Fuelling & performance nutrition for squash

An evidence-based guide to fuelling the squash player's body. Squash is one of the most intense sports there is — near-maximal, stop-start effort in a hot, enclosed, poorly ventilated box — which makes it as much a hydration and sodium story as a carbohydrate one. This covers daily carbohydrate, the pre-match meal, how much to take in during long matches and sessions, the very high sweat and salt losses squash drives, cramp, fast recovery between tournament matches, and the quietly serious risk of chronic under-fuelling. Practical, honest, and grounded in established sports-nutrition consensus plus squash-specific research.

Here's the short answer to "how should a squash player fuel?": keep everyday carbohydrate high enough to match your training, eat a familiar carb-focused meal before you play, hydrate hard — with sodium — because the hot enclosed court drives very high sweat losses, take in carbohydrate through long matches or a tournament day, and refuel and rehydrate fast between matches, all while eating enough overall. Everything below is the detail behind that sentence: the numbers, where they come from, and how to make them work for your body rather than someone else's.

Pair this with the squash strength & conditioning guide — the lunges, hard stops and change-of-direction work that builds the body this fuelling and hydration is meant to power.

A framing note before the numbers. Sports nutrition is well studied, but people differ enormously — body size, standard of play, fitness, how hot and humid the court is, gut tolerance, sex and health status all shift what's right on the day. So this is written as can, tends to and around, never as a guarantee, and every specific figure is a population-level guide drawn from published consensus or squash research, not a personal prescription. It's general education, not medical or dietary advice, and it isn't a personalised plan.

Why squash is such a fuelling challenge

Squash sits at the extreme end of racquet sport. It's a moderate-to-high-intensity intermittent game: quick, explosive rallies with short recoveries, repeated for anything from a 40-minute club match to an 80-minute-plus five-gamer. Studies of match play describe players active for roughly 50–70% of the total time, with rallies frequently lasting ten seconds or less and rests around eight seconds — a pattern that keeps the engine revving high, not idling between points.

The intensity is genuinely high. In elite match play, heart rate sits around 92% of maximum — roughly 160 beats a minute sustained — and about a quarter of playing time is spent above 90% of VO₂max, with blood lactate climbing well above resting levels. In plain terms: you're working hard, aerobically and anaerobically, and you're burning carbohydrate fast to do it. One analysis of elite male match play put energy expenditure at very roughly 1,180 kcal per hour (about 4,900 kJ) — an elite figure that a recreational player won't match, but a clear sign that squash spends energy quickly.

Two features make fuelling squash different from, say, marathon running. First, most single matches are short enough that a full glycogen tank plus a good pre-match meal usually carries you through — the classic long-distance "hitting the wall" is more a tournament-day, cumulative problem than a within-match one. Second, and much more important, squash is played in a hot, enclosed court with little airflow, so the limiting factor is often not fuel at all but fluid and sodium: you can lose a startling amount of both, fast. That's why this guide gives hydration as much room as carbohydrate.

Daily carbohydrate — the base

Match-day fuelling only works if you show up with the tank reasonably full, and that comes from your everyday carbohydrate intake, matched to your training. The joint position on nutrition and athletic performance from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine sets daily carbohydrate targets scaled to training load: around 5–7 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day for a light-to-moderate program, roughly 6–10 g/kg/day for the moderate-to-high volumes of a serious player training and matching most days, and up to 8–12 g/kg/day on the very heaviest days. Racquet-sport nutrition reviews land in the same place, recommending a habitually high-carbohydrate diet of about 6–10 g/kg/day for competitive players.

This matters more for squash than many players realise, because it's carbohydrate — stored as glycogen in muscle and liver — that fuels the near-maximal, repeated efforts squash is built on. Fat burns too slowly to keep up with a hard rally. When glycogen runs low, the effects are exactly what wrecks a squash performance: perceived effort climbs, footwork slows, decisions get sloppy and racquet skill frays. Tellingly, research on elite squash players has found many under-consume carbohydrate relative to guidelines — a common, avoidable way to leave performance on the court.

The practical point is that these dials should move with your week. A heavy training or match day warrants more carbohydrate than a rest day. Chronically eating at the low end while training hard is one of the most common ways players end up flat, under-recovered and stuck.

Before you play — the pre-match meal

For an easy hit you often need nothing special. Before a hard match or a long session, and before competition, a carbohydrate-focused top-up helps ensure liver and muscle glycogen are high at the first serve. Position stands describe a pre-exercise meal or snack of roughly 1–4 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight, eaten around one to four hours beforehand — the larger amounts earlier when you have time to digest, the smaller amounts closer to the warm-up.

