Can power make you a better cricketer?

Absolutely, if you know how to develop these skills in the right way. In fact, having highly functional power at your command is the most important cricket fitness element there is.

Power is the culmination of your cricket fitness: you are able to run faster, bowl quicker and hit the ball longer distances.
Not only that though. Being powerful means you are less likely to get injured or perform badly because your muscles take longer to get fatigued.

If you are weak you are inviting your body to betray you. You might get away with it but why take the risk when the right workout can put your puny muscles behind you once and for all?

Beware the information overload

It doesn't take long to find a basketful of advice on power training. You may have heard terms like core stability, heavy object training and Olympic Lifting. There are a million different methods, trainers and websites ready to help in all manner of ways.

You may even have tried them.

But what works best for cricket?

That information is a bit harder to come by without some serious research (don't worry, I have done it for you)

The hidden secret of cricket power

The secret of power training is that it is almost exactly like playing cricket.

Let’s randomly pick a weightlifting move designed to increase power to illustrate: the hang clean.

A good clean is about the combination of speed of movement, coordination and timing of the body, strength and mobility of the joints.

Just like bowling or batting.

Without that transfer to cricket skills, what's the point?

Or to put it another way, any power training you do needs to have maximum crossover to the pitch. To be functional and make you adaptable, not adapted.

How you do that is the art of good coaching, even if you are coaching yourself.

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Photo credit: darkpatator