Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the country, and it’s also becoming the biggest source of injuries walking into physio clinics. At Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby, near Brentwood, coaches work with pickleball players who went from sitting at a desk eight hours a day to playing pickleball eight hours a day — and their bodies can’t handle the jump. The fix isn’t to stop playing. It’s to build the strength foundation that lets you play without breaking down.
Watch: Pickleball Bodies
In this episode of the Kraken Power Podcast, Josko and Brandon talk about why pickleball is creating more injuries than any other recreational sport and what strength training can do about it.
Why Pickleball Is Destroying People’s Bodies
Pickleball has a low barrier to entry, it’s incredibly fun, it’s social, and you can be competitive with other 50-year-olds. That’s exactly why it’s dangerous. People go from doing almost nothing to playing four, five, six hours straight without any ramp-up period.
Brandon’s dad is the perfect example. After retiring, he traded eight hours at a desk for eight hours on the pickleball court. That was fine for about a year. Then every weekend became a complaint session: “Brandon, what should I do about my forearm? My knee hurts. My Achilles is killing me.”
The problem isn’t pickleball itself. It’s the volume, and the fact that untrained bodies can’t handle it. You wouldn’t go from zero running to marathon running overnight. But people regularly go from zero activity to drilling pickleball moves for four hours straight because the sport is so enjoyable they don’t notice the damage until it’s done.
A chiropractor at Strike — the physio and chiro clinic in the same building as Kraken Fitness in Burnaby — recently posted about where most of his injured patients are coming from. The answer: pickleball. More than running, more than CrossFit, more than rec league hockey.
Josko uses the inner Serena Williams comparison: “The best way to get someone’s inner Serena Williams out is to get a 50-year-old playing pickleball.” The competitive drive kicks in and all awareness of volume goes out the window.
The Most Common Pickleball Injuries
The injuries showing up from pickleball are predictable once you understand the movement patterns of the sport.
Elbows and forearms are the number one injury site. The repetitive forehand-backhand motion throughout hours of play wears out the smaller tendons in the forearm. Brandon calls it tendinopathy — the tendons get overloaded from repetitive stress without adequate recovery time. It’s the same injury pattern cashiers get from scanning grocery items all day.
Knees are the second most common. Players spend long periods in a half-squat position, bouncing up and down, with constant re-acceleration and deceleration to lunge at the ball. Without the quad and hamstring strength to absorb that load, the knees take the punishment.
Ankles and Achilles come next. Pickleball involves a lot of stop-start motion — lateral cuts, quick pivots, sudden lunges. The Achilles tendon and calf muscles aren’t conditioned for that kind of repeated stress in most recreational players.
The common thread: these aren’t acute injuries from a single bad moment. They’re overuse injuries from volume that the body isn’t prepared to handle. The tendons, ligaments, and muscles needed to support these movements haven’t been built up because these players went straight from sedentary to competitive without any strength foundation.
As Brandon explains it: when the muscles give in quickly from being untrained, all the load goes directly to the tendons and ligaments. That’s where the damage happens.
Build the Foundation Before the Sport
Kraken’s coaches don’t start pickleball players with sport-specific movements. They start with foundational strength — hex bar deadlifts, barbell squats, basic compound movements that build the base.
This surprises a lot of clients. They expect lunges, plyometrics, and exercises that mimic pickleball movements. And they’ll get to those eventually. But the first three to six months is about building muscle, strengthening tendons, and creating the capacity to handle those dynamic movements safely.
Brandon’s logic is straightforward: forward lunges, lateral lunges, and plyometric drills are great for pickleball athletes. But those exercises are more demanding on the joints than basic squats and deadlifts. If you can’t handle the foundational movement, adding the sport-specific version on top just creates more injury risk.
The progression at Kraken looks like this:
- Phase 1: Foundational strength — squats, hinges, presses, pulls. Build muscle mass and tendon resilience. Three to six months.
