Sunday 25 November 2012

Squash Tips - FLOW AND THE POWER OF LITTLE THINGS

It's not about what happens, but what you do with the facts.

Squash it's all about consistency. The game itself is structured so that the average of your shot must be the best one in order to win. You can win by being clutch. But you cannot rely on it. What you gotta rely on are the basics which should be at such a high level that you  can be consistent.


So the way you have to think about every rally in a game is that every point is a world of itself.

You can make mistakes or be lucky but every time the serve comes your head must  be cleared and you have to focus only in the now.

Squash is such an adrenalin rush that it becomes really hard to keep your focus.
How many time have you found yourself screaming or even worse swearing without a logical reason to do so?
That's because when you are playing and consuming energy your body choose to save energy and the first thing it cuts off is the multilevel logical reasoning.
Try to ask yourself something quite complicated when you're playing squash, the answer will be something close to : << ............>> you wont be able to have an answer.

So you cannot rely on hugely intricate tactical plans.


Also if your logical reasoning goes down, your emotional reasoning gets enhanced. This means that you will find yourself feeling , instead of thinking (therefore logically knowing what you're doing) ,
so the problem is that emotion are not logical. How can you trust them?



We can use the principle of flow for this one. Flow is a psychological concept introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book (1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience). What he says in his book is that when you perform a task which difficulty is hard but your skill level lets you achieve it with a good amount of effort, you enter into the flow state in which you find yourself not thinking too much but acting as if you already knew what to do in order to achieve the best outcome possible.


So how do we reach the Flow state in squash? 


The easiest way is to give yourself small objective that you can perform in a match instead of big complicated battle plan with counter moves and variations of all sort, you should sintetize it in just a catch phrase, for example: 
-Always aim for the angles or,
-go for the volley or, 
give more pressure. 

If you just choose one catchphrase and think only about of that, whenever you'll achieve your goal you'll find that all the motions are flowing easily. 

In conclusion,  Always focus on just one simple thing and nothing else
Live every point like a different universe, so that everytime someone serve you are restarting and possibly with a positive attitude.

The other great tool for focus is respiration.




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