Fort Myers, FL – How To Avoid Major Injuries Playing Pickleball in SW Florida

Serving Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Bonita Springs and Estero, Florida

I’m Shannon Willis, owner of Club Pilates in Fort Myers, Estero and Cape Coral Florida. I am also a master trainer for Club Pilates, a functional movement specialist and also a specialist in Pilates for golf and I love pickleball. Today I want to talk about pickleball injury prevention things to focus on to play better with less injury.

So pickleball is one of the fastest growing sport especially in Southwest Florida. I’m here on the West Coast of Florida and Fort Myers. There are so many pickleball players and its funny, they come in you know, they come into the studio and it’s really great, I’m helping them with their goals, but almost all of them come in with some sort of leg pain injury, unfortunately caused by pickleball. So I want to talk a little bit about injury prevention.

The sport is very popular in Florida, everyone is down on the pickleball court which is super fun. The joke is that pickleball got the 60 something’s off the couch during the pandemic. So they’re off the couch or on the pickleball court and guess what’s happening… their getting hurt! The thing about pickleball is you are playing on a short court. Therefore, the movements are smaller, more dynamic and a shorter range of motion, so it’s really important that you’ve trained to play Pickleball. You should be specifically working in lunges and this is a great way to warm up on the court,  so it’s really relevant to the game. This way your body’s actually prepared to play Pickleball.

If we think in three planes of motion right, pickleball being a rotational sport, but we’ve got this front to back plane and the side to side plane as well. The front to back plane is a crucial plane because you’re chasing the ball and so you get the ball and you’re just after the ball. So it’s really important that you trained with some front to back lunges, you know, you’re chasing a ball back right do you have to be able to step back as well.  The other crucial plane is this side to side plane. This is where a lot of injuries happen on the pickleball court. This lateral motion we’re not really used to it because we’re also sedentary.  We’re sitting most of our day so we’re really used to the forward motion. The lateral motion is crucial to being able to move across the court quickly so training with these lunges in a small range of motion at first.

Check your feet make sure that your pinky toe is staying down in your range then you can start to make your range motion a little bit bigger and you can see through my spine that my spine is long and I’m in neutral. As I shift and it becomes a much more athletic movement and then I can applying whatever I’m going to do with my racket as I shuffle across the court. So finally rotation right, we know it’s a rotational sport, you can see that this thing. We always think about the spine as rotating which it does or what about the hips so look I called it’s my turn around lunge because if I want to go that way I’m going to rotate off of my standing leg and then power off that way the rotational lunges. They seem sort of silly but look it’s relevant I’m ready and I’m receiving the ball how you see the rotational lunges are critical just for health of the pelvis and the spine in play but off the court so those are great strategies you can take those out on the court as a warm-up I highly recommend that you do it’ll definitely prepare the body for the game and then there’s plenty of things that you can do in a pilates studio after you play so I’m at Club Pilates, love to see you.

Contact Shannon Willits at shannon.willits@clubpilates.com

Visit Shannon’s website at https://shannonwillits.com/