“Something was off”: Navarro shuts down her 2026 season after RED-S and Hashimoto’s diagnoses, and returns in 2027

Emma Navarro has gone public with the health problems that have shadowed the last three years of her career, saying she was diagnosed in the fall of 2025 with “Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport” and with “Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism”, and that the roots of both lie in the choices she made when she first arrived on tour.

“As you all may know, I have faced some health challenges recently. What you probably don’t know is that these challenges began almost three years ago and were heavily influenced by the choices I made early in my professional career relating to training, fueling, competing and recovery,” the American wrote in a statement posted on her social media.

She explained why she had decided to speak now, having said nothing publicly while she worked through it. “I have been generally private about this topic while I worked to sort through the issues, but I feel that now is a good time to share a bit about what I have gone through as well as my vision for the remainder of the year.”

The diagnoses came after a long period without answers. “In the fall of 2025, after struggling for several years to figure out a difficult and confusing array of symptoms, I was diagnosed with a condition known as RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport), in which your body does not receive enough energy to support the demands of physical activity and daily life,” she wrote. “This was further complicated by a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, which presented a challenging puzzle of energy intake, energy expenditure and medication to be solved.”

Her reason for making it public, she said, was twofold: “both out of respect for my loyal followers who have stuck with me through the highs and lows of the last year, and also in the hope that it will resonate with at least a few people who may be facing similar struggles.”

Being new to professional tennis, I was doing what my team and I thought was best, and pushing myself to the limit was always my MO

The account she gives of how she got there begins in 2023, her first full season on tour, and with a workload that she says was the heaviest in the sport. “In that year I played 88 matches, the most of any player in professional tennis. I was splitting my time between the ITF Circuit and WTA Tour, competing almost every week and training as hard as I could during off weeks,” she wrote. “Being new to professional tennis, I was doing what my team and I thought was best, and pushing myself to the limit was always my MO.”

By the only measure anyone was applying at the time, it succeeded. “And it worked. I climbed from around 150 in the WTA rankings to almost 30 that year, winning four ITF titles and beginning to make deeper runs in tour events,” Navarro wrote. “I continued pushing in the off season of 2023 and then found quick success in January of the following year. I made the semifinals of my first tournament of 2024, a 250 in Auckland, and won the 250 in Hobart the week after, shocking myself and my team. I then made third round of the Australian Open, my best grand slam result as of that date.”

WTA’s Most Improved Player of the Year

That season would end with her at No. 8 in the world and voted the WTA’s Most Improved Player of the Year, having finished 2023 at No. 38 and 2022 at No. 143. The outward picture, she says, never matched the internal one.

“From the outside, things looked great. I continued to achieve tennis milestones that far exceeded my expectations, my ranking was rising, my level continued to improve, I continued to get faster and more athletic on the court, and I looked to be the strongest, fittest version of myself I had ever been,” she wrote. “But something was off. Or at least something was different. Different isn’t necessarily bad, I thought. Maybe things have to be different. I guess this is what being a pro feels like.”

“But different wasn’t a fair explanation of what I was feeling. I was off. I was experiencing emotions I had never experienced before, at least not to this severity. Irritability, frustration, perfectionism, worry, and bizarrely for me, anger.”

Navarro, 25, has since added titles in Merida in 2025 and Strasbourg this year, reached the Nottingham final in June, and went out of the US Open to Jessica Pegula, 3-6, 6-4, 6-3, after beating Karolina Muchova and Anna Kalinskaya on the way.