If you have ever pushed off hard for a wide forehand, felt your foot roll under you as you turned, and taken your shoe off two hours later to find the outside of your ankle puffed up, you have had a tennis ankle sprain.

If your child wins the flexibility test at every practice and has now started saying a knee feels wobbly or a shoulder slipped, this is worth understanding rather than panicking about.

Lunging for a ball that was never quite reachable. Pushing off hard to change direction. Stopping dead at the kitchen line. Then a sharp catch in the back of the lower leg, and the certainty that somebody behind you kicked it—except nobody is behind you.

If you have ever felt an ache at the front of your knee walking down stairs, getting out of the car after a long drive, sitting through a whole movie, or easing down a hill in the last miles of a long run, you may have experienced runner's knee.

If you have ever finished a set with a dull ache at the front of your shoulder, noticed your serve losing its usual pace by the third set, felt your arm go heavy and vague on overheads, or woken the morning after a tournament wondering why the shoulder feels worse now than it did on court, you already know what shoulder pain when serving feels like.

If you have been told you have a rotator cuff tear, the word tear probably did most of the work in that sentence. It sounds like something that has to be repaired, especially if you play a sport built on reaching overhead, and rotator cuff tear surgery can start to feel like a decision somebody has already made for you.

If you have had one bout of shoulder trouble and would rather not have another, or you are adding tennis days and quietly wondering whether your shoulder will keep up, you are asking the right question at the right time. Tennis shoulder injury prevention is worth taking seriously — and it is also more modest than most programs claim.

If your shoulder aches at the back after you play, clicks or seems to slide through the follow-through, feels blocked reaching across your body, or has simply lost power you cannot explain, there is a problem worth knowing about — and it is one that regularly gets missed.

If your child has gone from school tennis to lessons, tournaments and extra serving practice in the space of a season, or you have been handed a chart of test results and told where they should be, this is worth ten minutes of your time. Most youth tennis shoulder injuries build quietly, across months, while everyone is watching the scoreboard.

If you are counting down to a date your surgeon mentioned, wondering whether you will serve the way you used to, or already back on court and quietly unsure whether your shoulder is ready for it, this is the article for you. The honest answer about return to tennis after surgery is that the date decides very little.