How do you improve your timing without stressing about it?

One practice trap club players fall into is worrying about timing. Of course, timing is important, but only when it doesn’t becoming distracting to improving your batting.

Here’s what happens.

There you are at off season training; it’s months from the season beginning and the surface is very different from the outdoors. You get a half volley and go to drive it, mistiming it and hitting it in the air into the net.

The bowler is jubilant. “That’s out!” They cry. You can’t argue. The coach tells you to hit it along the ground (as if you didn’t know).

Your timing is off.

How you respond next tells you if you are in the timing trap or not.

Mindset is more important than timing

It’s not really about the mistimed shot, but about your reaction to it.

Some cricketers respond with anger or frustration. They get distracted by the lack of timing and start trying to hit everything. They have fallen for the trap.

Others become despondent. They wonder if they have lost the small amount of ability they had. They walk out the net after their session and say “that was a waste of time, I think I actually got worse”. They have fallen for the timing trap.

A third type respond in a positive manner.

This person might say something like,

• “That’s interesting, I wonder why that happened, let me try again”
• “Great, I know I have work to do but what a chance to beat this challenge!”

For cricket players in the timing trap, this sounds like crazy talk. How can anyone be so aggressively positive in the face of abject failure?

For those standing above the hole looking down on the guys in the trap, this is the only sensible response. It’s perfectly normal. Why would you think anything else?

Working on useful batting skills

Of course, whatever your mindset, your goal is still to improve that timing and get the nice feeling of hitting the middle of the bat.

So how do you stay out of the timing trap and get to work?

First, stay focused on the most useful task.

Before you even walk into a net, you should know exactly why you are netting. If it is to get your timing seven months before the season begins on an indoor pitch perhaps you need to rethink your plan.

There might be more important things to do.

When I am coaching players in nets, I encourage them to stay focused on other key points:

• Do you know how you play when you are at your best?
• Do you know if anything is different from that at the moment?

For batsmen, this is things like footwork, balance and bat swing. These things do not vary much no matter what the bowler or surface.

These are things you can work on by reviewing the videos from PV/VIDEO, drilling, and netting again until you are getting into good positions.

That way, even if you are mistiming the ball, you are still getting most of your game in place, which is perfectly acceptable as a starting point.

You might still say you want timing over all these things.

That’s fine too. I get it.

Especially during the season, when you want timing to be the main thing.

You can still avoid the timing trap.

“Variability” and “constraints” are helpful

Working on timing in nets is tough, even with a growth mindset, but there are two ways to do it: Variability and constraints.

Variability is easy.

In cricket nets it means mixing up the length, pace, bounce and deviation of the ball so you can never quite be sure of ideal timing.

That sounds very much like a traditional net!

This approach leads to a lot of failure of timing as you learn slowly to adapt your game every ball. This is much harder than in a a real match where bowlers bowl in overs and spells on wickets that largely stay the same through the match.

So, you can respond with frustration or you can respond with determination. The latter - especially if you track the results - will see you steadily improve the adaptability of your timing.

Playing in games becomes easier as you feel yourself improve.

The second way to improve timing is with constraints.

In a net with bowlers, there is not a huge amount you can do to constrain your batting (that’s one of the big problems I have with nets; it frees you up mentally from match pressure).

But you can do a few things.

• Change the surface (make it faster or slower, higher or lower bounce).
• Change the ball (make it swing or spin more, make it smaller or lighter, increase or decrease the pace).
• Change the bat (use a thinner, heavier or lighter bat).

Each option constrains the way you play slightly.

That might be a bit more difficult (like a thinner bat) or it might require more focus (like a slower delivery that moves more off the pitch). The key point is, you make training timing as hard as possible so you force yourself to adapt.

Again, the chance of failure is high: You need to have the right frame of mind and, ideally, a way of monitoring how you do so you can improve session to session. PV/ONE is ideal for this kind of monitoring.

Summary

• Timing can be a distraction unless you approach practice with a positive mindset.
• Before timing, worry about other aspects of your technique.
• Use variability and constraints to build better timing.
• Use video and review as much as possible to stay focused and in a growth frame of mind.