What is the key to cricketers that bowl more faster?

The Indian cricket team trainer Gregory King (C) leads cricketers while stretching during a practice session in the Qaddafi Stadium Lahore in 2006.
Photo: Arif Ali

Fast bowlers do not lift the toughest weights in the gym, but they jump higher and throw further than their teammates, according to a power and conditioning coach.

The South African Greg King, who is entering his 18th season with the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League and has experience in India, South Africa and New Zealand, has studied the relationship between specific strengths and the ability of Bowlers to generate high speeds as part of the University of Cantbury.

“Bowling coaches will often tell me:” This player just has to be a little stronger and that will make him faster, “said King.

“But if I have looked at players over the years, when we look at strength in the way in which most people understand strength, in other words, the ability to lift heavier loads, when I have looked at fast bowlers in that respect, they are not necessarily the strongest, but when we look at them in terms of other types of power, we see that they have the tendency to the tendency.

“Within that fast bowling group, those who come faster, they tend to jump higher, jump further or continue to throw.”

King is also the power and conditioning coach with Canterbury Cricket and said like any aspect of cricket, Tempo Bowling was a skill that developed over time.

“It is no skill that if you have never bent, you could only develop in the gym.”

King joked that he was once called a fitness trainer, but the title has become “Fancier” during the more than 25 years that he has worked in the industry.

He started in South Africa and worked with first-class teams, worked for four years with the Indian Cricket team and the South Africa team for six before taking on his current roles.

As a player, King was a batter who occasionally rolled his arm – but in his strength and conditioning work the bowlers were his focus.

“Bowlers always seem to work the most, those are the ones we tend to spend a larger part of our time trying to fit and get strong and prepare for playing.

“Most of your injuries – or a larger part of your injuries – tend to come across your fast bowlers, so that is the position that the most tension takes, so that is why when you look at the research, most is done in that area on fast bowlers and much less has been done on field positions or patchmakers.”

Indian Cricket Team Physical Trainer Gregory Allen King (R) helps Fast Bowler Ashish Nehra with a piece during the training on the fourth day of the Fast Bowlers Fitness Camp in the National Cricket Academy (NCA) in Bangalore, 11 June 2004.
Photo: Indranil Mukherjee

King said that although research into injury prevention for fast bowlers was “critical”, he saw a gap for research into “evidence-based strategies to improve the bowling speed”.

“Improving the speed of bowlers – whether they are soon or want to build their pace – offers a considerable competitive advantage.

“If you are a bowling coach, you would of course tackle that with technical changes or things that would be specifically related to their bowling action. But if [a strength and conditioning coach] Your tool must be in that area where we were involved in their conditioning, so that can run or their strength work. “

The first step of King's research included interviewing experts from all over the world to determine the power qualities that they thought were important when bowling and improving the speed. He then discovered which tests they used to measure those qualities.

King measured a variety of bowlers in New Zealand and India from Bowlers at club level, elite level Bowlers and schoolboy Bowlers to determine if there was a relationship between bowling speeds and different types of strength.

In the last part of King's research, he brings his findings into action with young bowlers. Year 10 to 12 students from three Christchurch schools have undergone rigorous reviews of their bowling rates and power skills before and after an intensive six-week training program.

Two different training approaches were evaluated: one focus on general power and the other emphasized explosive movements at high speed.

“Both programs are carefully designed based on insights from our earlier research and expert consensus.

“It is unlikely that you will get enormous changes in such a short time, but we have seen some improvements at some of the bowlers of a maximum of five kilometers per hour, which is fairly considerable for such a short period. In terms of training intervention, in general you look over about two to three kilometers per hour.”

King said for Junior Bowlers, with the help of one of the training approaches yielded similar results.

“It does not seem that the improvements were better in both groups, but it seems that they have both been improved by a very similar level.

“If you take a group of bowlers at a junior level, it is likely that they come from a very low training background. So almost everything you do with them will help improve their strength.

“While the club bowlers we used, many of them already had a pretty big training history that many of them have been on training programs for a long time, so their training level or training history was much more developed.”

King hoped that his research would help other strength and conditioning coaches that work with cricketers at different levels.