In my first few years as a coach I used to go along to coaching presentations and hear about the benefit of reflection and review.

Having been bought up in a “beer and chat” environment as a player, all this was a bit lost on me: A bit of utopian and conceptual thinking rather than real coaching practice that I could use with teams and cricketers.

Then I met Ricky Ponting!

I’m a huge fan of rebound nets for self reliant individual or paired practice when working with keepers and fielders. The Crazy Catch helps sharpen reactions, builds technique and can be used to unlock movement patterns.

How do we increase someone’s throwing speed in a safe fashion?

What's the normal journey for a cricketer's throwing arm?

Start strong and get progressively weaker and sore over the course of a season.

Major League Baseball players throwing arms get stronger over the course of an 162 game regular season.

Following on from the positive feedback on the standing back keeping drill using the multi-stumps I thought I would follow up with another keeping drill that was given to me recently by one of our International players here at Millfield School.

Tom has developed this drill with Iain Brunnschweiler in a recent England tour to the UAE.

You'll need a Katchet Ramp, multistump, Bat or Skyer and some cricket balls.

The aim is to simulate standing up to the stumps to both medium pacers and spinners, focussing on areas such as posture, hip and shoulder turn, catching area, and the ability to react to significant deflections from a realistic "nick-distance". In other words, to push back the boundaries of what is possible when standing up to the stumps.

The second ball throwing drill in this series is the med ball push. Catch up with previous articles on throwing drills here and here.

This is drill to the drills often used by fast bowling coaches. Yet it used used to develop an understanding of how the body generates speed through the body and into our hands for many of the other disciplines.

You show me a fielder who has never had a sore arm or shoulder from throwing and I will assume they "choose" to field at slip, irrespective of the state of the game!

For the rest of us, one thing that helps is learning how to warm up, condition and strengthen your shoulder and arm ahead of pinging the ball in matches or practice.

When I first started to take wicketkeeping seriously, I started to study and copy all the greats of the game. The likes of Alan Knott, Bob Taylor, Jeff Dujon, Rod Marsh and more contemporary at the time, Jack Russell.

In a few short months during the summer of 1988 I went from being a 5 foot 5 inch aspiring club standard fast bowler to playing U15 International cricket as a wicket keeper. This came about through a combination of a number of factors.

We often talk about "training hard and playing easy" on the Pitchvision Cricket Show. It’s a principle that you hear banded around all over the place within high performance sport.

Are you all "hot air" or do you actually "walk the walk"?