Mayo Clinic Minute: Pickleball Injuries And Prevention (Video)

By Deb Balzer

The popularity of pickleball has exploded in the last few years, and according to a recent report, so have injuries attributed to the relatively new sport.

Dr. Sanj Kakar, a Mayo Clinic orthopedic surgeon who specializes in hand and wrist disorders, says there are two main injuries he sees due to pickleball. He offers three ways to prevent them.

Watch: The Mayo Clinic Minute

A common pickleball injury is a traumatic one — like a broken wrist.

“Sometimes the patients are a little bit older, they may have undiagnosed osteoporosis, they fall over, they break their wrist, and we see actually a lot of those injuries,” says Dr. Kakar.

He says players can also face problems from overuse.

“For example, the tendinitis type of injuries that when somebody plays, they’re not conditioned to it,” he says.

The goal is to prevent those types of problems in the first place. Dr. Kakar says …