The picture on the top shows the central nervous system consisting of the brain and spinal chord branching out to our peripheral nervous system, consisting of the nerves themselves. The picture on the bottom shows these nerves and subsequent fibers (the yellow parts) innervating the muscles of the leg. Whenever you run, bowl or throw, it is this system controlling it, not your muscles, and the quality and power with which you will perform these tasks are determined by the quality of the program in the nervous system, not by the look and size of your muscles.

Following on from this point, the nervous system acts like a ‘living computer software’ program of sorts, where movements are stored in the central nervous system ‘memory’ and refined over time, depending on how they have been developed, and what qualities have been developed. This may be strength, speed, stamina (as a few examples) in any one of a number of unlimited patterns, and they are improved by continuously being trained in specific ways. And so whenever you call on your body to perform a certain task, your central nervous system fires a previously stored program to perform this task, and every time you perform it, you are refining and hopefully (depending on the quality of the movement program you are firing) improving it.

By recognising movement patterns, the nervous system is able to operate a much more quick and efficient system. Just think of how inefficient and slow the body would be if your brain had to consciously think of every single individual muscle involved in each movement in order to perform a task. Even something as simple as walking would be a slow process, let alone complex neural tasks like sprinting, kicking and tackling. Suffice to say, the more complex a task is, the more complex training required to properly prepare the nervous system for the task, and this is a key point to remember when conditioning for footy, because there is no more neurally-challenging sport in terms of all the movements and athletic tasks and challenges on the system required.

So for example, having a big chest from doing hundreds of machine chest presses doesn’t meant that you will be better at throwing or bowling a ball, just as doing hundreds of bicep curls doesn’t mean that you will be a better or stronger swinger of the bat. Why? Because this is a muscle focus, rather than a movement focus. These thoughts are a common mistake made as a result of training being so muscle focused. But remember, the brain recognises movement, not muscles.

This hopefully helps to initiate the understanding of the folly in breaking the body up and blasting different regions, as a means to get stronger for a full body complex sport like cricket. A performance-based sport must be attacked with a performance-based mindset. This leads in nicely to another brief point.

Greater chance of a disconnect between training modes

More and more you should be hearing strength and conditioning coaches, or athletic development coaches or high-performance coaches discussing the concept or approach of ‘athletic performance’ more so than ‘strength and conditioning’ or ‘fitness’ when it comes to sports like cricket. The general gist being that ‘athletic development’ better encompasses what these coaches are aiming to achieve with their athletes in their approach. It’s not necessarily about making them stronger or making them fitter per se, but rather a greater combined overall ability in the various physical components that are important to the sport – in our case acceleration, deceleration, agility, throwing, lower back and shoulder integrity and strength, core linkage to the upper body, etc.

‘All components of physical performance: strength, power, speed, agility, endurance and flexibility must be developed in a systematic, sequential, and progressive manner to prepare the athlete. Athletic development coaches enhance athletic performance by developing athletes that are completely adaptable and prepared to handle the psychological, physical, technical and tactical demands required to compete.’
Vern Gambetta

‘Trainers who separate strength and its programming requirements from other physiological characteristics of their sport make a mistake that over time may affect their rate of success.’
Tudor Bompa

But the key point here is that with the general bodybuilding approach, given that much of the attitude is about size and split routines rather than certain movement abilities and tasks, it is far easier for there to become a disconnect between various elements of an individuals training program. For example where does the biceps and triceps day fit in with the overall plan? Or how does it contribute to a certain goal? What will occur here is a disconnect between the 2, where the strength-based work is seen as separate from batting, bowling or team training, and the 2 will work to detract from each other, rather than complement each other. Certainly this isn’t unique to bodybuilding style training – however it is far more likely to occur, given than movement patterns and tasks are often forgotten in preference of body parts and regions in bodybuilding, making it much more likely.

Compound Exercises – Leave the isolation as a last resort

Isolation exercises have their place, especially if you need to rehab a particular joint, muscle or body part. And additionally there are other instances where isolating a particular area that requires strengthening or ‘awakening’ prior to other training such as the notoriously lazy glute medius, can have a place. However, by and large this is something that is done to excess with the standard bodybuilding approach (if cricket is the primary goal – by all means if bodybuilding is why you train in the gym, there is nothing wrong with this isolation, nor is anything else in this article relevant.)

Remember, the brain recognises movements not muscles. By this stage after reading the last couple points, you probably have a good understanding of the main reasons why strength training for cricket should be based almost exclusively around compound exercises involving many muscles and muscle groups and almost eliminate all isolation exercises like bicep curls and shoulder abductions. You may love the way your arms look in the mirror when you do them, but if you want to focus fully on training to be a batter or a bowler, don’t waste your time doing these, or at least only perform them after all the important functional work that will be of benefit has been completed. Aside from these reasons to drop isolation training and focus on the compound stuff;

• Far more carryover in training adaption relevant to cricket matches
• Training movements not muscles
• Challenging your nervous system more
• Being far more challenging from a work rate and conditioning point of view too.

There is also the added bonus of being far more time efficient with training. You likely work a full time or part time job, or are a student on top of playing cricket, and on top of having a family and social life and all the other things that go with everyday life, and do not have the luxury of being a full -ime professional athlete. And let’s not forget the actual team training and match days. So you likely will not have an endless amount of time to dedicate to your strength training program for cricket. Therefore it makes sense to pick exercises where you are getting as much work done in as little time as possible. So it should be obvious to want to pick exercises that are achieving the greatest possible result in the limited amount of time that you have at your disposal. Time spent doing bicep curls and tricep-pulldowns and sit-ups is time wasted. You must prioritise.

