[00:00:00] Josh Kennedy: Welcome back to the Cricket Matters podcast. Today's topic is move. Well, first, well, why physical traits matter before tech neat, I think in the strength and conditioning world, um, James, would you agree that cricket is a mere a mere baby? Um, it's just Emerging from its, uh, , from its embryo, basically. Yes.

[00:00:21] And learning, definitely. We're trying to be at the, uh, we're trying to be at the top of that, aren't we? We're trying to be at the forefront, um, which is why we assess basically. And that's what we're, that's what we're talking about. Do you wanna explain a little bit more about what we do and as I said, why the physical traits matter before we go anywhere near a technique?

[00:00:39] James Breese: Yeah, exactly. So the more I look at things and the more. We're trying to bring back stuff that's been ingrained in the world of professional baseball for years, in professional American football for years. All this stuff here, what they know is, is that movement quality dictates performance. It also dictates predictor of injury risk, [00:01:00] right?

[00:01:00] Because when they're trying to sign players in these major sports organizations, they don't want people who are prone to injury. Because that's an asset. That's a very expensive asset to sit on the bench and do nothing. That's 

[00:01:12] Josh Kennedy: Yeah, the number one predictor of injury is previous 

[00:01:16] James Breese: injury. So they've known the states that movement quality is important.

[00:01:22] How well you move, but what? That's quite hard to quantify. What is moving? Well, right now, really fun, famous speed, a sprint coach called Charlie Francis says it looks right. It flies right. Meaning, if he can see a sprinter just run well, he knows it's fast. He doesn't even need to look at the time. Think of the most, the best batsmen in the world, how elegant they make shot play, right?

[00:01:48] When they're playing, when they're, when they're playing their shots, right? They look elegant and fluid. Think of Joss Butler as a good example of how fast his hands are and how great he looks with hitting those, [00:02:00] smashing those boundaries with ease. He moves incredibly well. Jimmy Anderson is another good example.

[00:02:06] He is playing at a later stage. Well, he was playing at a later stage of cricket before he was forced to retire, according to his autobiography. But, you know, he moved elegantly. He was effortlessly. He was still bowling above 80 miles an hour. Right? He moved well. It wasn't just his technical stuff. So the point is, a lot of cricketers need to understand is, you need to move well first.

[00:02:28] You need to move well because moving well dictates how you perform because a lot of people try and fit square pegs into round holes, meaning they try and copy someone's technique. But their body will not ever let them get into do that technique because there's physical limitations, potentially. 

[00:02:46] Josh Kennedy: Do you think it's so it's like from, you know, from the running joke on this podcast is that I don't play cricket.

[00:02:50] So, um, it's from my perspective, it's like someone's struggling with their batting or struggling with their bowling, so like, Oh gosh. What am I doing wrong [00:03:00] technically? What can I fix? And they don't, they're not even thinking, hang on, I can't extend my shoulder overhead or I can't rotate my neck to the, or, you know, something like that, which you'd never even consider.

[00:03:11] Is that, um, is that where we're going? It's exactly where we're going. So we've 

[00:03:15] James Breese: got to remember this. So whenever anybody comes to us for a, for coaching, we will always, always, always conduct a movement analysis and we'll look at their physical capabilities first. Because we know the traits of the best players in the world and what we're looking for.

[00:03:30] Therefore, if they're struggling to move well, I already know they're going to struggle with certain elements of their technique. Now, this is going to be a series of podcasts over the next few weeks, okay? We can go into a bit more about this and how it dictates that. But likewise, you have the performance side of things, the physical traits.

[00:03:46] Sometimes they're physically not strong enough. And, you know, picking on the women here at the moment, sometimes They're physically not strong enough to hold the bats they're using. So they need lighter bats because the bats are too heavy they're using to help them perform what they need to do because they're physically [00:04:00] not strong enough.

[00:04:00] We need to see these things because it helps me make better assessments and judgments as a coach. So if I see somebody who is struggling, particularly one of the girls, who's struggling to play their shots, right, and not getting fast hands through, I will then look, well if they're stru I know then is their strength isn't there, call me to work on strength.

[00:04:18] But in the meantime, we need to get them a lighter bat. It's something as simple as that. So their movement quality and their physical traits will dictate how I do the coaching with them. And that is really important. And here's a good example, as a bit of a case study today, of how we work with some of our athletes and around the world.

[00:04:38] This is Jared from Australia. A big shout out to Jared, who lets us use him as a case study today. He's over in Brisbane. But he is a top order batting opening batsman. And he struggled at the start of the season. He's not scoring runs. Something he said is off. So we've been working with him for a while.

[00:04:56] So we have his earlier assessments from back [00:05:00] earlier in the year to see and compare and contrast. So, okay, cool. So he's asked us for advice. We go, what's going on, mate? Let's do, let's do the, let's do the analysis. Let's see what's going on. There's a baseline to see if it's a physical. or movement trait issue before we look at the technical stuff.

[00:05:15] And that's what we did. So guess what? Jared moves pretty well, right? He's, he's, he's screened and passed all the movement tests. He's always had a right shoulder issue because of throwing the ball all the time. So we just were mindful of that. And his physical side of things, we looked at his strength, his baseline strength.