- Phase 2: Movement progressions — stationary lunges before walking lunges, lunge holds before dynamic stepping. Same movement archetype as pickleball, but at lower intensity.
- Phase 3: Sport-specific training — forward and lateral lunges, wall balls, plyometric ankle and calf work, exercises that replicate the stop-start demands of the court.
People want to skip to Phase 3. Kraken’s coaches don’t let them. The foundation is what prevents the injuries from coming back.
Load Management: The Real Fix
The overarching philosophy for pickleball athletes at Kraken is load management — understanding your total weekly workload across both pickleball and strength training.
Brandon breaks it into questions: How many days per week are you playing pickleball? How many of those are hard sessions vs. light sessions? How many strength training sessions are you adding? Are those hard or light?
The goal is to keep overall workload at a level where you feel about a 2 or 3 out of 10 in terms of soreness before your next session. If you’re consistently at a 7 or 8, you’ve done too much. You want to feel like you could repeat the activity the next day if you had to.
Josko adds the self-check: if your soreness level isn’t improving over time despite consistent training, you’re chronically doing too much. Your body isn’t recovering and you’re in a hole that more pickleball won’t fix.
The flip side is encouraging: as your strength base grows, your capacity increases. The four hours of pickleball that used to destroy your shoulders will eventually feel manageable because you’ve built the muscle and tendon capacity to absorb the load. The strength training doesn’t just prevent injuries — it allows you to play more, better, for longer.
Brandon’s Dad: The Pickleball Comeback Story
Brandon’s dad is proof that the system works. After years of ignoring Brandon’s suggestions to strength train, the injuries from pickleball forced his hand. Brandon finally put his foot down: “Monday and Wednesday, you’re showing up at the gym at 8:45. I got you a personal trainer.”
His dad spent six to eight months in a recovery block. He dropped from playing five to seven times per week (sometimes multiple sessions per day) to maybe once per week. He stopped competing entirely during this period. The focus was entirely on building foundational strength — forearm and tricep exercises for the elbow issues, squats and hinges for the knees, progressive loading to build tendon resilience.
Six to eight months later, his dad’s review: “That was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He now swears by gym training, plays pickleball at his previous level, and has the strength foundation to handle the volume without his forearms, knees, and Achilles falling apart.
The takeaway: you don’t have to stop playing. You have to build the body that can handle playing. And that starts in the gym, not on the court.
FAQ
Why does pickleball cause so many injuries?
Pickleball injuries come from volume, not intensity. The sport is so fun and accessible that players go from sedentary to four-plus hours of play without any physical preparation. Untrained tendons, ligaments, and muscles can’t handle the repetitive forehand-backhand motions, half-squats, and lateral cuts that pickleball demands.
What strength exercises help prevent pickleball injuries?
Kraken’s coaches start with foundational strength: squats, deadlifts, presses, and pulls. For pickleball-specific injury prevention, forearm and grip exercises help elbows, while progressive lunges and calf raises build knee and Achilles resilience. The key is building a base before adding sport-specific movements.
How long does it take to build enough strength for pickleball?
Brandon’s dad took six to eight months in a structured strength program before returning to full pickleball volume. Most clients at Kraken Fitness in Burnaby see meaningful improvement in injury resilience within three to six months of consistent strength training two to three times per week.
Should I stop playing pickleball if I have elbow pain?
You don’t necessarily have to stop completely, but you should reduce volume and add strength training for the forearms and surrounding muscles. Kraken’s approach is to build tendon capacity through progressive loading so the elbow can eventually handle the repetitive stress of pickleball.
How much pickleball is too much per week?
It depends on your fitness base. If you’re feeling above a 5 out of 10 on soreness consistently, you’re doing too much. Brandon recommends tracking your weekly workload across both pickleball and gym sessions and keeping post-activity soreness at a 2-3 out of 10 before your next session.
Ready to Start?
If pickleball is beating up your body and you want to build the strength to play without pain, Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby near Brentwood offers a free trial week. Kraken’s trainers work with pickleball players at every level to build the foundation that keeps you on the court.
