Imagine you are sitting down in a lecture hall for your first day of cricket nutrition school. Pretty much the first thing you are going to learn is that calories are key.

You will be told that 99.9% of people are the same from international arena to village green: If calories burned are greater than calories eaten you lose weight. And vice versa.

Does that mean you should count calories to meet your cricket nutrition goals?

In the past I would have said yes, but recently I have questioned the importance of counting everything.

Scientifically the method works. I have found that humanity gets itself in the way more often than not. I used to use fitday to track everything but I gave it up. Here's why:

• I cheated. Not deliberately of course. I tried to stick faithfully to the nutrition information on the packs but I didn't always weight my food to get exact numbers. Sometimes I forgot to put stuff on altogether. My human infallibility was skewing the data to make it useless.
• I got stressed. Counting everything was time consuming and frustrating for me. It was becoming self-defeating to carry on as the stressing out and better cricket doesn't go together.

I gave up counting calories and switched to using John Berardi's 10 Habits instead. It worked and I managed to cut 6% from my body fat without losing strength or muscle.

My experience is that counting calories is a good idea on paper, but (to paraphrase a football quote) cricket is played on grass. If you are serious about using nutrition to improve your game understand the basics of calorie counting but stick to something a whole lot more simple and lower stress.