When you bake a cake you don’t wait until it’s in the oven before making it taste good. A good cake is all in the preparation.
Cricket is just the same. When you put in the work mixing the right ingredients, you know you will be proud of the results.
So, if the weeks before the season starts is the prep time of cricket, what are the ingredients?
In my mind there are 4 crucial areas.
1. General Fitness/Movement
If you imagine cricketing success to be a pyramid, then your strength, endurance, mobility and stability are the base.
At this point you are not thinking directly about cricket at all. You are just aiming to be able to move better and have stronger joints to keep injury away and have a powerful well to draw from when you get more specific.
Of course, some types of training work better than others. But you can’t go far wrong if you stick to:
2. Technical Skill
Early pre-season is a great time to improve general fitness, but you also can use it to work on your technique.
As you are so far from the season you can really get to work ironing out those technical issues that caused you a problem last year. If you don’t have a coach you can film yourself on your phone and look at what you are doing.
Then drill it out with some deliberate practice. You can easily make time in your net sessions with some prior planning.
3. Specific Fitness
As the season draws closer you can combine technical work with increases in physical demand: in other words making your training more specific.
At this point you reduce the amount of pure technical work and you pull back on the general fitness work; exactly how you do this will vary based on your needs.
What doesn’t vary will be what you use as a replacement.
Increase the amount of running and turning you do in nets. Get more intense with your fielding drills. Bowl longer spells in overs and get some core training and stretching in when you are resting from skill based work.
4. Tactical Awareness
Finally, you need to convert all this skill and fitness into real-life match scenarios where you can practice under pressure and get used to developing a plan for all situations.
Again, with careful planning - both indoor and outdoor - you can use training games that accurately represent your matches.
Putting it all together
As you can see, this takes some planning and can be intimidating if you are not used to putting everything together either for yourself or for a team.
So I took the pain out of that by compiling the preseason advice from top coaches Rob Ahmun (Glamorgan CCC), Shayamal Vallabhjee (former Analyst for India), Laurence Houghton (University of Western Austraila) and myself.
When you buy the Complete Cricket Preseason Training Bundle you get all the ingredients to bake your perfect winter cake.
It’s the fastest route to a different summer this time.
