Padel is the easiest racket sport to start and one of the easiest to get hurt playing. The court is small, the rallies are long, and the underarm serve means someone who has not played anything for a decade can be competitive within twenty minutes. That is exactly the combination that produces injuries: full-intensity movement on a body that has not done full-intensity movement for years.
Most padel injuries are quiet ones: a calf that goes tight in week three, an elbow that aches after a long doubles session, an ankle rolled reaching for a low ball off the glass. Almost all of them are avoidable if you know where the load is going.
Why padel hurts people differently from tennis
Three features of the game shape the injury pattern.
- Short, repeated accelerations from a standing start. A padel court is 20 metres by 10, so you rarely run far, but you change direction constantly. The calf and Achilles absorb the push-off and the braking, over and over, without the long strides that let a runner's tendon unload.
- Overhead shots off the back glass. The bandeja and vibora are played above head height with the shoulder in external rotation and the elbow decelerating hard. That is a shoulder and elbow load pattern most beginners have never trained.
- Sessions that last as long as the booking. Nobody plays padel for twenty minutes. A ninety-minute doubles slot is standard, and the social format means you keep going long after the point at which you would have stopped running.
What the injury research actually shows
Padel research is younger than the sport's popularity, and the studies disagree more than a single headline would suggest. A systematic review of padel injury incidence, prevalence and nature found injury rates of roughly 3 per 1,000 hours of training and 8 per 1,000 matches, with reported prevalence across studies ranging from 40% to 95%. That range tells you how variable the underlying surveys are, so treat any precise figure with caution.
On location, the review found the elbow the most frequently reported single region, with injuries mostly tendinous or muscular in origin, while other surveys of recreational players put the majority of injuries in the lower limb. Both can be true at once: the elbow accumulates the most complaints over a season, and the lower limb produces the ones that stop you playing.
| Area | Typical padel mechanism | What it usually feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Calf and Achilles | Repeated push-off and braking; lunging for a low ball | Sudden sharp pain mid-calf, or a tendon that is stiff for the first minutes of every morning |
| Elbow | Deceleration on overheads; off-centre contact; heavy or badly gripped racket | Ache on the outside of the elbow, worse gripping and lifting |
| Shoulder | Repeated overheads with limited rotation available | Pain reaching overhead or behind; weakness late in a session |
| Ankle | Rolling on a fast change of direction, often off the back glass | Immediate swelling on the outside of the ankle |
| Knee | Repeated deep positions and rotation under load | Ache at the front of the knee, worse on stairs and after sitting |
| Lower back | Extension and rotation on the overhead shots | Stiffness and one-sided ache after playing |
The calf and Achilles: the classic first-season injury
If you hear about someone's padel injury, this is usually it. The calf-Achilles complex is asked to produce and absorb force in short bursts, several hundred times a session, from a standing start. In a trained player that is fine. In someone who last sprinted in 2019, the muscle fatigues, the tendon takes proportionally more load, and somewhere in the second hour something gives.
The two versions are worth telling apart. A calf muscle tear is sudden and specific: a sharp pain mid-calf, often described as being hit from behind, and difficulty pushing off afterwards. Achilles tendinopathy builds gradually: a stiff, sore tendon for the first steps in the morning that eases as you move, then returns after playing. The first needs relative rest and a graded return; the second needs loading, and rest actually makes it worse over time.
That distinction matters because the internet's advice for one is the wrong advice for the other. If you want the detail, our clinical site covers what Achilles tendinopathy symptoms look like and the calf work that helps once you know which problem you have.
Sudden severe calf pain with swelling, warmth and redness, particularly after surgery, illness or long-haul travel, is not a padel injury until a clinician has said so. Get it checked the same day.
The elbow and shoulder: paying for the overheads
Padel elbow is usually lateral epicondylalgia, the same tendon problem as tennis elbow, arriving by a slightly different route. The typical cause is not one bad shot but a season of off-centre contact, often with a racket that is too heavy or a grip that is too small, forcing the forearm to work harder to control the head. Loading the tendon progressively is the treatment with the best evidence behind it; braces and rest manage symptoms without changing the underlying capacity.
Shoulders complain for a simpler reason. The bandeja asks for repeated overhead work with the arm behind the body. If your shoulder does not have that range available comfortably, the rotator cuff works at the edge of its capacity all session, and by week four it is sore. Building rotation and overhead strength before you build volume solves most of it.
