You can't bowl fast unless you have a healthy shoulder, but bowling is notoriously tough on your shoulders. If you have bowled for a long session you know the feeling of soreness in your bowling shoulder the next day.

To stop that from becoming an injury, you need to do some preventative exercise beyond just heading to the nets and getting a few overs under your belt.

For a lot of bowlers this means doing work with a band on the rotator cuff and some bench pressing.

But a much better way to stop shoulder injury is to focus on all the muscles around there, not just the cuff.

The shoulder is a clever and complex joint, so you need to get clever with it by firing all the muscles than make your shoulder blade move.

There are a lot of ways to attack it, but to start you can't go far wrong with 2 simple exercises:

1. Pulling: Face pull

You should already be doing plenty of rowing and chin up variations, which is a great start.

The face pull takes it to the next level though:

The face pull is the opposite type of pulling movement to rows. It rotates the shoulder blade upwards and externally, activating the traps which traditionally get missed out in a budding paceman's training plan.

2-3 sets of 10-12 reps is plenty, no need to go heavy as it's a support exercise.

2. Pushing: Ball push ups

Push ups are an excellent exercise for so many reasons, but here we are looking to activate the serratus anterior muscle that is crucial to shoulder health.

Doing the push up on a ball also activates the rotator cuff to double the effectiveness of the movement.

However, it's not the complete answer to training to prevent injury. To do that you need to get a complete programme.

Lucky enough, Steff Jones has one you can take straight off the shelf and start using today. Click here.

The programme is designed by a former bowler who now trains cricketers from schoolboy level to experienced professionals.

It's the best plan for you if you want to use fitness training to improve your natural bowling speed and keep innjury away.

Click here to get the programme instantly.