The art is in tolerance, not just grams. Favour familiar, lower-fibre and lower-fat carbohydrate you've rehearsed — porridge, toast, a banana, rice, a bagel — because fibre and fat slow digestion and can sit heavily when you're lunging and twisting at speed. The golden rule before an important match is to try nothing new. And because squash's court is hot from the first rally, arrive already well hydrated: sip fluids in the hours beforehand rather than trying to catch up once you're dripping.

During long matches and sessions — carbs per hour

How much carbohydrate you need during play depends mostly on how long the effort lasts. For most single squash matches the honest answer is "not much" — your stored glycogen and pre-match meal cover a typical match. It's the long, gruelling matches and the multi-match days where in-play fuelling starts to earn its keep. Here's the duration-scaled ladder, drawn from the joint position stand and wider consensus:

A word on that last row. The gut can only move a single type of carbohydrate (such as glucose or maltodextrin) across the intestinal wall at a rate that tops out near 60 g per hour — pour in more and it just sloshes in your stomach. But glucose and fructose use different transporters, so combining them — typically around a 2:1 glucose-to-fructose ratio — lets the body absorb carbohydrate faster, up toward 90 g per hour. Most squash players will rarely need the top of that ladder; it's relevant only across a very long tournament day. For a single match, a carbohydrate mouth rinse — swilling a sports drink and spitting it out — can even give a small lift in short, hard efforts without anything to swallow.

Sweat, sodium and hydration — the squash headline

This is where squash nutrition really differs from most sports. A squash court is hot and enclosed with little airflow, and the game is relentless, so sweat losses are high. In a study of elite squash players training in only moderate conditions (around 20 °C and 40% humidity), the average sweat rate was about 1.1 litres per hour — with men averaging near 1.5 L/h, women near 0.8 L/h, and the heaviest sweaters exceeding 2 litres per hour. On a warm show-court or a stuffy club box, losses can be higher still. Left unchecked, that adds up fast: the same players finished sessions with an average fluid deficit of about 1.2% of body mass, having replaced only around 60% of what they lost.

Why it matters: losing more than roughly 2% of body mass as sweat is associated with rising effort, higher heart rate and — in the heat — falling performance, exactly the qualities squash punishes. The long-standing guidance from the American College of Sports Medicine's position on exercise and fluid replacement is to drink enough to keep body-mass loss under about 2% over a session, rather than to a rigid schedule. In squash the practical opportunities are the short breaks between games and at the change of ends, so use them.

Sweat isn't just water — it carries sodium. The same squash study measured sweat sodium averaging 46 mmol/L and a loss rate of roughly 930 mg of sodium per litre of sweat, which works out to very roughly 1,000 mg of sodium per hour of play for a typical sweater (and more for salty sweaters). Replacing sodium alongside fluid helps you actually retain what you drink and hold plasma volume, which is why an electrolyte drink beats plain water for anything long, hot or repeated. Conveniently, many sports drinks deliver carbohydrate and sodium together, so fuelling and hydrating overlap.

There's no universal number, because sweat rates vary so much between people and conditions. The reliable way to find your rate is to weigh yourself before and after a representative session: each kilogram lost is roughly a litre of sweat you didn't replace. That single measurement tells you how aggressively you need to drink — and whether you're a light or a heavy sweater.

Cramp — what actually helps

Cramp is one of squash's signature miseries — a calf or hamstring seizing in the fifth game. It's tempting to pin it entirely on "salt and dehydration", and for a hot, high-sweat sport that's a reasonable contributor: heavy sodium losses may leave some players — especially salty sweaters — more prone to exercise-associated cramp, so keeping fluid and sodium topped up is a sensible first move.

But the honest picture is more nuanced. The current weight of evidence is that muscle cramp is also strongly driven by neuromuscular fatigue — muscles worked hard, in unaccustomed volume, later in a match than they're conditioned for — rather than by electrolyte loss alone. That's why cramp often strikes the under-trained player in a long match, and why salt tablets don't reliably prevent it. The practical takeaway is to treat cramp on several fronts at once: replace fluid and sodium, yes, but also build match fitness, pace your effort, don't start under-fuelled, and stretch or ease off the offending muscle when a cramp threatens. If cramp is frequent or severe, it's worth a conversation with a sports physician or dietitian rather than more guesswork.

