Fitness Training For Squash Players

Written by Ubakeng Mphela, CJS Sports  Conditioning Coach

Getting into the best possible physical condition will go a long way to helping you play squash at your best ability!  How do you make sure that you give yourself the best training?

Any sport is diverse on its own.

Anyone playing a sport will tell you about how demanding it is on your body especially a sport like squash, an individual sport and very competitive. You challenge your body through different fitness aspects and movements leaving you with no choice but to follow a programme that will help cover the overall fitness of squash.

The different aspects of squash include but are not limited to strength, agility, speed, core/stability, power and cardiovascular fitness. All these tools are ways in which squash players can use to better their skills and gameplay as they will be preparing their body, physically and mentally.

Specificity is the key to becoming an outstanding squash player!

By being specific and doing specific exercises, you prepare your body to adapt to specific movements, explosive energy for your joint mobility, and to help absorb the pressure.  Remember being in a competitive sport like squash requires you to give 100% effort in both training and in a match, putting your body under a lot of stress.

As a Sports Conditioning coach, I study the physical attributes that a squash player does on the court and breaks down each one of those to create a specialized programme that:

  • is specific to bettering their gameplay, and
  • create different training programmes for each category from beginner all the way to professional category.

When dealing with overall training, it is important to have a split programme for squash.

About 70% to 80 % of the time should be directed to specific exercises.  These are exercises that would be done on a squash court, with specific movements, strength, and agility work.

It is equally important to also include general fitness sessions that make up the other 20% to 30 %.  These are exercises like core conditioning, boxing (mitt work and not the actual boxing sport), interval training on a watt bike in the gym, short track sprints etc.

The key here is: the more specific your physical training is, the greater the benefits it will have on your overall performance!