Building Strong and Resilient Knees for Pickleball
Moving around well on the pickleball court requires a good bit of demand from your lower body, especially at the knee. Side to side dinking at the kitchen line, lateral shuffling, sprinting forward and backward. These are all impactful demands upon our bodies. Ensuring we have enough resiliency at our lower extremity tissues can go a long way to guarantee not only longevity on the court but also maximizing your athletic potential with court mobility.
Knee pain and knee instability in pickleball players are commonly experienced areas of discomfort for many. Previous knee injuries at the meniscus, ACL, etc, or inadequate tissue durability surrounding the knee could all contribute towards knee discomfort during or after pickleball play.
In this blog, we’ll break down some common reasons for knee pain and strategies and methods to build a resilient knee to keep you pain-free on the pickleball court!
Before we do, we must understand the basic anatomical structures surrounding the knee. The knee is like a special hinge in your leg that helps you move around. It's made up of different parts that work together to let you bend and straighten your leg. We have different ligaments, muscles, bones, and tendons that all work together to allow us to run, jump, and move from side to side without any issues.
While pain is often multifactorial, here are 3 of the most common reasons we see players experience knee pain and most importantly how to address and solve it!
Problem 1: Not listening to your body and ignoring the signals it sends you.
Oftentimes people who experience sensations of small “niggles” and “aches” in their knees will just push past the discomfort and ignore it. Whenever we ignore these pain and discomfort signals from our brain, it typically ends up turning into a much larger issue and injury in the long run than if we were to address it early on. High pain tolerances may not be a good thing in this situation as pushing past the pain and ignoring these sensations may often hurt us even more in the future.
Solution: If it hurts more than a 3/10 on the pain scale, or causes increased soreness in the knee more than 48hrs after you play, it most likely means you need to make some adjustments and are doing too much too soon.
High pain and long residual soreness are warning signals from our brain that let us know we are on the line of doing too much and if we continue to push the limits, something will potentially give. Following these 2 guidelines on the pain scale and residual soreness scale will allow you to ensure that you aren’t progressively pissing off the already irritated spot in your knees.
Problem 2: Not having enough tissue capacity at the knees and their surrounding tissues.
There is a certain threshold or “envelope of function” that our bodies can handle. Whenever we exceed the capacity and load tolerance it can handle, our brain will start sending pain signals to let our bodies know “Hey! This is probably too much! We aren’t ready for this load yet!” The amount of load that we are ready to handle at any given moment will vary from individual to individual based on our previous training background as well as what your current training program looks like.
Our bodies are fairly adaptable, but the load and stress we place on them must be in a meaningful progressive manner (zone of supraphysiological overload). Pain typically occurs when we end up doing too much too soon and exceed the current tissue capacity we can handle (zone of structural failure). The solution can either be staying within what your body can handle (Zone of homeostasis) or increasing the strength and capacity of your current tolerance so that you can do more!
Solution: Perform strict single-legged (unilateral) lower body strength training 2x/week to buffer up tissue resiliency and tolerance at the knees and hips.
This is a great way to increase the envelope of function at your knee so that you can do more (aka play more without increasing your risk of injury)! You’d want to perform these for about 2-3 sets at an intensity/difficulty level around an RPE 7-8/10 (meaning you could only do 3-4 more reps if you needed to).
Here are a few simple ones you can perform:
Single Leg Sit to Stands
Single Leg Elevated Hamstring Bridges
Side Plank Hold (Ankle)
Lateral Cossack Lunges
Problem 3: Not recovering properly.
Believe it or not, we’re not talking about foam rolling, ice baths, or saunas. Covering the basics of appropriate sleep and nutrition fueling goes a super long way! Listen to your body and recover properly. You can’t expect your body to perform well multiple days in a row if you play hard on the court, but you eat like garbage and average 4-5 hours of sleep. There is a study on Sleep and Injury Risk in Athletes and I’ll let you take a look at the graphic below. Anything less than 8 hours drastically spikes up injury risk to greater than 50%! Get that sleep in!
Solution: Prioritize your sleep with 8-9 hours on days you train!
Hopefully, if you’re still reading this article, you have a good sense of direction on how to improve your knee health for good so you can stay on the court longer without any limitations! If you are currently having pain, or are unable to perform any of the recommended exercises due to difficulty, you can always Book a Free 15-minute Phone Consultation with one of our Sports Doctors. They'll answer any of your questions and see how to help you stay active and strong on the pickleball court pain-free!
Happy Pickling!
Dr. Peter Yu
About the Author,
Dr. Peter Yu (PT, DPT, Cert-DN, Cert-CMFA, CSCS, TPI, USAW, USAT, CF-L1) is a performance physical therapist from MOTION RX here in Jacksonville, FL specializing in the management and care of athletes and active adults. In his free time, you can find him pickling on the local courts here in Jacksonville!
