I struggled a lot with a tennis elbow around 2023 after falling in love with padel and playing almost every day. I was about 6 months into my padel journey and my first racket, a fairly cheap one (less than €100), that was intended for beginners due to being round and soft started to deteriorate. I did not experience any problems using this racket even though my sessions had gone from about one per week to 3-5 sessions per week, which is frankly pretty good. Also keep in mind that I did not have any racket experience for the past two decades before starting padel, so the muscles in my forearm were not adjusted for the kind of stress you put on them with regular racket sports. Then I upgraded my racket and everything went downhill...

But I will get back to my personal tennis elbow story a bit later in the article.

What is tennis elbow?

• Officially called lateral epicondylitis
• Main symptom is pain on the outside of your elbow (upper forearm)
• Pain ranges from mild discomfort to constant pain that might affect your sleep
• Tendons in your elbow become inflamed due to overuse
• Most common in people between 35 and 54 years of age
• You can get it from activities that involve gripping hard and repeatedly twisting your wrist and forearm

What does it feel like?

How bad it feels clearly depends on how bad it has gotten. If you identify it as an issue immediately when you feel some discomfort in your upper elbow it will only be exactly that, a minor discomfort. If the inflammation in the arm has been ignored and you keep making it worse, the pain can be rather severe. At my worst I was struggling to lift a cup of coffee.

It can feel like your forearm muscles are constantly flexed or in tension all the time, much like a pump after a strength workout. The tissue around the muscles are harder than normal.

If you keep playing padel with the tennis elbow you can feel it on impacting the ball. For me, at the worst, and in particular on day two of a tournament I was foolish enough to enter, every single backhand shot was extremely painful and I was not able to focus on making high quality shots. In particular volleys were painful because the ball is hitting your racket with more momentum than in groundstrokes and your upper forearm has to handle the vibrations caused by impact.

When researching this article I did notice mentions of backhands being more of a problem with tennis elbow than forehand shots. This makes sense, because for backhand shots your upper elbow is exposed and have to dampen the impact. While for forehands, your underarm will be exposed to the vibrations. If you have pain in your underarm, more likely you have golfers elbow instead (medial epicondylitis).

How to avoid tennis elbow in the first place

If you are in the fortunate position of reading this article without actually having any signs of tennis elbow yet, I have some recommendations for you. Many of them overlap greatly with my tips on curing tennis elbow as well. All of these points are elaborated on further down the article.

1. Be careful with your choices of racket in terms of weight, hardness and balance (more details below)
2. If you want to increase your sessions per week, do it gradually
3. Do exercises for a healthy wrist and forearm off the court
4. Adjust your gripping technique and rest your grip between shots

What to do if you already got a light or severe tennis elbow

If you are unfortunate enough to already feel some or even a lot of pain with your elbow after playing a lot of padel, I suggest the following remedies;

1. Reduce your weekly sessions down to a manageable level, or even take a complete break for 2-4 weeks to heal
2. Consider downgrading to a softer, lighter more elbow friendly racket
3. Start doing wrist and forearm exercises off the court to rehabilitate your muscles and improve strength and endurance
4. Look at your technique, and in particular stop gripping hard and gripping constantly

Be very careful about your choice of racket and especially when replacing one

As you will learn about my own story below, upgrading to a more advanced padel racket was the deciding factor in my developing a severe tennis elbow. I am pretty sure my elbow muscles and tendons were just below the breaking point when I upgraded my racket. The new racket was harder in the surface, giving more vibrations into my forearms for each shot. It was still not a very hard racket, but it was enough to send me over the edge.

Be careful about the hardness, weight and balance of your new racket when upgrading. I would also be careful of session frequency when upgrading. Try to ease into the new racket. Don't jump right into daily sessions. Pay attention to any discomfort in your upper elbow that you might have during or after sessions. If you start feeling some discomfort, there is a decent chance it will increase gradually into a real problem.

But what if I want to play with a harder racket?

