Maintaining physical fitness can boost mental wellbeing, increase self-confidence and decrease risk of injury. This can be accomplished through regular exercise, diet and restful sleep patterns.
Athletes must set both short- and long-term goals to keep themselves motivated daily and strive towards achieving their objectives.
1. Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Recognizing your strengths and weaknesses is a necessary first step when trying to enhance your game. This can be accomplished through self-reflection, consulting with coaches or peers, or conducting self-assessments. Once identified, writing down these areas of strength or weakness allows easy accessibility going forward.
Writing down your goals gives you a tangible means of tracking their progression; having them written down also provides the chance for feedback from coaches or training partners that may assist with making necessary adjustments as necessary.
When identifying your strengths, try to look beyond simply physical skills you excel at and also consider mental ones such as focus and staying composed under pressure. Once you’ve created a list of all of your strengths and weaknesses, compare these lists in order to identify any patterns as well as gain motivation to address any weaknesses.
Remembering your weaknesses may feel daunting, but only you are responsible for improving them. While accepting that shortcomings are your responsibility may be challenging, doing so is necessary for success and will allow you to take control of your performance while knowing success will come as you work harder. For added confidence you could use vicarious learning by seeking out someone who has overcome similar perceived weaknesses successfully and finding out who has similar ideas on how to overcome their perceived weakness themselves.
2. Identify Your Goals
When playing squash, setting goals can help keep you focused and motivated throughout each match. While outcome goals like beating an opponent or reaching a specific ranking are valuable goals to strive for, setting process and technical goals that focus on improving skills may ultimately help achieve those outcome goals more quickly.
Squash is an indoor racquet sport played between two players or teams of two against each other. Each point must be won by at least two points to reach 11 and the game features long, intense rallies with frequent contact among the players as they quickly change directions and direction changes. Squash was first invented at Harrow School in England by students in the mid 19th century when they replaced hard racket balls with hollow rubber balls which bounce less and travel slower – invoking its name from Harrow’s Harrow school history where students replaced hard racket balls with soft rubber balls which bounce less and travel slower – something hard racket balls did not do at first!
Squash requires its participants to abide by certain rules in order to ensure fair play and safety, including an out line extending across the top of the back wall and down each sidewall; should any ball hit this area it is considered out, winning the point to its opposing team. In addition, there is a board on the bottom back wall; should it hit this area it must be served above it in order for it to count as legal serve.
Squash is a fast-paced, high intensity sport that demands exceptional physical fitness and stamina to play successfully. Squash offers a fantastic cardiovascular workout, helping reduce risk factors such as heart disease and high blood pressure while simultaneously increasing hand-eye coordination, balance, endurance and hand-eye coordination. Squash can be enjoyed by individuals of any age or ability as it can be played both individually or as part of group teams.
3. Create a Training Plan
Squash is an all-body sport requiring immense physical endurance. Aside from regular squash sessions, players need to build up aerobic fitness through activities like running, swimming and cycling in addition to attending regular squash sessions. A well-balanced training plan should incorporate all these aspects so as to best prepare players for match play.
For those uncertain how to structure a training plan, there are plenty of online resources that can provide help. But in order for it to be truly effective, players need to set specific goals and commit to them by writing them in their diary or calendar. This will enable them to prioritize training over other events that might come up throughout their week.
After gathering all this data, coaches can create a training program to meet specific goals. It should consist of regular and targeted drills which focus on those areas most in need of improvement – for instance if your player struggles with finishing off games quickly it might be beneficial to do a lot of repetitions of drills that improve this area such as continuous driving on one side and boast drills.
Test and benchmark your performance regularly by taking fitness tests like an On-Court Bleep Test or Vertical Jump Test available through SquashSkills app, such as On-Court Bleep or Vertical Jump tests – these can easily be added into training schedules.
Finally, coaches must devise a training schedule that allows for sufficient practice time every week. While more hours spent training do not necessarily mean greater improvements, quality over quantity should always be prioritized when selecting practices – 30 minute sessions that focus on improving areas in need are far more valuable than hours spent playing games on autopilot.
4. Set a Schedule
Squash is a year-round sport, so setting a schedule that allows for uninterrupted training is vital to staying on track with your goals. Plan for any potential roadblocks such as injuries, travel or family obligations when creating your schedule and training plan; don’t forget both solo practice (approximately twice each week) as well as group sessions like strength or speed/agility training in this plan.
Monitor Your Progression It is also crucial that you monitor your own progress as a squash player, setting benchmarks such as personal bests on specific drills or using these benchmarks as indicators of where improvements need to be made – this will enable you to establish what the next steps in your squash development should be.
College Squash
College squash season typically runs from early-mid November through the end of February, depending on your school. Team matches and club championships take place, in addition to individual tournaments for competitive squash players looking for a college experience. Don’t miss this unique chance to experience college life while experiencing competitive squash play!
Playing on a college team can provide an excellent way of meeting both challenges and becoming a better player, regardless of your current abilities or desired goals. Joining one is certainly no small commitment though and college coaches often look for players dedicated to improving their game year round.
Enhance your SPPT by including additional physiological testing such as RSA/COD assessments and body composition measurements. Combining this data allows a more detailed and accurate performance profiling to be completed, prioritising assessment measures with strong associations to squash physical performance.
5. Monitor Your Progress
As you work towards your goals, be sure to meet with yourself and your coach regularly in order to assess how effectively you are meeting them and identify any necessary areas for improvement. It is also essential that you celebrate each success, however small it may seem, to remain motivated and keep striving towards your goal(s).
Goal setting in sport is widely acknowledged, but implementing it effectively is sometimes tricky. For effective goal-setting to occur, goals must be clearly and well defined while being challenging enough to push an athlete to push beyond their comfort zones. As part of an effort to help athletes set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-related) goals more easily. Various acronyms have also been created in order to assist this process of setting targets more precisely – one being “SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Real Time Related).
Education was an integral component of most goal-setting processes (PP literature k = 5/15; applied research k = 6/7). Educational programs’ main goal was to raise athletes’ awareness of the benefits and process behind goal setting; typically this information included an overview of outcomes, performance goals and process targets as well as principle goals such as goal difficulty and proximity.
Along with providing information on various goal types, most programs included some means for monitoring and assessing progress. These mechanisms ranged from periodic goal evaluation meetings with athletes (Burton & Raedeke 2008) to public displays of progress (Widmeyer & Ducharme 1997). Self-monitoring logs or diaries were often employed. Some programs suggested using feedback from both external sources like coaches or training partners as well as internal sources like self-reflection for goal commitment purposes as a means to enhance future goal setting processes.