Wimbledon 2021: Let’s talk about injuries

By Ella Deeley

As many of you may know I spent my childhood travelling up and down the country to tournaments progressing through the junior ranks and then going on to proudly captain the women’s 1 st team at Bournemouth University. Throughout my time competing, I suffered countless injuries including Rotator cuff, Achilles and Navicular stress fracture and wanted to spend this time to look at the most common tennis injuries within both the men’s and women’s game. Studies show the injury rate during The Championships is 17.7 injuries per 1000 sets for men and 23.4 injuries per 1000 sets for women (McCurdie et al 2017).

Tennis begins from the ground up, from the feet and knees, progressing to the core and trunk, to the shoulder and elbow, and finally to the wrist, hand, and racquet (Fu et al 2018). According to studies by (Fu et al 2018) the most common tennis injuries include shoulder injuries (rotator cuff and SLAP tears), elbow (lateral and medial tendinopathy) knee (meniscus tear and ligament rupture/tear), similar to the ones based on my own experience showing injuries are similar at both the recreational and professional level.

This time of year encourages everyone to play tennis and we’ll most likely see an increase in the number of tennis related injuries due to tennis fever which swipes the country for a couple of weeks each year! Doing some of the following such as ensuring you’re wearing the correct footwear, playing with the correct technique and doing an effective warm-up and cool down are all thing you can do to minimise the risk of injuries.

References

  1. Fu, MC; Ellenbecker, TS; Renstorm, PA; Windler, GS; Dines, DM (2018): Epidemiology of
    injuries of tennis players. Curr Rev Musculoskelet Med 11(1): 1–5.
  2. McCurdie, I; Smith, S; Bell, PH; Batt, M E (2017): Tennis injury data from The Championships,
    Wimbledon, from 2003 to 2012. British Journal of Sports Medicine 51:607-611