S&C for Young Cricketers

At the elite level, teams are now extremely fit utilising various fitness techniques to enhance the athletic abilities of their squads. From my own personal experience, working at my fitness has helped me play at a high level, as I have got older it helped me cope with the demands of professional sport.

Does your fitness hold you back? Do you run out of steam when nearing a century because you haven't got the stamina or do your last few overs always go for the most runs because you've nothing left in the tank? All cricketers have experienced those feeling at times.  

Here are some of the main elements that a young cricketer should be focusing on:  

Endurance / Speed and Agility / Strength and Power / Stability and Mobility

Extended physical exertion, anything that is fairly continuous and keeps you moving for long periods of time. Swimming, cycling, running, anything that gets you out of breath. This should take over 20min really to start building a good base to train other areas.

This form of training is very important to young cricketers. Cricket, although it can be a long game is actually made up of hundreds of small events that take place at maximal speed and require a lot of power and agility.

SAQ (Speed-Agility-Quickness) will help you develop more athletic movement patterns allowing you to run better and move in a more balanced way in the field. It's also a very good workout so try and do as much of it as you can whether it be hurdles, ladders, cones etc.  

Strength is basically being strong, and Power is being strong, quickly. Confused? I’ll explain. There’s one this being able to lift a heavy weight in the gym but hitting a cricket ball out of the ground requires that force to be generated quickly and on cue. Strength training should be carried out with supervision to begin with to avoid injury and increase its effectiveness. However press ups pull ups squats and dips to name but a few can be started very early in the development of an athlete.