Tennis injury research, one study at a time.

The studies side by side

The units in the last column are different, so the figures cannot be compared with each other or added up.

Wimbledon, 2003 to 2012

McCurdie and colleagues looked back at ten years of musculoskeletal presentations to the sports physicians at The Championships, Wimbledon, for main-draw players.

• Rate. 700 injuries in ten years, 20.7 per 1,000 sets overall, with a yearly range of 14.3 to 25.8. The rate was 17.7 per 1,000 sets for men and 23.4 for women.
• Where. The lower limb accounted for about 47% of men's and 49% of women's injuries, the upper limb about 28% for both, and the head, spine and abdomen about 25% (men) and 23% (women). The shoulder, knee and lumbar spine were common sites in both sexes.
• What kind. From 2007 to 2012, 48% of presentations were traumatic and 52% overuse. Only 39% were new acute injuries that happened during the tournament; 34% were acute injuries from before the player arrived, 16% chronic and 11% recurrent.

Because so many presentations began before the tournament, the authors caution that their figures are not a true incidence of injury during play at Wimbledon.

Australian Open, 2011 to 2016

The research saw this study only through search-result excerpts, so these figures are unconfirmed. Gescheit and colleagues are described as counting any medical consultation with a tournament physician at the Australian Open from 2011 to 2016, and reporting 201.7 injuries per 10,000 game exposures for women and 148.6 for men. The most common regions are given as the shoulder, foot, wrist and knee for women, and the knee, ankle and thigh for men, with upper-arm injuries and stress fractures each more than doubling over the period.

High-performance players: a 2025 review

Amor-Salamanca and colleagues reviewed 37 studies (16 of adolescents, 18 of adults and 3 mixed) from searches covering 2011 to 2024. Their summary of the included studies:

• Incidence. From 2.11 to 3.50 injuries per 1,000 player-hours in juniors, and from 1.25 to 56.6 per 1,000 hours in adults. The authors cite 30.8 per 1,000 hours at a humid outdoor men's tournament.
• Season prevalence. The share of players with at least one injury in a season ranged from 46% to 54% in juniors and 30% to 54% in adults.
• Regions. In adults the lower limb accounted for 48% to 56% of injuries, the upper limb 25% to 40%, and the trunk 12% to 24%. The paper's discussion gives 12% to 39% for the trunk, which does not match. In juniors the lower limb was 48% to 54% and the lumbar spine 24% to 39%.
• Most frequent injuries. Ankle sprain was the most frequent acute injury (18% to 25% in juniors, 15% to 22% in adults), and shoulder tendinopathy the most frequent overuse injury in adults (25% to 40%).
• Factors the review associates with injury. Sudden spikes in workload, loss of shoulder rotation range, dense match schedules, a change of court surface such as clay to hard court, hot and humid conditions, and, in young players, early specialisation and high training volume. These are associations reported across studies, not a prevention plan; how any of them applies to a particular player is a question for a coach and a medical professional.

Tennis elbow: the figures disagree

Lateral elbow pain, called lateral epicondylitis or epicondylalgia and widely known as tennis elbow, has no single agreed frequency in the research. The published figures differ because the studies sampled different players and defined the condition differently:

• 1.3% in a study of 4,783 Finnish tennis players of all levels, as cited by a British Journal of Sports Medicine review. The research saw this only as a secondary citation in a search excerpt, so it is unconfirmed.
• 41.8% of 839 players who answered a Brazilian self-report survey, seen only as a search-result listing and also unconfirmed.
• 11% to 14% as baseline values in the grip-size studies inside the 2025 high-performance review. These are baselines from those studies, not general prevalence estimates.

No one of these numbers describes tennis players in general, and this site does not choose between them.

Older players in US emergency departments, 2010 to 2019

Weiss, Dougherty and DiMaggio used NEISS, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's sample of hospital emergency departments, to study tennis and pickleball injuries among adults aged 60 and over. For tennis they report:

• Count. A weighted national estimate of 58,836 injuries over the ten years (95% confidence interval 44,861 to 77,164), roughly flat at about 5,600 to 6,800 a year.
• Diagnoses. Strains or sprains 26.1%, fractures 23.5%, internal injuries 11.0%.
• Body regions. Upper extremity 32.7%, head and neck 23.3%, lower extremity 22.3%, trunk 16.6%.
• How. Slips, trips, falls or dives caused 59.0%.
• Severity and age. 10.8% were hospitalised; the mean age was 70.7. Eye injuries were 1.4%.
• Women and men. Senior women had about 2.7 times the odds of a fracture, and 5.0 times the odds of a wrist fracture, of senior men.
• Not counted as injuries. Cardiovascular events and fainting made up 21.5% of senior tennis cases and were removed from the injury figures.

The authors point out that NEISS sees only people who went to an emergency department, so it undercounts injuries, and that it has no data on how many people play, so it cannot give a true injury rate. The figures show the pattern and trend of emergency visits among older players, not the chance that any one player will be hurt. The same study's pickleball figures are on pickleball injury research.

A study that combined the racket sports

Changstrom, McBride and Khodaee studied NEISS emergency visits for racket and paddle sports together from 2007 to 2016, with 7,723 cases and a weighted estimate of about 301,038 injuries across all the sports combined. The record the research read did not give figures for tennis alone, so that total is not a tennis figure and is not used as one here.

What was not found

Wimbledon and the Australian Open were the only tournament injury surveillance studies the research found. No tennis-specific rate of sudden cardiac death was found, and no ITF, ATP or WTA injury report was read. A tennis elbow frequency from a primary population study was not found.