Listen on Your Favorite Platform
- YouTube – https://youtu.be/mae6-XnS4p0
- Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/episode/15vX8YOwaS7egRPBmAZRp5?si=i0cLRGuNTe23Bw6QFowqUQ
- Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/pickleball-bodies-ep-16/id1769000945?i=1000748214411
About the Author
Brandon is the co-owner at Kraken Fitness, a personal training gym in North Burnaby near Brentwood. With a kinesiology degree and over a decade of coaching experience, Brandon specializes in movement-based training, injury prevention, and building strength foundations for recreational athletes — including the growing number of pickleball players in the Burnaby and Greater Vancouver area.
[Brandon]
Welcome back to the Kraken Power podcast. We’re your hosts Josko and Brandon, and in today’s episode we’re gonna be talking about pickleball bodies. You ever met somebody who just started doing pickleball and all of a sudden they’re walking around like a UFC fighter, their shoulder hurts, their calves are tight, and they don’t know what’s going on.
That’s what we’ll be talking about in today’s episode. Let’s dive in.
[Josko]
So I got a really funny story to open up this podcast, and it’s about my father. So my dad, for years and years and years, I tried to get him into working out and coming to the gym, and he used to when he was younger. But as soon as he retired, what he did was, rather than going to the gym, was he started, rather than going eight hours at a desk all day, he went to playing eight hours of pickleball every day.
And this was good for about a year or two, but then after the second year of doing this, he came to me every weekend. He was like, Brandon, what should I do about my forearm? What should I do about my knee?
My Achilles hurts. Like, what’s going on? What should I do?
Because he knew I was in the health industry. And I was so tired of hearing him complaining that one day I was just like, you know what, dad? Monday and Wednesday, you’re gonna show up at the gym at 845.
I got you a personal trainer. And lo and behold, six to eight months later, he was like, man, that was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.
[Brandon]
I think the best way to get somebody’s inner Serena Williams out is to get a 50 year old playing pickleball.
[Josko]
That’s exactly what happened to him. It’s funny. It’s exactly what happened to him because, you know, pickleball is like a really fun sport.
It has a low barrier entry and people go from not doing much to something that’s very social and you could be competitive with other 50 year olds. It’s crazy because they’ll spend like four hours playing pickleball straight, just drilling sometimes. My dad would say he’s like, I was at the court drilling moves for four hours straight.
And he’s like, why does my forearm hurt? I’m like, yeah, I don’t know. But the funny thing is is now he swears about, swears about going to the gym because he actually took off six to eight months because he was so injured that he took a six to eight month block to just work on himself, strengthen his tendons, strengthen his muscles and supporting his joints to be able to come back and play.
So he wasn’t playing at all for that six month duration? He was playing at a very much lesser level. Yeah, exactly.
Before he was like playing in competitions, but when he was in his, let’s say, recovery block, he was playing maybe once a week where before he was playing five, six, seven times a week and multiple times per day sometimes.
[Brandon]
Yeah, it’s not that you don’t know, like it’s not that you shouldn’t be playing. It’s that you just don’t know how to, like your body doesn’t know how to handle it. You know, all that playing.
[Josko]
For people like him it’s such a fun thing that you can get in and join when you’re friends with that you don’t even really understand the volume and the stress you’re putting on your body because you’re just having so much fun.
[Brandon]
Yeah, totally. Yeah, every single time I pass by the pickleball course, there’s always people there. It’s insane.
[Josko]
Yeah.
[Brandon]
In fact, there’s like the the school community, like it’s like an online course platform and the biggest community there is a pickleball community. It’s got like 50,000 people paying 37 bucks a month for like tips on pickleball. It’s crazy.
It’s the fastest growing community in the world. Yeah. Yeah, it’s nuts.
It’s crazy. But so what would you do? What would you tell somebody that’s like just starting to play pickleball and they’re starting to notice some of these injuries?
