Indian cricket team trainer Gregory King (C) leads cricketers as they stretch during a practice session at The Qaddafi Stadium Lahore in 2006. Photo: ARIF ALI
Fast bowlers do not lift the heaviest weights in the gym but they do jump higher and throw further than their teammates, according to a strength and conditioning coach.
South African Greg King, who is going into his 18th season with the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League and has experience in India, South Africa and New Zealand, has been studying the relationship between specific strength characteristics and the ability of bowlers to generate high speeds as part of his PhD with the University of Canterbury.
"Bowling coaches will often say to me, 'This player just needs to be a bit stronger and that will make him faster,'" King said.
"But when I've looked at players over the years, when we look at strength in the in the way that most people understand strength, in other words the ability to lift heavier loads, when I've looked at fast bowlers in that regard, they're not necessarily always the strongest but when we look at them in terms of other types of strength qualities, we see that they tend to excel in those areas.
"Within that fast bowling group, the ones that bowl quicker, they tend to either jump higher, jump further or throw further."
King is also the strength and conditioning coach with Canterbury Cricket, and said like any aspect of cricket, pace bowling was a skill that developed over time.
"It's not a skill that if you've never bowled you could develop exclusively in the gym."
King joked he was once called a fitness trainer, but the title has gotten "fancier" over the more than 25 years he has been working in the industry.
He started in South Africa working with first-class teams, worked with the Indian cricket team for four years 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 over - but in his strength and conditioning work, the bowlers have been his focus.
"Bowlers always seem to do the most work physically… those are the ones that we tend to spend a bigger portion of our time trying to get fit and strong and ready for play.
"Most of your injuries - or a bigger portion of your injuries - tend to happen to your fast bowlers, so that's the position that takes the most strain, really. So that is why if you look at the research, most of it is done in that area on fast bowlers and there's a lot less done on fielding positions or batters or wicketkeepers."
Indian cricket team physical trainer Gregory Allen King(R) helps fast bowler Ashish Nehra with a stretch during training on the fourth day of the fast bowlers fitness camp at the National Cricket Academy(NCA) in Bangalore,11 June 2004. Photo: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE
King said while research on injury prevention for fast bowlers was "critical", he saw a gap for research on "evidence-based strategies to improve bowling speed".
"Improving bowlers' speed - whether they're already quick or looking to build their pace - provides a significant competitive edge.
"If you're a bowling coach you would obviously address that with technical changes or things that would be related specific to their bowling action. But as [a strength and conditioning coach] your tool has to be in that area where we were involved with their conditioning, so that could be their running or their strength work."
The first step of King's research involved interviewing experts from around the world to determine the strength qualities they thought were important in pace bowling and improving speed. He then found out what tests they used to measure those qualities.
King measured a variety of different pace bowlers in New Zealand and India from club-level bowlers, elite level bowlers and schoolboy bowlers to determine if there was a relationship between bowling speeds and different types of strength.
In the latest part of King's research, he is putting his findings into action with young bowlers. Year 10 to 12 students from three Christchurch schools have undergone rigorous assessments of their bowling speeds and strength abilities before and after an intensive six-week training programme.
Two distinct training approaches were being evaluated: one focusing on general strength and the other emphasising high-velocity, explosive movements.
"Both programmes have been meticulously designed based on insights from our earlier research and expert consensus.
"You're unlikely to get huge changes in such a short period of time, but we have seen some improvements on some of the bowlers of up to five kilometres an hour, which is quite considerable over such a short period of time. In terms of training intervention, generally, you're looking at about two to three kilometres an hour."
King said for junior bowlers, using either of the training approaches yielded similar results.
"It doesn't look like the improvements were better in either group, but it looks like they're both improved by a very similar level.
"If you take a group of junior level bowlers, it's likely that they come from a very low training background. So pretty much anything you do with them is going to help improve their strength.
"Whereas the club bowlers that we used, a lot of them had already had quite a large training history, that a lot of them had already been on training programs for a long time, so their training level or training history was much more developed."
King hoped his research would assist other strength and conditioning coaches working with cricketers at various levels.
