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The podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We are here to help you achieve your pickleball goals, with a focus on the mental part of your game. Our mission is to share with you a positive and more healthy way of engaging with pickleball. Together let’s forge a stronger relationship with the sport we all love. With the added benefit of playing better pickleball too. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your pickleball journey, Pickleball Therapy is here to encourage and support you.
[00:00:00.210] - Speaker 2
Welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I am your host, Tony Roig. This is a special episode of the podcast. We are lucky to have with us a special guest. We're going to be talking about the impact of pickleball on our bodies and our minds. They're trying to study as broad as they can about the sport. And so we wanted to have them on the podcast to share what they're doing and also to see if you, as listeners, want to participate in this really exciting project. Ted, it's It's a pleasure to have you. Ted Yem. Ted, I'm going to let you... You have a lot of titles, so I'm going to let you describe your titles to the audience, and then we'll get started with it. We'll dive in.
[00:00:39.780] - Speaker 1
Excellent. Thank you for having me, Tony. My name is Ted Yem. I'm a physical therapist out of St. Louis, Missouri. I have been involved in outpatient physical therapy for 22 years now. I currently practice in an outpatient I'm the Clinical Director of one of our clinics in the St. Louis area. But I also work with St. Louis University at their TIIP lab, which is an injury prevention lab. We have started a survey of pickleball injuries from pickleball players themselves. We're hoping to broaden that into a much larger study over a 3-5 year period.
[00:01:24.830] - Speaker 2
I understood from our conversation earlier, Ted, that this is the tip of the iceberg, right? This is just We're trying to get, whether you call it a baseline or call it like, Okay, we need to get our arms around this thing some. Then from there, we can hopefully continue to explore different facets of pickleball's relationship to human beings, bodies and minds, it sounds like.
[00:01:46.100] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I was starting to see some numbers come out, some pickleball injury numbers come out. But what I was seeing, the stuff that was being reported was all emergency room data, which It is not particularly accurate. I was seeing headlines like, pickleball injuries have increased five times, and all this other stuff. I started thinking, Well, wait a minute, pickleball participation has increased 10 times. So Like, of course, the injuries have gone up. Then we started looking at... I got with the people at Saint Louis University, and we started looking at, Okay, so how should we look at this? What we came to was that we wanted to survey pickleball players directly to get a sense of their injuries because we felt that some injuries are probably not being reported at all because you don't go to the emergency room for them. The emergency room data was making it look like pickleball was extremely dangerous, and we just didn't feel that that was really the case. After we started having that discussion, we started thinking, Okay, but we should look at general health with pickleball as well. We started building some of those questions into our survey, and that has blossomed into once we get our survey data, we can start planning for some randomized control trials to start testing some injury prevention strategies, as well as start putting some numbers with other ways that pickleball improves your health.
[00:03:14.410] - Speaker 2
It's It's not. It's really timely, Ted. I'm going to bet you, and I haven't introduced you to our audience yet, but our audience is very engaged with pickleball. These aren't casual pickleball players that listen to this podcast. They don't just stumble on this podcast, and we have a very loyal listener base. We have a base that really is into the sport. I'm confident they've heard about that $400 million article that came out, or headline that came out. So everybody grabbed on to it and said, $400 million in claims from pickleball. But there's a much bigger picture. I think this study is not just timely, it's important. Because I think it's important for persons who haven't yet played pickleball not to shy away from the sport because of a headline on some insurance claims without having a bigger picture. And I'll tell you this anecdotally, I've been at this. I've been playing pickleball for eight years, and I've been in the coaching space for about six of those. The impacts on players anecdotally is just out of control. And it's not an occasional thing. It's so pervasive that you got to think that... I mean, if the survey doesn't bear this out, I'll eat a hat.
[00:04:28.650] - Speaker 2
I'll find a hat, I'm going to swallow it because there's almost no way that the study won't validate. In fact, I think I would venture to guess that the study would... If I was betting on it, I would take the over. The over-under on it. I would take the over on whatever baseline you want to set for yourself. I'll take the over on the survey exceeding a reasonable guess as to what might come out. Ted, we talk about tip of the iceberg, and there's several phases. Some of the phases aren't yet defined. I understand that because you're very early in the process. But tell us a little bit about the survey that you're currently undertaking. Then I'm going to include it in the show notes, but tell players how they can get involved in this phase, and then we can talk about the next steps and how they can stay involved in the process. Let's start with the first phase.
[00:05:19.420] - Speaker 1
The first phase that we have developed is an online survey that asked players some demographic questions, age, and these types of things and then gets into how much pickleball are you playing and what's your skill level of pickleball? Then we start asking for some information on what type of injuries you've sustained playing pickleball so that we can get a good handle on what those things are. We also have put in a couple of questions about mental health, just a baseline touch on mental health, just to see are pickleball players generally pretty happy, which I'm hoping that the survey is going to find that they are pretty happy, and That's something that we can build off of. The real point of doing this survey the way that we're doing it is to get a really good, accurate picture of what the injuries are in pickleball so that we can start doing things to help people to avoid those injuries if we can. In our startup days like this, we have had a lot of help from some really great partners. Dupre has been really at helping us reach out through their newsletter and those types of things.
