Watching the Players - Arm Pain and Dinking Pop-ups

The other day I offered to do a little practicing with another pickleball player since I had some spare time.  The player said he really wanted to work on dinks, as he had noticed that when forehand dinking, he would often pop the ball badly, allowing his opponents to crush the ball back at him or his partner - not quite what he wants, since he aspires to get to 4.0!  He also had recently been experiencing some issues with pain in his elbow, and in recent months his upper arm had also been causing him problems.

I had him get out on the court to do a little dinking so that I could get an idea of what might be going on.  Sure enough, his backhand was decent, but his forehand dinks regularly created a high ball that could easily be attacked.

At this point, it became evident that his problems with arm pain and his forehand dink issues were most likely two pieces of the same puzzle.

The most glaring issue with this player’s dinking is that he held his wrist very rigidly while doing so.  This caused his paddle to face neutral or upwards when doing forehand dinks; an upward facing paddle means an upward flying ball.  Pain-wise, a player overusing and over-engaging their wrist is going to cause greater strain on the muscles of the forearm, many of which connect to the elbow (tennis elbow is generally considered to be an overuse injury of the muscles that allow your wrist to extend back!).

Generally speaking, when someone has an issue such as this, there are a few reasons why it happens.  People may have bad habits they developed a long time ago, old injury, weakness through the shoulder, poor range of motion of the arm, nerve problems…the list goes on and on!  An actual evaluation would give me a much more in-depth perspective of what was going on so that everything going on could be addressed, but on court during a 10-minute drill session, I decided to just provide suggestions on what I could observe at the time while hitting balls to him.

#1: Relax your grip on your paddle.  I had him practice holding his paddle loosely enough that ‘it felt like it could fall out of his hand if he held it just a little looser.’

#2: Let your wrist extend or ‘fall’ back a little bit when you’re dinking (or doing any kind of soft shot such as a drop shot).

Just by making these two little tweaks, he went from popping about 80% of his forehand dinks to around 20% in just a couple of minutes.  Though he still expressed frustration for the shots that were going too high, it was an incredible change in his game in such a short amount of time!

As with all things, consistency is key.  If he continues to focus on changing his dink technique, his consistency will continue to improve, and most likely a lot of the other various aches and pains in his arm will also improve as well!

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As the owner of Serendipity Physical Therapy and Wellness, I’m an avid pickleball addict in Naples, Florida, with a goal of keeping pickleball players moving at their best and injury free. I work with players for anything ranging from reducing various pains, weakness, or tightness, to helping with injury prevention, proper conditioning, and good technique.

If you’re new, you can check out more of my advice and content here: https://www.serendipityptw.com/blog.

If there is anything I can help you with or you have questions, please send me an email at Contact@SerendipityPTW.com. I would love to see how I can help get you moving at your best!