New Year, New You.

That's the idea a lot of people have in early January and why not? It's a good time to start self-improvement after the excesses of Christmas.

Just as most of us take a golden opportunity to do something positive, most of us have given up as quickly as we began. How are you going to stick with it this year?

Last season my team were cruising to an easy victory in a one day game. We had skittled the opposition for 144 and were 120 for 2 in reply.

I was down to bat at 6 but had not bothered to pad up, a situation which rapidly changed when we lost our best batsman to a rash shot followed almost immediately by the new batsman muttering something about unplayable deliveries as we passed each other.

How much training can you do during the season?

Many people might say the more the better. I think it's more complex than that. After all, most club players will not have the time or resources to spend all day training. That's without the risks of injury and fatigue through overtraining.

Getting the balance right is a science and an art.

This complete guide covers the articles on this site that give you the answers to the questions:

Practice makes perfect, the coaches say. Researchers thought "how much?" and tried to find out.

The answer their research established was simple: 10,000 hours or 10 years of daily practice. This applies for everything from athletes, entrepreneurs, scientists or any field.

December the 21st in Britain seems like an innocuous day but this year it taught me something about cricket.

The date is the Winter Solstice: The shortest day of the year when we enjoy just 7 hours and 49 minutes of daylight and darkness arrives before 4pm. Some might say that the depths of winter are depressing, dark, cold and often wet. Others may say this is the start of the long road towards summer.

Dr Ganesh Dutt Chugh is a respected cricket coach and sport psychologist based in Gandhinagar, India. He has an impressive CV including 3 Masters Degrees, a PhD and real life experience coaching since 1985. He has been psychologist to many private clients as well as the Indian netball and volleyball teams.

Dr Ganesh was kind enough to answer some questions for me recently on cricket psychology.

I got an email the other day from a reader telling me the miCricketCoach pages have too many tips, drills and information. As a result they are going to stop reading.

They didn't say they were going to get outside and play cricket instead, but if they did I would probably applaud their action. As Merlin Mann said:

As you know, I'm looking for someone to be the Case Study for 2009. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to get some more informal views of how everyone is playing and preparing at the moment.

So how is your season (or off season if you are in the winter like me) going?

Putting terrible larger events aside for a moment, England's one day losing streak in India after winning 4 against South Africa got me to thinking about how teams get themselves out of a cricketing hole.

I'm sure your own side has had similar times.

More cricket coaching questions answered this week by Kevin and I. This week we cover:

• Kevin's successful week
• Bowling well under pressure
• Team unity and preventing cliques forming
• Strength, mobility and cardio training for older players
• What to do if you keep bowling no balls

If you have a question or feedback for miCoach drop us an email.

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