[00:06:35.320] - Speaker 1
The St. Louis Shock from LLP has jumped on board, and so that is a really good one. My company, Peak Sport & Spine in St. Louis, We've been pretty instrumental in getting this started, and so has SSM Health Physical Therapy in this area, too. I just wanted to give a little shout out to all those people because they've really helped us get going. That, I think, is going to help us get into the next the next phase as quickly as we can.
[00:07:02.190] - Speaker 2
That's awesome. As we mentioned, I think this information is super helpful for the industry, for the pickleball industry, for just the... And when I say industry, I don't mean just everybody in pickleball. Players as well, because you may be able to pivot this to a study on our recommendations on particular injury prone areas and perhaps even how to avoid them and things like that. So that's awesome. So if a listener, as I mentioned, our listeners generally have a deeper involvement with the sport. If a player listening to this particular episode wants to participate in the survey, again, we'll put it in the notes down below, but what's the best way for them to become involved with that?
[00:07:47.300] - Speaker 1
If you search for a Slue Tip Lab on either Instagram or Facebook, you can get to that page, and there is a link to the survey from that page. It's probably the The easiest way is probably to go through your show notes and hit the survey link from there. The survey takes, I think that we put down 10 to 20 minutes. Most people are filling it out in less than 10 minutes. It didn't take that long.
[00:08:14.840] - Speaker 2
I took it. It didn't take that long. It was super painless, and you share some information about yourself. It's anonymous, right? There's no problem with your information being shared, or it's going to be aggregated, or aggregated, and then use an aggregate matter. Then the next step, because I did this as well, is I know at the end of the survey, it says, If you want to stay involved, then they send you somewhere else where you can... There you share your email, because obviously, you need to be contacted with further steps. But if a player wants to be... I, personally, I tell you, from a personal standpoint, I want to be involved in this project from Cradle to Grave, right? From the beginning until it expires as much as I can. I gave my email, and If a player gives their email, you guys would then… They'd potentially be in the pool of players who would be sent further follow-ups. I guess they can make it decision at that point. They don't want to anymore, but they would at least get the invite to continue in the process, right?
[00:09:17.490] - Speaker 1
Right, yeah. We would pretty much just keep giving them information about things that are coming up and parts of this that are moving forward. The next thing that we'll do… This injury data that we're getting now, this is called retrospective data, meaning that we're looking back and getting injuries. That's good data, but better data is prospective data. The next phase, the next immediate phase of this is those people who have participated and said they wanted to keep participating. There'll be a group of those people that we ask to participate in recording their injuries going forward for a certain period of time so that we can verify the accuracy of our retrospective data. Then those people are going to be probably first in line to try out some of our injury prevention strategies as well because we'll have some data on them going forward. That's the advantage of those types of things.
[00:10:14.100] - Speaker 2
I want to be first in line for the shoulder injury prevention thing because I came from tennis, so I already had some pre-existing stuff from the serve. When I started going crazy on my body, sometimes I'll start throwing the shoulder out first, to get that, Versailles going. So whatever we can do to avoid that, it'd be awesome. So it sounds like... So I'm going to make a... I'm going to suggest to our listeners, Listen, this is a great project. If we can help this group get their study continuing right, make it complete the survey, get it going on. There's not a hard and fast date, but we're going to set mid-august as the deadline for you guys. So get this done as soon as you can. If you have time today, get on there and do it. If you feel comfortable doing the continuing thing, why not? Super helpful for us as a sport in general, but also in Individually as players. It'll help us. It'll help us figure that out. Ted, I think we covered pretty well where we're at right now. What we need to do next, is there anything else that would be good for the order?
[00:11:27.030] - Speaker 1
Well, I just thank you for mentioning that deadline date. We're looking to get a little over 2,000 people for this survey to get started with. We will actually keep it open after that and continue to collect data because the more people we get, the more accurate our data is. But we can really start doing our analysis at 2,000, and we're about halfway there. If people can really get on it, we can get this first set of data out, and that really helps us move into our next set of things. There just are a lot of exciting things to look at in pickleball, and Pickleball. We want to get moving on that.
[00:12:03.260] - Speaker 2
I have a dinner that's counting on this with Ted, a dinner bet. If the pickleball therapy can push it over 2000, then come on, your favorite host gets a dinner from Ted. Just kidding about that. But let's get this thing done. And one other thing, folks, and Ted, I assume this is okay. If you want to share the link in your groups, share it in your groups. Oh, absolutely. And your team reaches with your pickleball clubs, post about it on Facebook, whatever. Pickleball players go in there, answer the questions. I think that'd be awesome. So get the word out if you can. If you're an ambassador in your area, share it. There's no reason not to. Again, the idea here is to get the information that will help Ted and his group, and also help our sport, and help all of us individually as pickleball players. So the sooner we can get that done, the better. Ted, it was a pleasure having you as part of the podcast. Again, the link will be in the show notes. And please keep us posted. We'll continue to have you on as a guest as this study and survey progresses.
[00:13:05.460] - Speaker 2
And as there's more information available, we'd love to share with our audience.
[00:13:10.170] - Speaker 1
Yeah, I really look forward to coming back and sharing what we're finding as things are going along, because I think that that's going to be really interesting for everyone to hear.
[00:13:18.890] - Speaker 2
Awesome. Thanks a lot, Ted, and good luck with the project.
[00:13:21.960] - Speaker 1
Thank you very much.