Not off-season, periods of active rest key to players’ fitness: Gloster

Strength and conditioning coach says if pacers stop bowling during breaks, chance of injury increases

- Somshuvra Laha

In a skill-based sport like cricket, fitness once conformed to the seasonal calendar and hence, needed off-season, preseason and pre-competition camps.

Butas the sport grew, fitness was viewed through a holistic lens that caters to power, endurance, agility, flexibility and reaction time of cricketers on an individual basis. And since everyone has different physical thresholds, the need to monitor and manage their fitness has become a yearround practice. Which is why the concept of training in the off-season —a window India rarely get these days —has undergone several makeovers in the last three decades.

The ideal preseason used to beasix to eight-week window, a phase where cricketers could afford to ramp down and up again. But now that window barely stretches a month. This time, for example, India are getting just four weeks between the Test tour of England and the Asia Cup that will be played in the T20 format.

Playing two different formats in the space of a month may seem a fairly easy transition to the casual observer but it involves tough recalibrations, says John Gloster, a renowned strength and conditioning expert who has worked with senior national teams of India, Bangladesh as well as the Rajasthan Royals franchise.

“The intensity of the T20 game is so high that it mimics the physical exertions of an ODI,” Gloster told HT. “But the players today have access to better technology, better training and a better understanding of their workload. So, I think they're a better protected athlete, and therefore a better prepared athlete than they were, you know, back when we didn’t have so much data.”