As your padel level progresses you might get interested in playing with harder rackets, and that is completely fine. Even with my injury, after being patient and giving my wrist and forearm health a lot of focus with rehabilitation and strength exercises, I was recently able to upgrade to a harder racket which was very satisfying. Harder smashes is a lot of fun! But I was patient with it. I was practically pain-free for over a year before I even considered it and made the jump.

Adjust your technique to minimize elbow, forearm and wrist stress

This is actually a very underlooked point when you see different articles online on how to relieve your tennis elbow. Many coaches will tell you that you do not need to grip the racket very hard at all for most shots. Actually it can hurt both your game and your forearm muscles, because a tense and strong grip will make your wrist stiffer. Many padel shots require a loose wrist so gripping too hard would be detrimental to the quality of these shots.

A second very important point in my opinion when it comes to technique and wrist health, is barely even grip the racket at all between shots. That might sound weird, but that is what you have your non-dominant hand for. Let your non-dominant hand actually hold the racket in between shots. When you think about it, 99% of the time you spend on the court you are actually waiting for the next shot and not performing a shot. There is no need to grip your racket most of the time. If you get in the habit of letting your grip go and reset with the assistance of your other hand and also re-gripping when it is time to make a shot you will reduce the total amount of gripping considerably. This will also let you be more loose when you want to adjust the grip slightly, for example for certain overheads like the vibora or kicksmash.

Look at the professionals in their ready position. They are always supporting the racket with their non-dominant hand which means their dominant hand doesn't need any grip force at all most of the time.

Another tip is also to avoid holding the racket at all in between points, in breaks, etc. Give your grip a break.

Wrist and forearm exercises off the court

Many people think the wrist and forearm is just one or a few muscles but actually there is over 20 muscles in the forearm and wrist area! They are responsible for everything you do with your fingers and wrists, including gripping, supination, pronation and much more. I highly recommend doing a variety of exercises, both for general muscle health and rehabilitation while also strengthening them.

Rehabilitation and endurance with rice bucket training

It sounds really weird but I found this exercise mostly coming from the arm wrestling world (which is huge by the way!). You buy a standard bucket and a big bag of rice, dump the rice into the bucket and use the rice as resistance by moving your hands and performing exercises in it. I found this to be an amazing exercise to work on your wrist and forearm endurance and overall health. There are many examples of follow along videos on Youtube that lasts about 10 minutes. You really get the blood moving into your wrist and forearm muscles and feel great after. I have been doing this on and off in combination with strength exercises in order to keep my wrist and forearms healthy. Highly recommended.

Adding muscle strength

There are a ton of exercises you can do to increase your grip and forearm strength. For padel and tennis elbow recovery, I highly suggest to focus on:

1. Gripping
2. Pronation (turning palms to the sky)
3. Supination (turning palms to the ground)
4. Wrist flexion and extension (moving your hand up and down)

Pronation and supination is the rotation of your wrist to open and close your hand. This is a very common movement when playing racket sports. As usual when working out to increase strength I recommend doing sets of repetitions, and if you are serious about increasing strength you should definitely add more resistance over time. You can use dumbbells, hand grippers, wrist rollers and similar tools to perform these exercises.

A few suggested exercises:

1. Hand grippers for grip strength
2. Wrist rollers for wrist flexion and extension
3. Dumbbells for wrist pronation and supination
   1. You can also use a simple resistance band if you don't have access to dumbbells

My own tennis elbow story

As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, my initial racket started falling apart and it was time to get a new one. During this time many of the better players in my club were playing with a Starvie Metheora Warrior. Being influenced by them and wanting to play like them, I ordered it and was looking forward to levelling up my game multiple notches in an instant! Instead, it gave me a rather serious incident of tennis elbow. I should mention that I don't blame the racket itself - it was the jump in vibrations and intensity from my previous racket to the new one that stressed my elbow and forearm muscles enough to develop my issue.

