Squash Court Speed Training

Series Summary

Squash is a racquet sport that was formerly called squash racquets, a reference to the "squashable" soft ball used in the game. The game is played by two players (or four players for doubles) with standard rackets in a four-walled court with a small, hollow rubber ball. Squash is characterized as a high-impact exercise that can place strain on the joints. In the traditional scoring system, a point is scored only by the server when the receiver is unable to return the ball to the front wall before it has bounced twice. When the receiver wins the rally, they are awarded only the right to serve.

Just like other aerobic sports, squash requires a lot of stretching and training for participants to be able to perform to the best of their abilities and avoid injury. In this free video series, a squash instructor will teach you how to stretch and train for squash with a number of exercises and drills. You'll learn how to practice sprinting court movements, how to do lunges, and how to prevent injuries. You'll also learn how to stretch the legs, upper body, and how to do drills to measure your progress. With these training tips, you'll be in great shape to start playing squash!

Video Transcript

"If you've been playing squash a little bit or you're new to the game or you're an advanced player, you realize how court speed is incredibly important. So what I want you to think about, it's not enough to be fast, but you have to know how to be fast for a purpose. So what you can do in a squash court, and it's covered pretty thoroughly in our movement section, but I want you to think about sprinting to the ball so that you can do more with the shot. So you can see that if I hit it, if I have a ball up there and I can get to it quickly, I have more options than if I can't get there very quickly at all. So what I want you to really focus on is when you do your court movement drills, start measuring how fast you can do so many of them. So if I can move to the wall like that, see how many you can do in thirty seconds. So if right now all you can do is, let's say ten of those in thirty seconds, your goal is to get it up to twelve or fourteen and ultimately see how many you can get. Start with what you have because the quicker you can move around the court, the better your game's going to be. So if your strokes are good and you're slow, that's going to hold back your progress. If you're real fast and you're movements are somewhat in precise, you're like a wide receiver in football that doesn't, you might have a lot of speed but you don't run good routes. You've got to become very precise in your movement. So the way you measure this is you do your court sprints, your court movement drills, and you time yourself and you see how many you can do in a fifteen or thirty or sixty second period. So, as you improve your ability to move around the court, your shots will get better and better."