Prepared to hit any ball and play it anywhere at any moment.

Welcome to the final edition of The Squash Company’s three-part special blog post on ‘The Ready Position’. ‘The Ready Position’ involves not only your feet and your body but also of course your racket. It is the position you should adopt between every one of your shots to give yourself the best possible chance of retrieving your opponent’s shot. In today’s post, we will be looking at the very important role of the racket in ‘The Ready Position’ and how you should hold your racket whilst awaiting your opponent’s shot.

Are you Racket Ready? The ‘Neutral Position’ for your racket

Squash is littered with missed opportunities. There are countless openings and chances to apply pressure and perhaps even win the rally wasted all the time because people simply aren’t ready to play their opponent’s shot.

Between your shots, your should get your racket up to around chest height at a backhand angle.

From this position, it is easy to manoeuvre your racket into a forehand or backhand position and your racket is already at a decent height making a reaction shot very feasible. These reaction shots are perhaps where players are commonly caught out the most, with opponents playing weak or loose cross-courts from the front which players aren’t able to intercept cleanly or at all due to their lack of preparation. If these players simply had their racket in the ready position, they would be able to attack the weak cross-court and quite probably win the rally.

The racket is also not far away from being around shoulder height if you need to carry out a full swing, meaning you can save yourself valuable seconds whatever shot you’re going to play, simply by getting your racket up to chest height.

It is a small thing but a very useful habit which can be done almost at all times. Anything that can save you a few seconds is worth doing, especially when you can use those seconds to take time away from your opponent by taking the ball early because you are ready to play the ball that bit quicker.