Squash Company

Squash coaching with passion

Keeping hydrated when playing squash



Are poor hydration levels impacting your performance?

Hydration impacts significantly on sporting performance. Lots of people skip the subject saying they ‘don’t drink water’ or they ‘don’t need to drink’ and many players will go through matches without having anything more than a sip of water from a water fountain. Whether or not your realise it, it has a huge impact on your performance, especially in the latter stages. If you start hydrating yourself properly, you’ll be amazed at just how much your physical and mental performance can improve.

One very important thing that a lot of people don’t realise is that once you feel thirsty, it’s already too late. Feeling thirsty is a sign of the onset of dehydration, albeit not at a serious level which will affect your health, but at a level significant enough to impact your performance. If you feel thirsty, your concentration and physical performance will already be suffering.

Pre-Game

Before a game, it’s important to start making sure you’re well hydrated in advance. To achieve optimal performance, you need to start preparing 2 to 3 hours before that match.

The drinking during this time should be in gradual doses and you should look to consume around 400-500ml of water. This sounds like a lot but isn’t all that much when spread out across 3 hours, particularly if you are about to embark on an intense match. Just make sure you’re close to the toilet in the lead up to a match!

As well as getting in a habit of drinking sufficiently, it’s also important to take steps pre-match towards aiding your concentration and getting in the zone.

Try having a 500ml bottle with you before you play a match which you can swig from. It’s a small and easy thing to do which will make a lot of difference to your quality of performance. If you’re really serious keep a 1l bottle with you at all times!

In-Game

You only need glance down at your shirt to see how much water you’ve lost during a match. This water must be replenished. Ideally, you’ll be able to drink smaller amounts gradually after each game, rather than necking a bottle every couple of games or when you feel thirsty.

It is estimated that both the average male and female need to drink just shy of 500ml per 30 minutes of intense exercise and I would class most squash matches as intense exercise. If your match is lasting nearer to an hour, then you’ll need over 900ml of water in order to maintain peak performance, which you don’t need telling is a lot!

This amount will vary of course on how long and intense the rallies are and also will change if you are smaller than the average male or female. You’ll need to drink significantly more if you’re bigger or if you’re playing high-level matches.. These are all rather generic figures though, as some people will sweat more than others or need more water irrespective of body size and it also varies depending on several other factors, so use what works for you. What is clear though is you need to drink a lot.

I’d recommend getting a 1 litre sports bottle right away and keeping it close by during matches.

Are electrolytes real? Is Lucozade Sport really better than water?

You might be surprised (or not surprised) to find that water isn’t actually enough on its own to rehydrate properly during and after intense exercise, as you lose lots of different minerals in sweat and during exercise. ‘Electrolytes’ is a term generally used to describe potassium and sodium, amongst a few other things.

Lucozade isn’t better than water, as their slogan suggests but it does have some important properties that water lacks, although it is no good on its own and not great in pure form.

Sports drinks are important for replacing the electrolytes which your muscles will need to function but most of them contain so much sugar that they will detract vital bodily energies away from the muscles. You need sufficient amounts of these electrolytes so that the Sodium-Potassium pumps in the cell membranes of your muscles can make your muscles contract effectively. These pumps rely on keeping a higher concentration of potassium outside the cell and sodium inside the cells to make muscles contract. During the more intense rallies, potassium can move out of the cells so rapidly that there isn’t a high enough concentration in the cell to maintain balance and the muscles gradually contract with less and less power until you’re fatigued.

You need to be able to replenish the stores of these electrolytes regularly during a match in order to keep your muscles contracting efficiently, which requires a sports drink of some kind. As I just mentioned, sports drinks have too much sugar in them on their own, which is detrimental to your performance. The best way forward is to have a diluted sports drink, i.e. put some water in your Lucozade, which will help you completely rehydrate.

If you don’t replace your fluids properly with a combination of diluted sports drink and water, you will not only find that your performance suffers but also that you’ll get muscle cramps and pains a lot more readily. Being properly hydrated goes a long way in staving off these aches and pains with some research suggesting that lactic acid may not actually be the cause of the muscle ache, but too much potassium building up outside of the cell membranes of muscle cells.

So make sure you bring a diluted sports drink with you alongside your barrel of water!

Post-match

There is a reason a lot of people drink milk based drinks after exercise and that is to help rebuild muscle fibres as well as provide carbohydrates, sodium and calcium, which are all important to recovering physically from exercise. Some of the protein drinks you’ll find will often advertise an excessive amount of protein though. As with all figures it varies a lot depending on your size, gender and a few other things, but generally you only need to take in around 20g of protein and any excess tends not to be processed by the body.

However, having a big glass of milk or healthy milkshake is a good idea to boost your recovery, particularly if you are at a tournament or playing again in a short space of time e.g. within 24-48 hours.

As always, you need to drink plenty of water too.



Five ways to improve your squash game now



Our Coaching Philosophy

Every player is different. Styles, techniques and strengths vary but we like to give the players we work with a basic framework for their play based on some of our playing principles and philosophies.