After about a month of playing I started to feel discomfort in my arm. Being an idiot, I ignored it and kept playing. Gradually it got worse and it struck me that I probably had developed a tennis elbow injury. I went to both my doctor and a physiotherapist, both of them concluded that this was the case. The doctor told me to take a break from playing and do exercises for the wrist and forearm. The physio told me much the same but could also offer shockwave treatment. It was a bit costly (about 100 EUR per session) and I would need at least five sessions and he could not guarantee any kind of results. I opted out of doing the treatment.

In the beginning I just played a bit less sessions per week to allow more healing between sessions. At this point it was rather uncomfortable to even lift a cup of coffee. I was stupid enough to sign up for a local tournament and even in both mix and men's open divisions! The mix division was on the Friday of the weekend and by the end of a full evening playing (and winning the mix division!) my elbow was fuming with pain. I probably shouldn't have played the mens division on Saturday but I didn't want to leave my partner down. This was a mistake. After a few matches with an already sore arm, every single shot became extremely painful and in particular backhands. When researching for this article I see that a poor technique backhand across multiple racket sports is a culprit for tennis elbow and can be very painful to execute when you have it.

After this tournament I never should have entered I decided to take a longer break and started researching tennis elbow injueries, how to heal them and avoid them in the future. There is a lot of information online but it is not very consistent. Dozens of tennis coaches and physios have their own explanations on Youtube, combined with actual official recommendations from health care institutions. Also in your local padel clubs there will always be people who are experienced with tennis elbow because it is quite common. After doing my research and speaking with fellow padel players, I tried out different gear, but the absolutely crucial part of starting to heal and also playing padel was buying a more elbow friendly racket.

With a more elbow friendly racket I was able to play without triggering the pain. I increased the intensity gradually, starting with 1-2 matches per week. I also made sure to heal properly between sessions. Over time I increased the number of sessions per week and after a few months I was back at full intensity. Having a light soft and round racket was not perfect for my game, but at least I was able to play. Padel is about not making errors, remember? Not only hitting winners ;-)

After this racket I broke I bought another one in the same category, and after 6 months with that racket I finally upgraded to a racket that was not marketed as "elbow friendly". Still a fairly soft racket though, and in particular the Head Gravity Pro Windahl Edition (2022). For me this was the perfect transition over to more normal rackets.

As of writing this in June 2025 I have not felt any elbow pain in the last 1.5 years of playing. I recently also upgraded to a Stiga Cybershape 3K which is fairly hard compared to my previous Head rackets. Still I don't have any pain, thankfully! I will keep doing off the court exercises for wrist and forearm health for as long as I live and play though.

Tennis elbow specific accessories had little effect

There are tons of products that are supposed to mitigate tennis elbow but I did not have much success with them. The main ones I tried was a elbow sleeve as well as a hesacore grip. I didn't really feel they benefited my in any particular way but I was desperate and wanted to try everything.

The elbow sleeve

My physiotherapist actually recommended against using this one. The main reason was that it would not assist in rehabilitating the injury, only make your elbow used to playing with a crutch of sorts. I did use it for good measure though, it feels like it might have helped slightly in the beginning but when I got tired off wearing it after about 6 months and removed it, I felt absolutely no difference. I would generally not recommend this but rather focus on what I have pointed out in this article.

Hesacore grip

This seems a bit of a gimmicky product. You buy a grip to put under your normal grip on your racket and the silicone-style grip is supposed to dampen the vibrations when the ball impacts your racket. It is very minimal what sort of impact a few millimeters of grip on the racket can do. The racket is still as hard as it is, as heavy as it is, and the ball is still coming as hard. When changing rackets I just avoided putting it on and like with the sleeve, I felt no difference. This was after I was done with the worst part of my injury, so it might have helped slightly. But I have my doubts.

TLDR; Summary

• Tennis elbow sucks bigtime, avoid it by taking measures!
• Be careful when upgrading your racket
• Care about your forearm and wrist health off the court
• Adjust your technique and stop gripping the racket constantly when on the court
• Accessories might not do much for you but results may vary

Good luck with your game and elbow health!

Do you think I missed something crucial in the article? Let me know! Post a comment or question below or contact me directly.