quadriceps, sensible shoes and not treating every lob as a personal challenge all help.

Does warming up prevent padel injuries?

Warm-ups that combine light aerobic work with dynamic movement are associated with lower injury incidence across sports, and clinicians recommend them for padel specifically. There is no padel-specific trial proving it, and one Belgian survey even found a positive association between warming up and injury, which is almost certainly explained by who warms up rather than by the warm-up itself. Do it anyway; the cost is eight minutes.

When should I see a physio about padel pain?

If pain has lasted more than one to two weeks, if it keeps coming back, if your movement or performance has clearly dropped, or if anything happened suddenly with a pop, swelling or a joint giving way. Padel injuries are mostly gradual, which means they are mostly catchable early — but only if you stop treating the early version as normal.