Playing tennis is a great form of exercise. It’s a full body workout: running across the court uses leg muscles; your core is engaged keeping your balance; and you use power from your arm muscles to hit the ball. As a non-contact sport, it’s relatively low-impact and improves your flexibility, coordination and agility – all while being good for your heart.

So, what’s the downside? Overall there isn’t one, but tennis – just like any sport – can cause injuries. Here are some of the most common tennis injuries, and how you can avoid pain from them.

Upper Body Injuries

Shoulder pain 

Due to the repetitive nature of some tennis shots, particularly overarm serving, shoulder injuries are commonplace. To help prevent injuries and shoulder pain, always warm up and warm down before and after playing. This helps to build strength in your rotator cuff muscles and stabilise your shoulder joints.

Tennis elbow

So famous they called it tennis, tennis elbow is another injury linked to repetitive motion. Although commonly caused by playing tennis, it’s an injury that can occur from any type of overuse or repeated actions of the muscles in the forearm that are attached to the elbow and used to strengthen the wrist. The injury will get better on its own with proper recovery time, but icing the elbow and/or using anti-inflammatories will help with pain.

Wrist pain

Wrist pain connected to tennis is common due to repetition and overuse – the joint becomes overloaded. Pain comes from swelling and tenderness and so can be treated with ice or painkillers. To avoid tennis wrist injuries in the first place, it’s important to warm the wrist up properly before playing. Hand and wrist exercises will help to strengthen the muscles.

Lower Body Injuries  

Hip / groin pain

Muscle strains around the hip and groin area are common in a sport that requires quick, sharp turns of direction and sudden bursts of speed. As with avoiding all of these injuries, warming up properly is imperative. Hip stretching is a goof way to strengthen the area and prevent injury.

Knee pain

A common knee problem for regular tennis players is a condition named patellar tendonitis (also called jumper’s knee). It’s a gradual tearing of the patellar tendon that holds the kneecap in place, which happens when put under a lot of strain from running and jumping to hit the ball. RICE therapy and painkillers is the best way to treat the condition. As well as good warm-ups and cool downs, one way to help avoid this and other knee injuries is training that builds over time. Becoming stronger and more flexible means that you not only suffer from fewer injuries, but that recovery time is shorter too.

Calf pain

Calf muscle strain, sometimes called tennis leg, is a sharp shooting pain that can occur as the result of a quick motion, for example during a sprint. When this happens, the leg should be compressed and elevated to limit the bleeding. And, of course, ensuring that muscles are warm and flexible before you start playing is a good way to avoid the strain in the first place. 

BioWaveGO for tennis pain 

Pain from all of the injuries listed above can be treated with BioWaveGO. If pain lingers after playing, use BioWaveGO’s electric wave technology to block pain at the nerve. Just one half hour treatment can relieve tennis-related pain for up to eight hours.