One final added benefit of performing compound exercises over the inefficient isolation stuff, as outlined by Tudor Bompa in Periodization Training for Sports, is that these exercises also create a far greater workload for the cardio-respiratory system as well, meaning that you are also getting a lot more ‘cardio’ conditioning when performing these exercises.

What about the recruitment and training of deep stabilisers?

This could easily become a very long-winded and technical discussion on anatomy, but I promise I will not let it, and will only quickly go over the most important and relevant essentials. What I am talking about here are all the various muscles inside the body that you don’t see when looking at the mirror, or on the outside of the body. These are all the deep muscles that you won’t see bulging when you exercise and these certainly won’t be the muscles that those around you are impressed by….simply because they aren’t visible. However, they are no less important than the outer unit muscles responsible for actual movement.

Key Fact: Stability must always precede force generation

These deep stabilisers are responsible for providing for stability in and around across all your joints, in order for the outer unit muscles that are responsible for the actual movement of the body, to have a solid foundation to fire or function from, and to move in the most efficient manner, whilst avoiding injury. To give a good analogy of why this is important, I will take from the work of world-renowned holistic and corrective exercise practitioner Paul Chek. Paul uses the old expression that ‘you can’t fire a cannon from a canoe’ when talking about exercise and movement in general. In other words, if you don’t have a solid foundation deep (around the hips, spine, shoulders, ankles, knees, core, etc) then you can’t expect to move or perform efficiently, and certainly can’t expect to perform at a high level for very long without injury.

Therefore performing exercises that also require the use of the deep stabiliser muscles is what must be included in a truly functional and effective training program for cricket. For example, when doing a pushing exercise, a dumb bell press on a Swiss ball, or a standing cable press are fantastic in this sense, as you will not just be using the obvious outer unit muscles (pecs, triceps and anterior deltoids), but will also be firing all the stabilisers in and around your shoulder, in order to provide the platform to push from, as well as the stabilisers around the hips, and also the inner unit core muscles. Believe me, you will realise exactly what I mean when you do these exercises….or at least your body will. Whereas on the other hand, a seated chest press on a pin-loaded machine, or even a plate-loaded machine, is useless!….. all you will use are those outer unit muscles (pecs, triceps and anterior deltoids), as you aren’t required to stabilise the weight at all, because the machine is providing all the stability. All you need to do is push.

This may not seem like a big deal, however over time, as you develop larger ‘outer’ muscles, whilst having not appropriately conditioned the inner stabiliser muscles, what you end up with are large and strong muscles that you are unable to stabilise (as the inner stabilisers have been underdeveloped relative to the outer strength.) You would literally be better off doing no strength work at all, than developing an imbalance between your outer strength and your inner stability. Cricket is high impact and tough on the body as it is already (particularly if you are a pace bowler), don’t go making it even harder on the body by preparing it inappropriately in this manner.

Relative Strength & Power

As touched on earlier in this article, as well as talked about in more detail elsewhere on the site and in the book, bodybuilding aside, when training for cricket, whilst strength is important, we aren’t necessarily training strength purely for the sake of getting stronger in the traditional sense. It is overall athletic ability that we want to develop, and strengths importance lies in the fact that strength is the underlying quality that these other abilities are built on top of. That is, first we must build our baseline levels of strength in certain movements or patterns, and then on top of that we can develop expressions of power such as speed, acceleration, deceleration, agility, throwing, rotating as well as the ability to repeat these to a consistently high quality level throughout a match.

‘Because power production is the key determinant to success in sport, athletes need to use training techniques that are focused on transitioning the strength gained from heavy (but slow) resistance training to high velocity movements.’
Donald A. Chu

Noted. But where does this fit in with the bodybuilding discussion? The key is in understanding the concept of relative power (and relative strength for that matter.)

In his book Every Day is Game Day, world leading sports and athletic conditioning coach Mark Verstegen discusses a concept that is very relevant to what you are trying to achieve in your conditioning program, and that is relative power. Relative power is basically your power-to-weight ratio. So for example if your body weight goes from 75kg to 70kg, but you maintain the same power and strength, your relative power has gone through the roof.

In the words of Mark Verstegen himself;

‘Relative power makes the most efficient athlete.’

‘Relative power makes things easier for the athlete. He’s able to control that bodyweight and also to efficiently decelerate it and reaccelerate it into the ground or someone else.’

As Mark Versetgen says, ‘There is a misconception that in order to become powerful you need larger muscles or more weight.’

Lets go a little more in-depth into just how Mark looks at relative power as it relates to athletic conditioning, and how it shapes his philosophy on power training. Some coaches in footy would disagree with the following outlook on power but its worth noting from this world leader in athletic conditioning;

‘Lets say we have a guy who weighs 200 pounds and 10% body fat. We measure his performance in the vertical jump and the broad jump (relative power tests.) We then add 10 pounds of lean body mass whilst keeping him at 10% body fat (but he now weights 210 pounds.) We then measure the 2 tests again, and find that his performance has remained the same despite an increase in weight.’

So far nothing too out there, but this is where Mark’s outlook becomes interesting, and perhaps a little different to what you may expect in cricket.

‘Most coaches and scientists would see this as a huge positive. After all he was able to gain 10 pounds and still jump as high. I would say we failed. Our expectation with the way that we train for power is that if we add 10 pounds of lean body mass, we expect his vertical jump to improve and for him to become faster.’

The main focus is improving movement quality, and if there is any addition in size and weight, we want there to be as much improvement as possible in the various expressions of power output, to accompany any increase in size.