I'll let you in on something I see every single week. Someone turns up, bag on shoulder, straight through the door, bouncing a ball twice, and they're straight into a full-power smash on point one. No warm-up. Nothing. Straight from the car park to full throttle.
Nine times out of ten, nothing happens. It's that tenth time I worry about.
Padel's a funny sport in that it looks gentler than tennis: smaller court, glass walls, less running about, so people assume their body doesn't need much preparation for it. It does. Quick changes of direction, sudden sprints to the glass, and a lot of overhead swinging all add up, and your shoulders, elbows, knees and lower back are the ones picking up the bill if you skip the prep.
What's actually going wrong out there
The injuries I see aren't usually dramatic. They're not players getting taken off on a stretcher. They're the slow, nagging kind, the ones that turn up a few weeks in and quietly wreck your season.
Ankle sprains are the classic one: all that lateral movement and sudden direction-changing puts real strain through the ligaments, especially on a court you haven't played on before. Then there's what everyone ends up calling "padel elbow", which is really just tennis elbow with a different postcode: repetitive strain from all that racket work building up over weeks, not one big moment. Shoulders take a battering from the overhead game too, particularly the smash and the bandeja. And lower back strain is one I hear about constantly from players who've spent all week hunched over a desk and then go straight into an hour of twisting and lunging with zero warning.
Here's the bit that matters: research on padel injuries consistently points to the same handful of causes: poor warm-up, fatigue, and playing on a surface or in conditions you haven't adjusted for. And the good news buried in that is just as consistent: most of it is preventable.
Why "I'll warm up by playing the first few points" doesn't cut it
I hear this one a lot. "Sure, I'll loosen up during the first game." The problem is your first few points are often the ones with the highest injury risk, because that's exactly when your muscles are cold, your joints haven't been through their range of motionyet, and you're still moving stiffly, right as you're expected to sprint sideways for a ball or throw a full-power smash.
A proper warm-up isn't about ticking a box before the fun starts. It's about telling your body what's about to happen so it's ready when it happens. Ten minutes is genuinely enough: light movement to get blood flowing, some lateral shuffles since that's most of what you'll be doing on court anyway, joint activation through the shoulders and hips, and a few controlled practice swings before you're hitting anything at real pace.
And afterwards, don't just walk off
This is the bit almost nobody does, and it's arguably more important than the warm-up itself. You finish a match, you're buzzing, you grab your bag and go straight to the car. I get it, I've done it myself plenty of times over the years. But that's when a proper cool-down actually pays off: gentle movement to bring your heart rate down gradually, and static stretching once your muscles are warm, holding each one for twenty to thirty seconds. No bouncing, no forcing it, just holding.
Skip that step regularly and it catches up with you as stiffness, soreness that lingers longer than it should, and, over months rather than days, the overuse injuries that quietly end a season.
The honest bit
I'm 65. I've played racket sports for most of my life, and I'll tell you straight: the warm-up matters more to me now than it ever did at 25. Not because my game's gotten any less competitive, but because recovery is what lets me keep playing it. The players I coach who take this seriously aren't the ones who get injured less by luck. They're the ones still out there enjoying the game in five years, ten years, while others have quietly stopped because their knees or their elbow won't let them anymore.
Padel is meant to be one of the sports you play for decades, not just a few competitive seasons before something gives out. Ten minutes before, ten minutes after, that's genuinely the whole ask. It's the cheapest, easiest thing you can do to make sure you're still on court next year, and the year after that.
If something's already niggling, a shoulder that's been off, an elbow that flares up after every session, don't just push through it and hope. That's exactly the kind of thing worth getting a proper look at before it becomes something bigger.