As Pickleball has grown in popularity, one question that we get a lot is “what stretches should I do before I play”? The first thing we tell our athletes is “think active, not passive”.

Let me explain.

Passive stretching is what we all know and probably grew up doing. It has become dogmatic that stretching prevents injury. The current research does not reflect that. Passive stretching is your classic hamstring stretch, or a quad stretch or calf stretch. Like grabbing your foot and pulling your heel to your butt. The target muscle is relaxed in other words. All this does is temporarily diminish the stretch reflex. Well that reflex is there for a reason and inhibiting it may not be the best idea. Well, let’s just say it’s probably not ideal.

Active stretching is basically what we mean when we say “mobility”. It’s improving range of motion through use of the muscle. To be clear, we’re not saying passive stretching is bad, it’s just not the best use of your time prior to sport.

Think of it this way: you want to warm the muscle up. What’s the best way to do that? Blood. Flood the area with blood and now you have a warm muscle. Blood tends to pool towards the gut and brain when you are sedentary. Especially if you just had a meal (gut), or you are studying or reading (brain). If your limbs get cold after a meal, this is why.

Using your muscles will get blood to your limbs, which is good. There are lots of ways to do this. Jumping rope or doing burpees will get a lot of blood to the limbs. However, you are staying in a somewhat neutral position doing something like jump rope. If you want to improve your range of motion while using your muscles, now that’s mobility. And if we can do it in a way that is sport specific, that’s bonus points.

So then the question becomes, what movements does this sport demand. Pickleball is a rotational sport like golf or tennis. So we know we need spinal rotation. Here is something you can do for that:

Pickleball requires a lot of leg movement. So we should select an exercise that challenges the hip, knee, and ankle. Here is our first choice:

Also, you need to be able to swing, so a shoulder exercise would be a good choice:

There’s no right way to warm up, but there are better ways. The question that we never get asked is, “what should I do after”? The recovery component of sport is just as important as the warm up, and often neglected. This is where we do some soft tissue work. There are a lot of other strategies as well to enhance recovery as explained in this video:

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Exercises for Pickleballers