The hidden habits that cause most tennis injuries

The shoulder did not go during a serve. It went during a Tuesday evening doubles match that meant nothing, on a shot that felt entirely normal, and the player in question would later describe the sensation not as a sudden snap but as something that had quietly been on its way for months. That is how most tennis injuries actually arrive. Not as dramatic, isolated events, but as the final instalment of a pattern the player had been living with, often without realising it, for far longer than they would care to admit.

The temptation is always to blame the moment. The awkward lunge, the cold morning, the extra set that probably should not have happened. And sometimes those things are genuine triggers. But in the vast majority of cases, particularly among club players who play regularly and competitively, the injury is not really about what happened on the day. It is about what had been happening in the weeks and months before it.

Graham Anderson, the Championship Lead Physiotherapist at Wimbledon and a long-serving fixture on the ATP Tour, has a phrase for this: "Prevention is the cure." It sounds like a platitude until you understand the frustration behind it. Anderson has spoken openly about the weariness of "patching the same people up" and his conviction that physiotherapy is not a role for repair only. The patterns that bring players into the treatment room are, more often than not, patterns that could have been interrupted much earlier. For touring professionals, the support systems exist to catch them. For club players, they usually do not.

The rest problem

There is a particular kind of committed club player who treats rest as something that happens to other people. They play three or four times a week, sometimes more, and the idea of deliberately taking a day off feels counterproductive, almost negligent. If the body is not actively broken, the logic goes, why would you stop?

The difficulty is that soft tissue does not recover on the same schedule as enthusiasm. Tendons, ligaments and the smaller stabilising muscles around the shoulder, elbow and knee need time between loading sessions to repair and adapt. Without it, the tissue accumulates what sports physiologists refer to as microtrauma: tiny, subclinical damage that does not produce pain in the moment but gradually weakens the structure until something finally gives. The player feels fine right up until the point where they are not fine at all, and the gap between those two states can be alarmingly narrow.

This is not an argument against playing frequently. It is an argument for understanding that frequency without recovery is not training. It is erosion.

The signals most players override

Ask a room full of club tennis players whether they have ever played through a niggle and every hand will go up. A dull ache in the elbow that appears after the first few backhands and fades by the third game. A shoulder that feels stiff during the warm-up but loosens once the blood is moving. A knee that complains on the first few lunges and then quiets down. These are familiar companions for regular players, and because they tend to resolve during the session, they are almost universally dismissed as insignificant.

They are not insignificant. They are information. A tendon that hurts at the start of activity and eases as it warms is exhibiting a well-documented pattern in early-stage tendinopathy. A joint that stiffens overnight and takes time to loosen is signalling inflammation. These are not quirks of ageing or the inevitable price of an active life. They are early warnings, and the window in which they can be addressed with relatively simple interventions, adjusted load, targeted strengthening, a short period of modified activity, is the window that most players sail straight past on their way to the court.

By the time the pain becomes persistent, the problem has usually progressed to a stage that requires significantly more time and effort to resolve. The six weeks of rest that nobody wanted becomes three months, precisely because the first two weeks of modified training were ignored.

Moving badly, repeatedly

Tennis asks the body to do a remarkably violent set of things in a remarkably short space of time. Decelerate from a sprint. Change direction at speed. Rotate the trunk through a full range while transferring weight. Absorb the shock of a hard stop on an unforgiving surface. When the movement patterns that govern these actions are sound, the forces distribute through the body in a way that the musculoskeletal system can handle. When they are not, the forces concentrate.

Saša Jezdić, the sports physiotherapist, pays close attention to how players slow down. "Weakness during deceleration or instability when stopping is where I notice risk building," she has observed. It is rarely dramatic. It is usually small things repeated over time: a slightly messy stop, a knee that drifts inward, a scramble that feels heavier than it should. Research into tennis-specific deceleration has reinforced this point, identifying it as a critical but routinely overlooked factor in injury prevention. Players train to get to the ball. Very few train to stop once they arrive.

A player who consistently lands on a stiff front leg during their serve is sending impact directly through the knee rather than absorbing it through the chain. A player whose lateral movement relies on the ankle rather than the hip is loading a small, vulnerable joint with forces it was not designed to manage alone. A player who reaches for wide balls with their arm rather than their legs is asking the shoulder to compensate for what the footwork did not provide.

None of these patterns produce immediate injury. That is precisely what makes them dangerous. They produce load, session after session, in structures that are slowly exceeding their capacity to recover. The player adapts around the inefficiency rather than correcting it, and the compensation itself becomes a new source of strain. By the time something gives, the root cause is often two or three steps removed from the site of the pain. Anderson's rehabilitation principle captures this neatly: "Get better the same way you got injured." The implication being that if you understand the movement pattern that broke you down, you have also found the movement pattern that needs to change.

What your shoes are quietly doing to you

This one deserves a mention here because it connects directly to the movement problem. Players who would never dream of playing with a dead set of strings will happily play for months in shoes with collapsed midsoles and worn outsoles, and the downstream effects are more significant than most people appreciate. A shoe that no longer absorbs impact transfers that energy into the foot, the ankle and the knee. A shoe that has lost its lateral support allows the foot to roll on hard direction changes, loading the ankle in ways it should not be loaded.

The result is not always an acute injury. More often it is a subtle shift in how the player moves: slightly less willing to push off hard, slightly less stable on the stop, slightly more upright in their athletic position. The degradation is gradual enough to be invisible, but the cumulative effect on joints and soft tissue is real. If your movement patterns are already imperfect, worn shoes amplify every inefficiency.

The missing ingredient

Of all the habits that contribute to injury among club tennis players, the absence of any strength training is arguably the most consequential and certainly the most common. The logic is understandable: tennis is the sport, tennis is the priority, and the available hours in the week are better spent on court than in a gym. But the body that plays tennis needs to be robust enough to withstand what tennis does to it, and court time alone does not build that robustness.

Targeted strength work, particularly around the hips, the rotator cuff, the posterior chain and the muscles that stabilise the knee, is not about becoming a more powerful athlete, though that can be a welcome side effect. It is about building the structural capacity to absorb the forces that tennis generates without breaking down. A player with strong glutes decelerates more effectively and puts less stress through the knee. A player with a well-conditioned rotator cuff can serve repeatedly without the slow accumulation of shoulder strain that eventually becomes a tear.

Two sessions a week of thirty minutes, focused on the right areas, is enough to make a meaningful difference. It is not glamorous work. It does not produce the immediate satisfaction of a well-struck forehand. But it is, in a very real sense, the thing that allows the forehands to keep coming.

Patterns, not accidents

The common thread running through all of these habits is that they are patterns, not events. No single session without rest causes a breakdown. No single niggle ignored leads directly to surgery. No single day in bad shoes destroys an ankle. The damage is cumulative, distributed across weeks and months of repeated small decisions that, individually, seem perfectly harmless.

That is what makes them so easy to overlook and so important to recognise. The player who understands that their injury risk is shaped far more by these quiet, daily habits than by any single unlucky moment on court has already taken the most significant step toward staying healthy. The rest is just the willingness to act on it before the body makes the decision for them.