Padel, squash and badminton injury research, each sport on its own.

Padel

The research for this site uses one systematic review of padel injuries. Dahmen, Emanuel, Fontanellas-Fes, Verhagen, Kerkhoffs and Pluim published it in BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine in 2023. It brought together eight studies with 2,022 participants, about 75% of them male.

• Incidence. About 3 injuries per 1,000 hours of padel training and about 8 per 1,000 matches, from a limited literature. One included study reported 2.75 per 1,000 training hours and 8.44 per 1,000 matches.
• Prevalence. The share of players who had been injured ranged from 40% to 95% across studies: about 60% to 95% over a playing career, and about 40% to 72% over the previous 8 to 12 months.
• Where. The elbow was the most frequently reported site, then the knee, shoulder and lower back. Upper-limb shares ranged from about 35% to 61%, lower-limb from about 27% to 53%, and trunk from about 9% to 21%.
• Diagnoses. Lateral elbow tendinopathy (tennis elbow) was the most frequently reported specific diagnosis, with one study reporting 74% of its players affected. Calf and hamstring strains, lateral ankle sprains and plantar fasciitis appeared in several studies. Achilles tendinitis appeared in only one, at about 2%.
• Eyes. The review's only eye finding was one study reporting eye contusion in about 1.7% of injuries.

How strong the evidence is. The authors rated study quality as relatively low to moderate, a mean of 7 out of 9. Most studies were cross-sectional or retrospective questionnaires in which players reported their own injuries, most came from Spain, and injury definitions varied. No meta-analysis was possible, and risk factors were not analysed.

Squash

The squash injury research found is small and mostly old. No systematic review and no national surveillance study specific to squash was found, so the two studies below describe their own players only.

New York clubs, 1981

Berson, Rolnick, Ramos and Thornton surveyed players at one private and one public club in New York by telephone, in a study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine in 1981.

• 69 of the 155 players reached (44.5%) had been injured playing squash.
• Strains and sprains were more than a third of injuries, and nearly half involved the lower extremity, most often the ankle and lower leg.
• 47% of injuries kept the player out for more than two weeks; permanent impairment was uncommon.
• Players over 40 and new players had a higher risk in this sample.

Elite juniors in Doha, 2009 to 2015

Horobeanu, Johnson and Pullinger followed 21 male junior players, mean age 14.5, at Aspire Academy in Doha for six academic years (Asian Journal of Sports Medicine, 2019).

• They recorded 212 musculoskeletal injuries, 157 (74%) of them squash-related.
• The squash-related rate was 7.28 per 1,000 training hours and 5.75 per 1,000 hours on court. The rate of on-court injuries that cost training time is given as 4.78 in the abstract and 3.89 in the discussion, a mismatch inside the paper.
• The lower limbs accounted for 67% of squash-related training injuries, most often the thigh and knee, the lower back about 7% and the upper limb about 9%.
• Growth-related osteochondrosis, including Osgood-Schlatter disease, was the most frequent diagnosis (22%), and injuries that came on gradually (61%) outnumbered sudden ones.

Twenty-one boys at one academy are not a picture of squash players in general, and a 1981 telephone survey describes the game and players of its time. Squash eye injuries, which have their own older literature, are on eye injuries and eyewear rules.

Badminton

A 2025 systematic review

Stepper, Hecksteden, Stagge, Faude and Donath published a systematic review of badminton injuries in BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine in 2025. As the journal's blog summarised it on 31 March 2025, incidence fell between 1 and 4 injuries per 1,000 hours, the lower extremities were most often affected, and overuse injuries were a relevant problem. The authors could not run a meta-analysis because study designs, injury definitions and data collection varied too much.

Further figures from the review rest only on a search-result excerpt, because the full text sat behind a verification page, and are unconfirmed: that it pooled 19 studies, that elite-only studies sat at the higher end of the incidence range, that lower-body injuries made up 41% to 92% of injuries and that overuse injuries made up 25% to 74%.

A Danish hospital, 1994

Hoy, Lindblad, Terkelsen and Helleland studied 100 badminton players treated over one year at the casualty ward of Randers City Hospital in Denmark (British Journal of Sports Medicine, 1994). Badminton made up 5% of all sports injuries recorded there.

• Diagnoses: sprains 56%, Achilles tendon ruptures 13%, torn ankle ligaments 10%, fractures 5%.
• 21% were admitted to hospital, and 27% of injuries were graded severe on the Abbreviated Injury Scale.

Achilles tendon ruptures in Oulu, Finland, 1979 to 1994

Leppilahti, Puranen and Orava counted 111 closed Achilles tendon ruptures in 110 residents of Oulu (Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica, 1996).

• The incidence rose from 2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1979 to 1986 to 12 in 1987 to 1994, peaking at 18 in 1994.
• 81% of ruptures were sports-related, and 88% of those happened in ball games, most often volleyball, badminton and soccer.
• One third of the ruptures in 1993 happened in badminton, and badminton patients were younger on average than volleyball patients (35 against 42 years).
• The authors linked badminton's share to the sport's growth in the city, from about 40 club players in 1985 to about 2,000 in 1994.

Other Nordic rupture series that name badminton were seen only in search excerpts and are not given here. No study from after 2010 giving badminton's share of Achilles ruptures was found, so these figures describe one Finnish city decades ago, not badminton today.

US emergency visits across the racket sports, 2007 to 2016

Changstrom, McBride and Khodaee studied NEISS emergency-department visits for racket and paddle sports together. In the record the research read, badminton had the highest share of sprains, strains, fractures and dislocations among the racket sports, and table tennis the highest share of skin and internal organ injuries. The study's total covers all the sports combined, and no badminton count was available, so no badminton number is given here. Like all NEISS data it counts emergency visits, with no figures for how many people played.

Eye injuries

Badminton eye injuries have their own case series, the largest found an 85-patient series in which most were struck by the shuttle and most were playing doubles; they are on eye injuries and eyewear rules.

What was not found

The research found no squash-specific systematic review or national surveillance study, no recent squash eye-injury rate, no peer-reviewed padel eye-injury study it could use, and no recent study of badminton's share of Achilles ruptures. Where this page gives an old figure, it is the newest one found, not a current one.