The philosophies below are, in our view, the five most fundamental lessons to learn if you want to become an excellent squash player. They are: ‘taking the ball before the back wall’, ‘going in short straight regularly’, ‘hitting the ball where the opponent is not’, ‘using deception’ and ‘hitting winning shots’.

Taking the ball before the back wall

Those of you that have read Matthew Syed’s book ‘Bounce’ will be familiar with the story of the England Table Tennis team’s reaction experiment at Brighton University. Desmond Douglas was English Table Tennis champion on eleven occasions and also made it to No. 7 in the world and was renowned the speed at which he played.
However, when he participated in a reactions test staged by Brighton University, he performed the worst of any member of the England Table Tennis set-up, including the youngsters. The test was laughed off; how could a player who played at such lightning pace have slow reactions? It was dismissed initially as a failed experiment. Only the experiment wasn’t a failure, it was right; Desmond Douglas had poor reactions.

How then did he become one of the greatest players in the world, let alone one so famed for his reactions? Delving into his background helped to answer some of the questions. Douglas grew up playing table tennis in a cramped room where there was so little room behind the table, he had to stand and play with his stomach pressed up against the edge of the table. This lead to him being forced to react quickly and hit the ball early or he simply would not be able to play a rally. What might have been seen as a disadvantage in terms of facilities actually became a formidable advantage for him. After years of playing this way, he was so used to playing in that style that when he played others on a normal table, he seemed to have supernatural reactions and take the ball incredibly early as he was so used to playing that way from his club. It wasn’t his physical attributes that contributed towards his ability to take the ball so early but rather his nurturing and the circumstances in which he learned the game.

We are trying to promote the squash equivalent. We play a lot of no back wall games to encourage all of our players to take the ball before the back wall in order to decrease the amount of time their opponents have between shots. This doesn’t necessarily mean volleying the ball; we do a lot of work encouraging our opponents to launch counter-attacking drops, boasts and drives from just behind the service box. Players that get used to playing without a back wall will experience a similar journey to Desmond Douglas and begin to take every ball before the back wall as a matter of course. They will apply phenomenal pressure to their opponent by constantly depriving them of valuable recovery seconds with every shot they play. They begin to seem like they have incredible movement and speed to the back corners, when in actual fact, some of them are quite slow in basic terms.

Going in short

It is never too early to go short. Be it a drop, drop volley or a kill shot, you should never turn down an opportunity to go short when it is on, even if it is your first shot of the rally. Too often players continue to play to length when their opponent is already behind them, which when you think about it is nonsensical. The point of a drive shot is to get in front of your opponent and look for weaker return which you can attack.

We always like to encourage our players to look out for opportunities to go in short whenever they get the chance to do so. Constantly recovering balls from the front corners is tiring for anyone and when played well, the shots all stay tight and so remain very tough to retrieve or hit the nick. It does take a bit of practice playing lots of drops and drop volleys, particularly from further back in the court but we believe it is a worthwhile pursuit. It is a tactic that pays dividends when it comes to winning rallies with outright winners and when the opponent becomes fatigued from lots of retrieving at the front of the court.

Hitting the ball where the opponent is not

Squash is a simple game. We as coaches, like everyone, are often guilty of overcomplicating things. So we try to have a simply philosophy and that is that the number one rule of squash is to ‘hit the ball where the opponent is not’. It’s not always as simple as it sounds as in the heat of the game it is easy to be unsure of our opponent’s location and we can often resort to hitting the ball without much thought or consideration. However, with some practice it becomes second nature. You can watch for and listen out for your opponent and if you are unsure of their exactly location, we look for our players to have default reactions. If they are in front, they should look to go short, as even if the opponent reads it and recovers the ball, they will have used more energy than if recovering a length shot.

It takes a bit of practice to stay composed enough to make that split-second evaluation but the difference it makes is incredible. Always hit the ball away from your opponent.

Deception

We always try to teach our players how to disguise their shots and deceive their opponents as they are learning how to play the shot. That way they can learn early on to incorporate deception into their shots, which means they are able to make mundane shots winning ones and find ways to finish off rallies from early in their development. This means they are not only able to play shots capable of winning rallies on a regular basis but they are also thinking a lot about the workings of shots. We try to put deception and creativity in as early as possible as it is much harder to learn to be deceptive at a later stage having already become settled with a particular stroke.

Hitting winning shots

With much of the game moving over to PAR (Point a rally) scoring, it is more important than ever for players to be able to hit winning shots to score points. As such, we think it is important players are taught how to end rallies through deception, strategy and hitting the nick. As part of this, we believe all players should attempt to develop proficiency in every stroke imaginable, including those that might usually be regarded as trick shots or luxury shots, as learning all sides of the game is the best way to promote true understanding, as well as creativity. We have also seen in recent years how players such as Mohamed El Shorbagy, Ramy Ashour and James Willstrop have regularly played outrageous and adventurous shots to such great success they are almost now considered a standard shot, whereas before a volley nick might have been consigned to showboating and exhibition matches.