[Josko]
Well, typically these pickleball injuries are coming from the amount of volume because it’s not like a very intense sport. You could play it for hours. Yeah, I’ve seen people literally stay in the exact same spot and go You know, like barely even moving their feet.
[Brandon]
Yeah.
[Josko]
But imagine like you saying that you’re going to, you know, run a marathon, right? You take the time to train and you build up that capacity so you can run this long duration of time. So when you’re playing pickleball, there is no ramp up for a lot of these people.
They go from playing or sitting in a desk eight hours a day to playing pickleball for eight hours a day. It’s just so fun, right? So if you are going to be getting into pickleball, you have to be doing some kind of strength training to help, again, bolster your tendons and your tissues to be able to accommodate this kind of volume.
And usually you’re gonna want to put it in places that are high stress for the demands of the sport. So it’s funny that one of the chiropractors at Strike who’s like down below our gym, a physio and chiro place, he recently had a post saying like, well, where are the most injured people coming from? He said, pickleball.
And he said, the most common, you know, site of injury is now the elbows and the forearms because people are putting, you know, forehand and backhand, forehand and backhand so much throughout the day that the smaller tendons in the forearm are getting worn out. They’re getting tendinopathies. So if you’re going to be doing strength training, you’re going to want to be doing some kind of load protocol towards those tendons.
And so what one of our trainers had my dad go through was some kind of forearm and tricep and bicep exercises, you know, progressively over time. And now his capacity for those tendons has increased. The ceiling has increased.
So when he goes back to playing pickleball, the little dink of the ball isn’t going to hurt his elbow as much.
[Brandon]
Yeah, because it’s just that repetitive motion over and over and over again. I mean, you see cashiers working at grocery stores get those kind of same injuries from like picking up the object and literally moving it to down the down the till. So, of course, you’re going to see with pickleball as well, especially if you’re going to be playing every single day for multiple hours a day.
[Josko]
Exactly. And it’s not just the forearms, too. We have to think about a lot of other people are getting other injuries in other common sites like knees, for example, because people are in like a half squat.
Well, most people when they’re playing are in like a half squat. They’re bouncing up and down. There’s a lot of reacceleration and deceleration to kind of lunge at the ball.
And that goes for the same for like ankles and Achilles. You mentioned in the intro that a lot of people are having like calf and Achilles injuries.
[Brandon]
Yeah, totally.
[Josko]
There is a lot of like stop start motions. So in the gym, do you have any kind of recommendations for what that would look like?
[Brandon]
Yeah, I would assume that the best thing to do is to do forward walking lunges where you’re stepping forward, maybe pushing back, stepping forward, pushing back and side to side movements as well. Maybe lateral lunges. You could even do like wall balls as well, where you’re like coming down and like, you know, squatting into impact.
Those kind of exercises would, in my opinion, be great for pickleball athletes.
[Josko]
I agree. And I think that’s something that people want to aspire towards working with. But I think one thing that we do at Kraken really well here is we actually build people’s foundational movements out first, too.
[Brandon]
Yeah.
[Josko]
So, yes, we want people to get into sports specific movements like forward lunging and maybe even like plyometrics through ankles and calves. But realistically, what helped my dad out the most was doing like hex bar lunges, no hex bar hinges, sorry. And, you know, barbell squats first.
And he built a really good strength base before he went into those plyometric movements, maybe three to six months later. That totally changed the way he trains.
[Brandon]
Yeah, exactly. You have to build that base of strength because you said that you need to, you know, train your ligaments and your tendons. Squats still do that, even though you’re not, you know, bracing for impact.
You’re still going to be training all of that stuff. And it’s going to get that base of strength first before you start doing more plyometric stuff, for sure.
[Josko]
Exactly. And people think that if they’re doing a sport, that workout in the gym always has to mimic that sport. But what we’re trying to say is build that foundational base first.
Right. If we have that to work off of and then we go into sports specific things, you’re going to get so much more benefit out of actually doing them later on.