Tournament day — recovering between matches

If a single match rarely troubles your fuel tank, a tournament of several matches in a day absolutely does — and the space between matches is where it's won or lost. Squash research makes the point sharply: players who trained twice in one day, with only a short gap, largely failed to replace their fluid and sodium losses before going again, whereas players with a full day's recovery restored both comfortably. The short turnaround is precisely when passive recovery isn't enough — you have to be deliberate.

When the next match is only a few hours away, work both fronts the moment you come off court:

• Carbohydrate, quickly. Research on rapid recovery describes taking in carbohydrate at around 1.0–1.2 g per kilogram of body weight per hour in the first few hours after a hard effort to refill glycogen as fast as possible — the muscle is most receptive to restocking soon after you stop. Easy-to-eat carbs (a sandwich, fruit, a rice or oat snack, a sports drink) do the job.
• Fluid and sodium, aggressively. Rehydrate to make up most of what you lost, with electrolytes, not plain water alone — this is the exact scenario where the study's short-turnaround players fell short. Weighing yourself gives you a target to replace.
• A little protein. Roughly 0.25–0.3 g per kilogram supports muscle repair and, when carbohydrate is hard to get in, helps glycogen refilling.

Across the whole tournament day, aim for the top end of the daily carbohydrate range — roughly 8–10 g/kg — spread over meals and snacks between rounds, and keep sipping electrolyte fluid. The player who eats and drinks well between matches is the one still moving in the last round.

Everyday recovery — carbohydrate and protein

Away from tournaments, recovery is less urgent. After a hard session, two jobs matter — refill glycogen and repair muscle — and how quickly you need to chase the first depends entirely on when you next play hard.

• Fast turnaround (another hard session or match within a day). Speed matters: aim for that 1.0–1.2 g/kg/h of carbohydrate in the first few hours, plus some protein, as above.
• Normal turnaround (a full day or more until the next hard session). No need to rush — simply hitting your usual daily carbohydrate and protein targets across normal meals refills stores comfortably. The "eat within 30 minutes or lose your gains" urgency is real only when the recovery window is genuinely short.

Over the whole day, players are generally advised to eat around 1.2–2.0 g of protein per kilogram of body weight — more than a sedentary person, because hard squash damages muscle and protein supports repair and adaptation — spread across meals rather than piled into one. The eating-for-results guide covers the broader nutrition picture in depth.

Under-fuelling and RED-S

The most serious nutrition mistake in any hard-training sport isn't a bad gel choice — it's chronically eating too little to support the training. Squash burns a lot of energy, and players juggling heavy court time with work or study can slip into low energy availability: not leaving enough energy, after exercise is paid for, to run the body's basic functions.

Sports scientists quantify this as energy availability — roughly, energy eaten minus energy burned in exercise, expressed per kilogram of fat-free (lean) mass. Research associates falling below about 30 kcal per kg of fat-free mass per day with a cascade of problems, while something nearer 45 kcal/kg FFM/day is considered healthy for an exercising body. Sustained low energy availability is the root cause of what the International Olympic Committee calls Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S): a syndrome, affecting both men and women, that can impair bone health, hormones and menstrual function, immunity, metabolism, mood and — the irony every competitor should note — performance itself.

The warning signs are worth knowing: nagging or recurrent stress injuries, frequent illness, stalled or declining performance despite hard training, poor sleep, low mood, and (in women) missing periods. None of these are things to push through. If they appear, the answer is usually to eat more, not train harder, and to seek help from a sports physician or dietitian. Given that squash players have been shown to under-consume carbohydrate against guidelines, the risk here is real, not theoretical.

Common questions

What should I eat before a squash match?

For an easy hit you often need nothing special. Before a hard match or a long session, sports-nutrition position stands describe a carbohydrate-focused meal or snack of roughly 1–4 g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight, eaten around one to four hours beforehand — larger and earlier, smaller and closer to the warm-up. Favour familiar, lower-fibre, lower-fat carbohydrate you've tested in training, such as porridge, toast, a banana, rice or a bagel, and don't try anything new before an important match. Arrive well hydrated, because squash's hot, enclosed court drives heavy sweating from the first rally.

How much should I drink during squash, and do I need electrolytes?

There is no single number, because sweat rates vary widely. In one study of elite squash players training in moderate conditions, sweat rates averaged around 1.1 litres per hour and reached over 2 litres per hour in the heaviest sweaters, so squash can be a very high-sweat sport. Use the breaks between games to drink, aim to keep body-mass loss under about 2% across a session, and learn your own rate by weighing yourself before and after. Because sweat also carries sodium — the same study measured losses of very roughly 1,000 mg of sodium per hour of play — a drink with electrolytes helps you hold onto fluid and replace salt, especially in a warm court or a long session.

