Category: Fitness

In our SquashSkills ‘Circuit of the Month’ series, we give you a brand new squash-specific training session each month to help boost your physical conditioning.

Circuits are a fantastic method of training, perfect for squash players to use to optimise time and get maximum impact from their workouts.

We have a brand new edition of our popular ’11 Points on Fitness’ Q&A, this time featuring Egyptian star Mazen Hesham.

Mazen has been on a long road back from injury after first bursting onto the scene several years ago, but a big win over Diego Elias at this week’s British Open is a sign that he’s almost back to his best.

The lunge action is one of the very fundamentals that squash is built around. The ability to rapidly move into and hold a strong stable lunge position is crucial to giving yourself the optimal base for maximising control of your shots.

New Zealand’s Paul Coll is our featured player this week, and we’ve had a fantastic response to our exclusive documentary ‘More Than a Machine’ that examines the background and training regime of the Kiwi star.

The purpose of this blog is to give you some suggestions of elements you can incorporate into your training, to help allow you to put into practice some of Paul’s conditioning-related insights.

It’s not always easy trying to fit in extra training time to work on your squash fitness. Any session you manage to add in then, you obviously want to ensure is as guaranteed effective and as efficient as possible. A great way to organise your physical workouts to optimise this effectiveness and efficiency, is through the use of Circuits.

When most people think ‘Flexibility’, they think ‘Stretching’. The idea that making the muscles ‘longer and looser’ is an essential part of warming-up, cooling down, and enhancing performance for a sport such as squash is one of those ideas that is pretty entrenched in most players minds.

Squash is a sport that requires a high level of physical conditioning to excel. Players serious about their squash spend a lot of time and effort on their training programmes, working hard to squeeze in all of their sessions each week. It can thus be frustrating when workouts have to be moved or missed when work/family/social commitments intrude, and confine time and space availability.

We get a ton of great feedback and questions sent into us here at SquashSkills, many that well warrant a wider audience. In a new periodical feature on the blog, we’re going to be expanding on some of these discussions and making them into full articles.

This week’s then, sees us addressing a recent question that came in from a member about the use of ankle weights for the squash player:

“I was wondering if you have any advice on utilising ankle weights while playing/training? I have heard that some Egyptian players do this?”

We’ve got a great selection of training programmes now live on the site, with more being added periodically.

Whether you’re looking to focus on your speed, your endurance, or if you’re just looking for a general all-round physical boost, there’s a programme for you.

It can often be difficult to squeeze in much extra time for any additional squash-specific conditioning training beyond your usual on-court sessions, so it’s important that anything that you do add really maximises the time you have available. One of the exercises you’ll often see in many of our sessions and programmes here on the site that really fits the bill, is the rear foot elevated split squat – a favourite of many top sports performance specialists and athletic trainers such as Eric Cressey and Mike Boyle.

In pretty much any large scale commercial gym you might wander into, you’re more or less guaranteed these days to see a number of various inflatable balls, foam blocks, wobble boards and other ‘Unstable Surface’ items of training equipment. But are they of any use for the squash player?

As with many sports, the arrival of Summer signals the end of the traditional squash season. While some players take a break or reduce their squash playing schedule to pursue other sports over the summer months, for many others it’s seen as the perfect opportunity to get in a good block of structured training to really focus on getting into peak shape, and to help ensure they can hit the ground running ready for the new season in the Autumn.

If you’re serious about taking your squash to the next level, at some point you’re going to have to incorporate some form of structured physical training into your programme.

We’ve got some great fitness content on the site, with a wide variety of exercises, sessions, and programmes covering the entire spectrum of fitness needs and goals.

We’re often asked the question though, what exactly are the most important areas of squash-specific conditioning training for the player looking to take that next step? It’s difficult to condense such a wide ranging topic down into one simple answer, but to help get you on your way here are our SquashSkills 3 top tips for squash fitness training.

As anybody who has played the sport will surely attest to, getting into the best possible physical condition for your squash can go a long way to ensuring you are able to play at your peak capabilities.

With this in mind, we try and cover a wide variety of different training methods and modalities here on SquashSkills to give you all the tools you need to perform at your very best.

In our recent ‘Flexibility for Squash’ blog article we looked at the use of stretching as part of a squash-specific warm-up, where the traditional concept of ‘static’ stretching was somewhat outdated, and had showed little appreciable benefit in controlled studies.

In part 2 we looked more into the mechanics of stretching, the actual effects on the muscle, and what the latest research says as regards the potential use of flexibility training as part of a wider athletic programme. As an addendum, in this article we’ll be exploring the different types of stretching in a little more detail.

It can often be difficult for people to let go of closely held beliefs as regards technique, training and fitness, as new ideas can challenge people’s comfort zone and (perceived) knowledge of what can be pretty dogmatic subjects. This rigidity however, can often be detrimental to progress.

There’s a huge range of different fitness tools and devices available now, of a wildly varying degree of use and effectiveness. Amongst this backdrop of ‘must-have’ gadgets carefully marketed to part the fitness enthusiast from their money in the quest for the next latest and greatest workout tool, sometimes the simpler things get lost.

The humble Skipping Rope is one such oft-forgotten item, yet for the squash player in particular it is an invaluable addition to your kit bag. Cheap, portable, and easy to use, no squash player should be without one!

Court Sprints. Two words that strike fear into the hearts of all squash players!

They are however one of the most traditional of all squash fitness training drills, and are widely employed by players of all levels. Has their importance and suitability been overestimated though?

Something that we speak a lot about on SquashSkills, is the importance of dedicating specific training time to developing the individual athletic qualities instead of just training your conditioning ‘generally’ – physical attributes such as Speed, Power, Strength, and Stability are vital to becoming an all-round player, and for maximising your abilities on court.