[Brandon]
Yeah. So let’s say, for example, like if you were, like I said, for lunging and coming in and out of lunges. Yeah, that’s all true.
But like your tendons and your ligaments wouldn’t take so much of an impact if you had muscle taking that impact first before your tendons and ligaments. And the problem is that a lot of these people coming in, they’re completely untrained. You’re right.
So then what ends up happening is instead of their like their muscle gives in really quickly and then it’s just boom, all tendons and ligaments at that point.
[Josko]
Exactly. And what we’re just trying to say is you’re progressing into playing your sport, but you’re also progressing into the movements that you’re doing in the gym. So forward lunge, for an example, like a regression to that would be maybe a stationary lunge or maybe a stationary lunge hold first before we get into something that is actually dynamic and moving forward and backwards.
You’re still working on that same movement archetype that you’ll be doing in pickleball, but at a lesser stage. So when you’re ready to make the next step, you’re not already damaged before you get there.
[Brandon]
So if you could, you know, put this all into just like a way of thinking as opposed to just giving everybody a program right now, like what would be that philosophy for training for pickleball?
[Josko]
So in my opinion, it would just be all about load management, right? So the reason why people have these injuries is because they just go straight into something without knowing like how much they’re actually doing in a full entire week. So if you were to break your week into compartments, let’s say for an ease of, you know, concept, let’s say like the full week, like seven days throughout the week, how many of those days are you playing pickleball?
And how many of those days are like hard sessions? How many of them are light sessions? And then now, because we know we have to integrate some kind of strength training component, how many strength training sessions are we going to be doing?
And same thing for those. Are they hard sessions or are they light sessions? So what you’re going to want to find out is throughout the entire week, what is your workload?
[Brandon]
So how does somebody decide like how many training sessions they should have? Like let’s say they want to train pickleball twice per week for a couple hours each time.
[Josko]
Totally. So again, going back to seeing what your entire workload is, but you also have to be a little bit interceptive to seeing how you feel after those weeks or maybe after those training blocks. If you feel, let’s say, on a scale of one to ten, that you’re at like a seven or eight amount of like soreness or feel like you couldn’t repeat that activity again the next day, then you’ve probably done too much.
Right. You probably want to be under about a two or a three and a scale of ten to being where you want to be. So you can again, you’re excited to go out and play again.
You feel like you have the same amount of pep in your step. And if you are anything below that, you know, you can kind of accommodate more.
[Brandon]
So you’re saying like you want to feel a two out of ten, even post workout and all that, like before you start playing pickleball again?
[Josko]
Yeah, because for you to feel like completely rested and not like no soreness at all would be unrealistic, especially if you played the day before or you train the day before. Some level of soreness is completely normal. But if it’s sliding up that scale beyond like a five, six, seven, that means you’ve probably done a little bit too much.
[Brandon]
Yeah, a lot of people, they don’t realize that like the more you train outside of pickleball, the more you’re kind of trained that like work capacity, you know, so then you’re going to be able to handle a lot more down the line. Like, let’s say right now, like you go and train four hours of pickleball, your shoulders just messed up and everything. But then you start, you know, doing like some shoulder press and maybe some other work at the gym, your shoulders get stronger.
And then now you’re able to do four hours a week because you’ve built up that capacity. So that’s kind of like the goal that everybody should be doing. You know, it’s like, yeah, like you have to always watch out for your recovery and everything.
But just know that if you continue at this rate in the future, it’s going to get easier and easier to do more.
[Josko]
Yeah. And on the flip side, if you’re doing that same amount of work rate and it’s not improving, that means you’re continually doing too much. Yeah, totally.
And that means you’re under recovering or you’re just doing way more than your body can actually accommodate.
[Brandon]
Yeah. So we have tons of clients that are doing pickleball now, and it’s just a sport that’s growing wildly. So this is definitely not going to be our last podcast that we’re going to talk about pickleball, but hope you guys like that one.
And we’ll see you in the next one.
[Josko]
See ya.