Ankles, knees and the glass
The back glass is what makes padel fun and what makes ankles roll. Chasing a ball off the wall means accelerating backwards then changing direction late, often looking up rather than at your feet. Add a worn artificial turf surface and the odd loose sand patch and you have the standard lateral ankle sprain mechanism.
Two things reduce it. Court shoes with genuine lateral support beat running shoes, which are built to move forwards and roll easily sideways. And if you have sprained that ankle before, the balance work matters more than the strapping: previous sprain is the strongest predictor of the next one, largely because the joint's position sense takes months to come back and rarely does so on its own.
A sensible first season
Nothing here requires a gym membership or a training plan. It requires not going from nothing to three sessions a week in a fortnight.
- Cap the jump in volume. One session a week for the first month, two from the second. Tendons adapt over weeks, and they adapt to the average, not to your enthusiasm.
- Warm up for six minutes, properly. Two minutes of easy movement, then calf raises, a few lunges, some gentle overhead swings with the racket, then three or four quick changes of direction. The point is to make the first sprint of the session not be the first sprint of the session.
- Do calf raises twice a week. Three sets of 12 to 15 on each leg, slow down, holding something for balance. This is the single highest-value thing a new padel player can do, and it takes four minutes.
- Check the racket and the shoes. A lighter racket and a grip that fits reduce elbow load; court shoes reduce ankle risk. Both are cheaper than six weeks off.
- Stop when the quality drops. Most injuries land in the last twenty minutes, when the legs are tired and the technique goes. Ending a session with something left is not weakness, it is how people keep playing all winter.
When a niggle needs looking at
A soreness that settles within 24 to 48 hours and does not get worse each session is normal adaptation. Book an assessment if any of the following apply: pain that is worse the following week than it was the first, pain that changes how you walk, an ankle that stays swollen beyond a few days, any sudden sharp pain that made you stop mid-point, or a shoulder or elbow that has been present for more than three or four weeks without improving.
The reason for the three-to-four-week line is practical. Tendon problems caught early respond to loading in weeks. The same problem left for six months still responds, but the timeline stretches, and the sport you were doing it for has a season.
How this works at PhysioNearby
Sussex has become a genuinely good place to play padel. There are courts at Bluecoat Sports in Horsham, floodlit outdoor courts at Worthing, clubs opening along the coast, and in mid-2026 an application went to Mid Sussex District Council for six more courts at a leisure site near Albourne. The people filling those bookings are largely in their thirties, forties and fifties, and most of them did not play a change-of-direction sport last year.
That is the clinically interesting part. The injuries we see from new racket-sport players are rarely caused by the sport being dangerous. They are caused by a mismatch between the load a body has been prepared for and the load a competitive doubles session delivers, and that mismatch is measurable: how many single-leg calf raises you can do, whether your shoulder has comfortable overhead rotation, whether a previously sprained ankle still has its balance back. Those three tests take a few minutes and predict most of what goes wrong in a first season.
Clinics on the PhysioNearby network across Sussex see this pattern every summer, from Horsham and Haywards Heath down to the coast. If you are not sure what a local assessment involves or what it costs, here is how the matching works.
Common questions
Is padel worse for injuries than tennis?
The evidence does not support calling it more dangerous. It has a different profile, weighted towards the elbow, calf and ankle rather than tennis's serving shoulder, and it attracts more beginners playing at full intensity, which is a separate risk factor from the sport itself.
Do I need padel-specific shoes?
For anything beyond occasional social play, yes. Running shoes are designed to compress and roll on sideways loading, which is the exact movement that sprains ankles on a padel court.
My elbow hurts. Should I stop playing?
Usually not completely. Tendon problems tend to respond better to reduced, controlled load than to full rest. Reducing sessions, checking the racket weight and grip, and starting a progressive strengthening plan is a better first move than putting the racket away for a month and starting again where you left off.
How long does a calf tear keep me off court?
It depends entirely on the grade, which is why guessing is unhelpful. A minor strain can be back to modified play within two to three weeks; a significant tear takes considerably longer and returning early is the most common reason people tear it twice.
Padel rewards people who build up slowly and punishes people who treat week one like week twenty. Four minutes of calf raises twice a week is a strange price to pay for a whole season, but it is the deal.