The gentle sport is sending me more shoulders than skiing is.

Pickleball's genius is that you can play a real point within about four minutes of picking up a paddle. No sport has ever been so generous about letting you in.

That generosity is also the problem. The barrier that keeps people out of most sports — the year of being bad at it — is the same barrier that would otherwise have built the tissue up slowly. You skipped straight to competitive, at pace, three times a week, on a body that agreed to none of this.

Two things then take the load. The shoulder, because the game lives overhead and the points are short, so the repetitions per hour are far higher than they feel. And the knee, because pickleball is played sideways — and sideways is the direction almost nothing else in a modern adult life asks for.

That second one is worth sitting with. Think honestly about the last decade of your movement. Walking: forwards. Cycling: forwards. Running: forwards. Every machine at every gym you've belonged to since the Reagan administration: forwards, backwards, up, down. Then on a Tuesday evening somebody dinks it wide and your knee is asked to brake, sideways, at speed, for the first time since a school sports day.

That knee isn't failing. It's being asked a question it was never taught the answer to. Which is genuinely good news, because unrehearsed is a much more solvable state than damaged.

The shoulder half of the work starts with these overhead patterns, and the sideways half starts with balance and deceleration.

A 60-minute assessment first: what happened, what's been done about it, what your playing week looks like, and then testing what the shoulder and the knee currently accept — overhead, across the body, and sideways under load. That last one is the test most people have never had, and it is usually the revealing one.

Then one-on-one sessions of 45 to 60 minutes with me at the studio on Glenarm Place downtown. The goal isn't a shoulder that behaves in a clinic. It's a shoulder that behaves in the third game, when you're tired and the ball is above your head and you're going to go for it anyway, because of course you are.

And if what you've got needs a physician before it needs me, I'll say so in the first half hour.

So the sport that let you in without an entrance exam also skipped the part where your body got ready for it, and the joint doesn't care what the sport is called. Once you've seen that, "it's only pickleball" stops being available as an explanation — which is a shame, because it was a good one and I liked hearing it.

Anyway. You know it now. See you on Tuesday.