People sign up for things. A pickleball league, a running club, a return to the gym, an adult soccer team that meets on Thursdays — and the decision is a good one, right up until the body that shows up hasn’t done anything like this in ten years.
The variable that matters here is adaptation. Your tissues adjust to the loads you place on them, gradually and with a lag, and when the load arrives faster than the adaptation can keep up, the risk of injury climbs. That’s true at every age and it has very little to do with willpower.
Reducing that risk is probably the single most useful thing I do for people.
Pickleball deserves its own paragraph
It was designed as a social game on a small court, which is exactly what makes it hazardous now that it’s full of former athletes. Put someone with a competitive background on a court that size and they will find a way to move at a speed the court wasn’t built for, usually laterally, usually off one leg.
Knees and ankles are where that shows up.
What preparing actually involves
It’s less than people assume and more specific. What matters is that the tissue you’re about to load has been asked to do something similar recently, that the joints involved have the range they’ll need, and that whatever you’ve been compensating for gets found before it becomes the thing that gives out.
Warm-ups matter more than the stretching most people default to, and the right warm-up depends on the person. Someone with hypermobile joints usually needs their muscles switched on and holding them together rather than lengthened further — for that person, long-hold stretching before activity works against them, which is the opposite of what they’ve usually been told.
If you already have a date
Plenty of people come in with something specific on the calendar — a race in eight weeks, a season starting in the spring, a trip involving more walking than usual. That’s the ideal version of this conversation, because we can work backward from it.
Tell me what you’re planning to do and how long we’ve got, and we’ll get your body ready for it.
Activity pages to follow: pickleball · running · golf · lifting · gardening