Westside Chiropractic
If your calendar has quietly filled up with pickleball, you are not alone. It is the fastest-growing sport around, and it is bringing a very specific crop of aches into the clinic with it. That is not a reason to quit, it is a reason to play a little smarter. The game rewards quick starts, low digs, and sharp twists, and those are exactly the movements that ask the most of your back and knees.
One analysis found that pickleball-related spine injuries jumped more than fifty-fold over a decade, and when researchers rank where players get hurt, the knee usually comes out on top. None of that is meant to scare you off the court. It just tells us where to spend our prevention effort.
Why does pickleball bother my lower back?
Picture your spine as a hinge that is happiest working through its middle range. Pickleball keeps yanking it to the edges: you bend forward to scoop a dink, then rotate hard to put one away, over and over. Reaching down with a rounded back, instead of bending at the hips and knees, is the classic way to irritate the discs and joints in your low back. The fix is not to stop bending, it is to bend better, letting your legs do the lowering while your spine stays long.
What about my knees?
Knee complaints in court sports often start upstream. When the hips and ankles are stiff or weak, the knee ends up absorbing loads and directions it was not built for, especially on those quick lateral pushes and pivots. That is why we rarely sort out a cranky knee by only looking at the knee.
How do I stay on the court?
A few unglamorous habits do most of the work:
- Warm up before the first serve, not after. Two or three minutes of leg swings, easy lunges, and gentle pivots wakes the right muscles up.
- Build a little strength through the hips and core. Research keeps landing on the same point: a stronger core is one of the better protections a low back can have.
- Wear actual court shoes. Running shoes are built to go forward, not sideways, and pickleball is a sideways game.
- Respect rest days. Playing every single day with no recovery is how a small niggle becomes a real overuse injury. A few good sessions a week beats seven rushed ones.
When should I get it looked at?
Most pickleball aches settle with a sensible warm-up, some strength work, and a couple of easier days. Book an assessment if pain lingers past a week or two, keeps getting worse, or comes with numbness, pins and needles, or pain shooting down a leg. Those are worth checking rather than playing through. If you want a hand with a stubborn one, that is what our help for lower back pain and runner’s knee is for.
Play hard, dink often, and give your body the same attention you give your third-shot drop.
