What Is The Best Age To Start Playing Squash?
Learning to play squash from an early stage can be beneficial to anyone. Giving your child the ability to start practicing any sport from an early age will help them live in healthier ways in the long run, but it will also release all that energy they build up. But the question remains, is there a specific age that’s better than others to start playing squash?
Five years is probably the best age for anyone to start playing squash, though some would say the best age is the moment you have the ability to hold a racket in the palm of your hand. There are definite health benefits and early cognitive skill development from learning squash at an early age.
As the saying goes, any time is an excellent time to start doing something good in your life. So seize the moment, pick up a racket, and start being active. Squash is fun, competitive, and intense, but most importantly, it will improve your child’s quality of life. Let’s look at the benefits of playing squash for different age groups.
What Is The Best Age To Start Playing Squash?
You can safely say that squash is safe for children to learn from age five and onward. From this stage in their short lives, they will start to develop some health benefits and learn valuable life lessons. From an early age, children will benefit from things like better hand-eye coordination, self-confidence, improved ability to focus, and more respect for themselves and others.
The Benefits Of Playing Squash For Your Child
We all know that being active from an early age is very beneficial for our well-being. This includes mental well-being and excellent physical health, and it will even go beyond that. You may even notice some behavioral changes in your child. Playing and learning to play squash will also improve your child’s social skills outside of the home and classroom.
Mental Well-Being
When we are active, our mental health also improves. This is because enhanced fitness improves our blood flow, allowing blood to reach the areas where it will benefit our brains, providing much-needed oxygen that will assist in excellent brain function and good mental health.
With all the distractions from social media, computer games, video streaming services, etc., it is more crucial than ever to understand the vital role of exercise and its benefits in every aspect of our lives.
- Studies have shown that people that are more active from an early age are less prone to the effects of depression.
- Active children also have higher levels of concentration, which will result in faster problem solving and better learning and cognitive skills.
- Their ability to focus more on one given task will also improve.
Improving Physical Health
When we play squash, children and adults alike, we get our bodies to move around. This improves situational and spatial awareness since we must try to predict where that ball might go next and think ahead while avoiding bumping into the other player.
- Being active on the squash court will improve muscle strength.
- It will get the heart pumping, which assists with blood flow and lung health.
- Children that are more active from an early age, and maintain their active lifestyle, will gain long-term health benefits such as reduced risk of diabetes and obesity.
- Playing squash helps to maintain normal blood sugar levels.
- Being active helps to support bone structure and maintains healthy, strong bones.
- Active children have less body fat, and the exercise of playing squash helps to regulate body weight.
- We all know that life is stressful at times, even for our children. Being active in any physical sport, including squash, will help release tension in the body and mind.
We don’t even realize the importance of exercise in our children’s lives. We are often so enclosed in our surroundings that we give our children identical surroundings with the same limitations. Did you know, more than 50% of children around the world already have phones from the age of eight? We enable our kids more and more to be couch potatoes.
It is said that children between the ages of three and five need to be active throughout the day, while children from six to seventeen can do with exercising for 60 minutes each day. While we know the importance of exercise in our own lives, being more active together will not only improve your child’s quality of life, but it will definitely improve yours as well.
Squash is the perfect sport to facilitate this since squash is a sport that the whole family can participate in.
Life Lessons That Youngsters Can Learn From Squash
Participating in a sport and being active from an early age will help smooth the path of your child’s life. Learning to face obstacles will teach them how to deal with problems in their lives in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
- Being active promotes more confidence, which will make the road they walk on easier in a way. Many of the challenges that children face each day can easily be overcome if they have more confidence.
- Squash also instills the will to achieve success and work hard for the things they want in life, showing them that nothing falls into their lap without some sacrifice.
- Children who are active in playing squash, or any sport, will adapt faster in managing risk in their lives and will likely be more willing to take on new opportunities and challenges.
- Playing squash will give them even more structure in their lives and will teach them the importance of routine. Neglecting the routine of exercise will negatively affect their squash game, which is also true of every other aspect of their lives.
- With this structure comes the ability to prioritize essential activities in their lives. Knowing the importance of exercise for their bodies from an early stage will make exercise one of the priorities in their lives. This will give your child the quality of life they deserve.
- Playing squash in doubles will teach them the importance of teamwork and might even help some leadership abilities to emerge.
- With improved confidence comes strong leadership abilities.
- Squash teaches them that it is okay to lose in life. Losing can make you stronger, and handling it correctly enables you to work that much harder to achieve success next time.
- Perhaps more than any other sport, squash will prepare us for any outcome in life. You can not predict the outcome of the ball; neither can you predict the outcome of your life. You can plan, observe, and adapt when things turn out differently than you planned.
- Most importantly, it defeats procrastination since it gets them off that couch and doing something. It makes them take hold of their life and start living.
Conclusion
There are immense benefits to a child starting to play squash from as young as possible. Early age is the most perfect time to learn new skills, and their lives can only improve from playing the game. But there is no “right” age to start playing squash. Any age is a good age. The crucial thing is to stop making excuses and start looking at all the excellent reasons to get active and to start playing.
References
- https://www.reddit.com/r/squash/comments/kurr6g/what_is_the_correct_age_to_start_playing_squash/
- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/is-it-worth-it-squash-exercise-stuart-heritage
- https://www.lifetime.life/sports-programs/squash-sport/junior-squash.html
- https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/adults/health-benefits-of-physical-activity-for-children.html
- https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/children/index.htm
- https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/well/family/the-benefits-of-exercise-for-childrens-mental-health.html
- https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity
- https://thriveglobal.com/stories/10-life-lessons-learned-through-sport/
- https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774838891/its-a-smartphone-life-more-than-half-of-u-s-children-now-have-one
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfCYxBeDfZ8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXbnadGe6RQ