How can I improve my cricket fitness in 7 simple steps!

So, how can I improve my fitness specifically to impact my cricket and give me a better chance of staying on the field, bowl faster and hit the ball harder.

Posture perfect

Your posture is absolutely vital both on and off the field. Posture in everyday life creates habits and can either alleviate pain or exacerbate it. Cricket is a game of making repeatable shapes therefore if we can enable our joints to perform the movements they were designed to make them we can not only get better but help prevent problems further down the line.

Action: in a nutshell upper body posture requires strengthening your back (posterior) muscles and releasing your front (anterior) so exercise 1) face pull exercise 2) chest door stretch release.

Structural strength

The human body wasn’t designed to run full pelt, slam your foot into the ground jack knife over your hips and try and kill someone with a leather cricket ball, neither was it designed to repeatedly plant one leg forward and swing like crazy all day! Therefor we need to give the joints structures as much of a chance to handle the demands of the game as we can! All cricket movements can be broken down and regressed back to the big 5 lifts. Squat, deadlift, bench, pull up and shoulder press. They certainly aren’t the only exercises you need but working a phase where you utilise these lifts to overload the structures ie. hips, knees, ankles and shoulders would set you up for a more stable body!

Action: get your squat form in focus, initiate the movement from the hips, keep the weight through the heels and make sure the knees don’t internally rotate.