Will taking salt or electrolytes stop me cramping in squash?

It might help some players, but it is not a guarantee. Heavy, salty sweating can contribute to cramp, and replacing sodium and fluid is sensible for squash given its high sweat losses — particularly if you are a heavy or salty sweater, or you cramp late in long matches. But muscle cramp is also strongly linked to neuromuscular fatigue from hard, unaccustomed effort, so conditioning, pacing and not starting a match under-fuelled matter too. Treat electrolytes as one useful tool, not a cure-all, and see a professional if cramp is frequent or severe.

How do I recover between matches in a tournament?

When your next match is only a few hours away, move fast on both fronts. Prioritise carbohydrate — research on rapid recovery describes around 1.0–1.2 g per kilogram of body weight per hour in the first few hours to refill glycogen quickly — plus some protein (roughly 0.25–0.3 g/kg) and, importantly, aggressive rehydration with sodium. Squash research found that players with only a short same-day gap between sessions often failed to replace their fluid and sodium losses, whereas those with a full day recovered comfortably, so the short turnaround is exactly when you have to be deliberate: start drinking and eating carbohydrate as soon as you come off court.

Do I need energy gels during a single squash match?

Usually not for a short match. Position stands suggest little or no carbohydrate is needed for efforts under about 45–60 minutes, because your existing glycogen covers it, and for hard efforts of that length even a carbohydrate mouth rinse can help. For a long, gruelling match or a session that pushes past an hour, taking in around 30–60 g of carbohydrate per hour — a sports drink, a gel or a banana in the breaks — helps maintain your blood glucose and on-court sharpness. The bigger fuelling job in squash is usually spread across a whole tournament day rather than within any single match.

Takeaways

• Squash is intense, hot and stop-start. Near-maximal intermittent effort in an enclosed court makes it as much a hydration-and-sodium sport as a carbohydrate one.
• Build the base daily. Match everyday carbohydrate to training — roughly 5–7 g/kg on lighter days, 6–10 g/kg for serious players, up to 8–12 g/kg on the heaviest — and don't be the player who under-eats carbs.
• Top up before you play. A familiar, carb-focused meal of about 1–4 g/kg, one to four hours before; arrive well hydrated; nothing new before a big match.
• Fuel long efforts, not short ones. Little needed under an hour (a mouth rinse can help); ~30–60 g of carbs per hour for long, gruelling matches; save ~90 g/h (glucose–fructose) for very long tournament days.
• Hydrate hard, with sodium. Squash sweat rates average ~1.1 L/h and can top 2 L/h, with ~1,000 mg of sodium lost per hour; keep body-mass loss under ~2%, use the breaks, and prefer electrolyte drinks — but don't over-drink plain water.
• Treat cramp on several fronts. Fluid and sodium may help, but conditioning, pacing and being well-fuelled matter as much; cramp is also a fatigue problem.
• Win the gaps in tournaments. Between matches, refuel fast (~1.0–1.2 g/kg/h of carbs), rehydrate aggressively with sodium, and add a little protein — the short turnaround is where days are lost.
• Recover normally on normal days. Hit usual daily carbohydrate and ~1.2–2.0 g/kg/day of protein; rush only when the next hard session is soon.
• Eat enough, always. Chronic under-fuelling (low energy availability, RED-S) harms bone, hormones, health and performance. When in doubt, eat more, not less.

If you remember one thing, make it this: in squash, the player who fuels well isn't the one with the fanciest gels — it's the one who shows up with a full tank and well hydrated, drinks (with salt) in the breaks, and refuels fast between matches. Strathlon's job is to keep that base honest by adjusting your targets around the sessions you actually log, so the everyday fuelling that underpins every match is one less thing to guess at.

This is general educational information, not medical, dietary or coaching advice. The sports-nutrition figures here are drawn from established consensus and squash-specific research, and are framed as population-level guides — individual needs vary widely with body size, standard of play, court conditions, gut tolerance and health, and are best personalised with a qualified professional. Anyone with a health condition, a history of disordered eating, frequent or severe cramp, or who is pregnant or postpartum, or who suspects under-fuelling, stress injury, menstrual disruption or RED-S, should consult a sports physician or registered dietitian before making changes. See our Terms for more.

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