To Serve & Protect
by Chantel Gorton, PT, DPT, SCS
Tennis is a lifetime sport. It’s played at all ages, from young to old, and doesn’t need pads or helmets. It doesn’t come with a team to guilt-trip when Fred can’t make it on Tuesday night because he’s already exhausted from the week. Tennis also carries benefits that extend far beyond the caloric burn, such as the social element (it’s genuinely hard to play solo), and the hand-eye coordination demands keep an aging brain sharp and engaged.
Unlike team sports like football, soccer, or basketball, tennis is something you can pick up at any age, develop a decent level of proficiency, and actually enjoy for decades. It doesn’t scream “I’m going to get injured playing tonight.” That’s a big part of why it stays popular well into retirement.
Form, Mechanics, and Technique
But like any activity, mistakes can lead to injury. Novel activities bring aches and pains. Those aches and pains accumulate into annoyingly persistent tendon irritations that also tend to become chronic.
Take the most common injury you probably associate with tennis: Tennis Elbow. It’s an irritation of the elbow tendon that absorbs the brunt of force when a racket is swung incorrectly. “Tennis elbow,” however, rarely affects professional players. Do professional players have some magic stretch the rest of us don’t know about? No. They were simply trained in the skill. They built the strength, stability, and motor control needed to hit a tennis ball hundreds of times without straining the elbow. Novice players, on the other hand, often skip that foundation, the correct form, the progressive training, and the recovery.
PREPARED to Perform
Think back to your first week on a new job. You probably had aches and pains you couldn’t quite explain. That’s the same thing.
Work conditioning programs for new hires and return-to-work employees are essential injury prevention tools, just as essential as running through your PREPARED checklist at the start of a shift. Anything can be hard on the body when it’s new.
A job doesn’t have to involve electrical hazards, heights, or chemical exposures to be determined risky. Don’t underestimate a task that “weighs nothing” but gets repeated a hundred times a day by someone who’s never done it before.
Taking the time to learn proper technique may seem obvious, but spending twelve months cursing ugly words at your elbow every time you lift a coffee mug? That will drain you. The average recovery time for tennis elbow is up to a year. It’s worth the time to learn the skill. Build progressively. Recover intentionally. Using your body as your tool is hard work and not an inherent skill. We are not born ready for industrial work, but we can train ourselves to be resilient and predictable so every time we swing that proverbial racket, we know we are setting ourselves up for success.
Chantel Gorton, PT, DPT, SCS || Chantel received her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Pacific University, then went on to a sports medicine residency at St. Lukes’s. She swapped the professional athlete for the industrial athlete in 2016 and hasn’t looked back. When not advocating for fitness and health, she’s alongside her family digging in the garden or finding an outdoor adventure.
Be sure to check out our other blogs for further injury prevention education and tips for the industrial athlete from Work Right!