[00:05:33] Had gone up, right? This is where I'm going with this. His physical strength had gone up, but when we did some of the power tests, his power had dropped down. So about an average, wasn't it Josh? About eight, nine percent was down on power performance 

[00:05:49] Josh Kennedy: across the board. So in that sense, when you look at it that way, when we talk about assessments and screening, it's like, well, that's a bit of a conundrum because you've passed our screening assessment.

[00:05:59] So what is going [00:06:00] on? Right? So 

[00:06:03] James Breese: he was jumping to technical issues. Before we even looked at technical stuff, right, we see there's a power discrepancy from what he's been doing before in the past. So before I even look at any video analysis of what he is doing, I have gone, Hey, mate, what have you done differently here?

[00:06:19] Because obviously the start of the season we're working towards together for a long time coming up to it. And we've gone into the start of the season where we were going intensive now, and he changed up his program to match what the S& Cs were doing for him and asking of him in terms of what he had to perform at.

[00:06:36] So we had a bunch of stuff we asked him to do in season, but he was then doing what they're asking of him to do in the meantime. Now, in season for us, it's fairly maintenance. We don't want to go too heavy, because if you go too heavy, it makes you slower. What he was 

[00:06:52] Josh Kennedy: doing, was doing a heavy loads. And soar, makes you slow and soar.

[00:06:57] And that's one of the worst things you can, actually, [00:07:00] probably the worst thing you can do. Exactly. 

[00:07:02] James Breese: So this extra workload was making him slower. Which meant his power was down. Like it's just the medicine ball chest pass power test we do. But he was down massively on doing that rotational side of things.

[00:07:16] He was down because he was loading himself with heavier weights. So it was a, it was a power issue. So before we even look at his technique, we know he's slower. We know he's slower. So therefore something is not working properly. So we just had a conversation with him and going, right, mate. Well, hang on a second.

[00:07:33] We need to back off here. Like this is physically making you so we can see this. We know where you're testing was at the start of the season at the end, but before the season Like on the off season, before the start of the season, and it's now down six weeks into the season. That's an issue. That's a massive issue.

[00:07:50] So, we completely took out his strength training. He's being asked, he made up an excuse, actually, more than anything to stop doing it. And [00:08:00] first weekend back, he's feeling less sore. He scored a 50. Okay. It's not a hundred, but he scored a 50. Now, coincidence, maybe you could argue it, but the point is everyone jumps to technical stuff first when it could be a physical or movement limitation that's causing an issue with his technique, causing him to snick off or get out LBW is actually what he was doing all the time.

[00:08:25] Right. Which is unusual for him. As he said, he got LBW three times out of six. Right? And that is highly unusual. Because he was, 

[00:08:35] Josh Kennedy: because he couldn't move, because he was slower, essentially, he couldn't move across the crease. 

[00:08:38] James Breese: We believe so, yeah. There could be many reasons. I had a look at his technique stuff, and he was, he was falling over to the offside, for various different reasons.

[00:08:44] But the point was, it was, we looked at, we addressed the physical movement issues first. Movement was cleared fine, absolutely no problem at all. Strength, it got up. Power had gone down. There's a fine line. You need to be strong to be powerful, but you need strength and speed. Strong enough. [00:09:00] And that's the big thing.

[00:09:00] Great point, you. Yep, strength and speed equals power. So you need to build your strength up in the off season, but you need to maintain them and keep the speed up the entire time. But if you build your strength in season, it makes you slower. Therefore, slower hands, don't hit the balls hard, potential issues of falling to the off side, which we saw in this case study here.

[00:09:18] So, the point is, it's a bigger picture to play. And that's what we're trying to explain to all our athletes and people out there. Don't always jump to technical stuff because it may be a physical limitation, either movement or strength or something along those lines that are holding you back. 

[00:09:38] Josh Kennedy: How can people find out if it is a physical limitation?

[00:09:41] Do we have a way of doing that? 

[00:09:43] James Breese: Yeah, we do. That's why we ask, no matter anyone we start working with, they ask them to do their performance analysis. There's three levels for analysis, level one, level two, level three. It's very rare that we get people to do level three stuff straight away. But they all have to do their level one things.

[00:09:55] And we go through all of it. We look at the physical side of things, how well you move. And we create a baseline [00:10:00] because if we look at analysis from videos, I know you're probably going to struggle with certain aspects and we'll do more podcasts about specifics. So stay tuned, leaving a cliffhanger now for the next episode, but we will get into it more specifically.

[00:10:14] Um shortly, but that is the key takeaway here guys. You need to move Well, I need to have baseline levels here to understand whether it's a physical or technical aspect because we see it so often Physical and movement issues dictate technical ability and prowess 

[00:10:29] Josh Kennedy: Exactly and as our friends in the fms say move well move often.

[00:10:33] There we go. That is it for today Please don't forget to rate review and subscribe And if you would like our free training plan then go to cricket matters. com forward slash train And remember our goal is to make you a better cricketer