“Well, I’m Wisconsin native, so I quickly developed a passion for the outdoors and outdoor activities and played year-round athletics throughout my childhood in high school. So, that in itself, combined, lead me into orthopedics and really develop that career path.”

“Well, really an individualized approach and it’s really a team effort. And when a patient comes to see me, I look at us as a as a team. And so, each recommendation is really personalized depending on those patients’ goals.”

“Yeah, I like to break that down into categories. And really there’s three major categories that I see and that’s overuse type injuries, wear and tear type injuries and traumatic injuries. An example of each would be overuse injuries are your sprains and strains and that can range anywhere from shoulder to knee, ankle. And then with regards to wear and tear type injuries where we look at more things like arthritis where someone may require ultimately a joint replacement. And then your traumatic injuries, which can be broken bones or fractures all the way up to rotator cuff tears and meniscus injuries of the knee.”

So again, I see those three major categories just in the general population with pickleball. So, you have your overuse type injuries, then you have your wear and tear type injuries and your traumatic injuries, and I’ll give an example of each. So, for some of the overuse type injuries, certainly rotator cuff tendonitis is by far the most common in my opinion, or at least what I see in my experience. And then with regards to your wear and tear type injuries, usually it revolves around arthritis of the shoulder or knee. And that can be arthritis that’s been dormant for some time and doesn’t become symptomatic until one increases their activities such as playing pickleball. And then of course with the traumatic injuries, certainly we think of rotator cuff tears and meniscus tears of the knee, but it’s certainly not limited to that. And we see a variety of different breaks, including the wrist and the ankle when someone may fall and break their bones.

A lot of it starts with good preparation and one is to have good appropriate gear. And that mostly with pickleball is related to shoe wear. So having good shoe wear, knowing what your limits are and allowing the body to rest and recover as well as I would encourage a, a stretching program and a good warm up program.

Well, first and foremost, I would start with stepping back. If someone’s injured more commonly than not, it’s, it’s one of the first two categories. It’s overuse, it’s a wear and tear type injury, unless you’ve had a, a, a Frank injury like a fall, the first step is to step back. And then beyond that, anti-inflammatories, Tylenol, we call it the RICE method. It’s an acronym that stands for rest, ice, compression and elevation. And it’s when those things don’t work or about for about a week is when you should begin to seek treatment.