With the re-opening of courts (hopefully) on the horizon, maintaining our squash based movement skills is crucial when preparing to get back to the sport.
Ghosting is one of the best and most widely used practices when working on squash movement. It can be used for fitness purposes by doing high-intensity fast ghosting, or, you can slow it right down and go back to the basics if you're looking to work on specific elements of your movement.
Realistic Movement
As many players still don't have access to a court, most players have taken to parking lots and other wide open spaces to practice their movement. However, it's easy to forget how far we move into the corners in a real-life match without the walls there to remind us.
Many off-court ghosting videos involve players moving too far into the corners, which doesn't necessarily imitate real game movement. This is seen most often with movement to the front of the court, however, it is also common with back of court movement too.
If you check out the ghosting video below on my own realistic ghosting practice, I take a brief look at a rally between Ali Farag and Mohamed Elshorbagy and look at how far into the corners they actually move.
Being the current world number 1 and 2, both players have incredibly good touch, even when Ali plays a very soft drop to the front, Mo never has to move all the way into the corner when retrieving it.
Ghosting
Applying this realistic movement in to practice is relatively simple, I highly recommend watching a few professional matches on the PSA YouTube channel to get an idea of how the best players move, and how you can tailor your movement to match it.
The video below shows my own parking lot ghosting practice with a friend, we measured out the dimensions (shown in the image at the bottom of this blog post) of a court and taped them onto the floor. We then alternated between 60 seconds of ghosting at 50% pace, and 30 seconds of ghosting at 80% pace to incorporate some fitness. We then did a few minutes of one person pointing to different corners of the court and the other person ghosting those corners.
Check out the video here:
Hopefully the video helps you practice and maintain your movement while we eagerly anticipate the return of squash!
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