Padel Elbow: What Causes It, How to Treat It, and How to Prevent It Coming Back

If you've played padel for more than a season, you've probably felt it: a dull, sharp pain on the outside of your forearm that flares during play and hangs around for days afterwards. It usually starts subtle, gets worse gradually, and eventually stops you playing altogether. It's called padel elbow — clinically, it's lateral epicondylitis, and it's one of the most common overuse injuries in the sport.

Here's what's actually going on, and what to do about it.

What causes padel elbow

Every time you strike a ball, particularly on the forehand, the impact sends vibration up through the racket, into your hand, and along the tendons of your forearm to their attachment point on the outside of the elbow. That attachment point is the lateral epicondyle. Small amounts of vibration and load are fine — they're what the tendon evolved to handle. The problem is repetition.

A typical padel session involves several hundred ball strikes. A competitive tournament weekend might involve several thousand. Each one adds a tiny amount of micro-damage to the tendon fibres. On its own, each strike is negligible. Accumulated across thousands of repetitions, the damage outpaces the body's ability to repair — and the tendon becomes inflamed.

That's the injury. The pain you feel isn't the muscle. It's the tendon-bone interface at the elbow, becoming increasingly angry.

Why it hits padel players harder than tennis players

Padel elbow is a close cousin of tennis elbow, but there are two reasons why padel players are often more susceptible.

First, the racket. Padel rackets have no strings — the ball hits solid foam and carbon fibre, which transmits more vibration to your arm than a strung tennis racket does. Every shot delivers slightly more shock to the tendon.

Second, the technique. Padel involves far more wrist articulation than tennis — the bandeja, the víbora, the finger-flick vollies. Wrist-heavy shots load the extensor tendon more directly than the shoulder-driven strokes of tennis.

Combine those two and you've got a sport that's uniquely hard on the elbow tendons of amateur players who haven't built the strength and technique to absorb the load safely.

What the standard treatments miss

Most players, when they first feel padel elbow, do one of three things: rest until it feels better and go straight back to playing, buy a generic elbow strap from Amazon, or take anti-inflammatories.

None of these fix the underlying problem.

Rest without addressing the vibration and load means the tendon starts to heal — and then the next session immediately re-injures it. Generic straps apply pressure across the forearm but don't reduce the vibration hitting the tendon. Anti-inflammatories mask the pain and let you play through damage that's actively getting worse.

What actually works is a combination of three things: reducing the vibration reaching the tendon in the first place, supporting the muscle and tendon during play so they can absorb load more efficiently, and giving the tendon time to genuinely heal between sessions.

The biomechanical approach

Floky's NO-STRAIN sleeve was designed specifically for this problem. It's a compression sleeve — but not a generic one. Three things make it different from anything else on the market.

Vibration-dampening fabric. The weave structure and silicone applications are specifically engineered to absorb ball-strike vibration before it reaches the elbow tendon. In lab testing, it measurably reduces the oscillation reaching the lateral epicondyle by a significant margin.

Graduated compression. Rather than uniform squeeze, the compression profile is heavier at the mid-forearm (where the extensor muscles do their work) and lighter at the elbow itself. This activates and stabilises the muscle without over-restricting the joint.

Anatomical fit. The sleeve is shaped to how a forearm actually moves during a padel swing, not just cut as a tube. It stays in place through hundreds of shots without needing constant readjustment.

Agustín Tapia wears it. So does much of the Premier Padel tour. But it wasn't designed for pros — it was designed for the ~70% of amateur padel players who will experience some form of elbow pain in their playing careers.

For players who need extra support during rehabilitation, we also make a dedicated Floky elbow support — a heavier-duty compression brace for when the tendon needs more direct stabilisation.

The full protection stack

Preventing padel elbow long-term isn't just about wearing a sleeve — though that's the biggest single lever. It's also about grip size (too small increases wrist work), technique (get coaching if your forehand is arm-driven rather than shoulder-driven), and recovery (proper warm-up before, and compression recovery afterwards).

For serious players, the combination worth using is: NO-STRAIN sleeve during play, plus focused rest days between hard sessions. If you're deep into rehab, add the elbow support for extra stabilisation.

Padel elbow is preventable. Once it's set in, it's manageable. Ignoring it is what turns a niggle into a season ending injury.