Physio boost for English cricketers
With every year, the limits of what professional sports teams do in search of competitive advantage are extended. Football teams now use cognitive training tests to gauge young players’ potential.
At England’s National Cricket Performance Centre at Loughborough University, the ECB’s scientists strive to give the team a competitive advantage. They regard injury prevention are one of the next frontiers i n professional sport — and, potentially, a crucial part of how England can lift their first World Cup trophy in 2019. Given the increasingly arduous schedule, never has preventing players from being injured been more imperative.
This summer 91 county cricketers, from eight sides, are taking part in a pioneering study to reduce back injuries. The aim is simple: to track players both before and after they are injured, and get a better idea of what causes back injury. “Before you’d only be able to make guesses as to what the causes are,” explains Raph Brandon, the ECB’s Head of Science, Medicine and Innovation.
Finally, that is changing. Over the winter, the group - 45 fast bowlers, 18 spinners, 20 batsmen and eight wicketkeepers, including both previous sufferers of lower back pain and those who have been pain free — have been profiled by the ECB’s medical team on factors related to lower back pain. With the aid of wearable sensors, players’ posture, joint mobility, muscle flexibility, muscle endurance, aerobic fitness, hamstring length, ankle mobility and shoulder mobility have all been measured. Even their sleeping patterns.
Now the ECB and their counties will monitor the players during the season, tracking their workload, any discomfort they pick up in their lower back and how they respond to treatment. The ECB has focused on lower back pain — “probably the biggest cause of pain and injury in cricketers,” says Steve McCaig, a senior physiotherapist for the ECB overseeing the study — for many years. It has investigated bowling workloads and tried to tweak, or even remodel, bowling actions to make quicks less susceptible. But perhaps only by focusing on those who avoid injury, as well as those who get injured, will there be a great leap forward in keeping cricketers free of back pain. It is not only fast bowlers who should benefit; while it is rarer that back pain cause others to miss matches, it can still undermine performance.
“At the end of the season we’ll compare those who develop persistent and recurrent low back pain to those who don’t,” McCaig explains. “From our statistical analysis we’ll be able to identify how those people who developed lower back pain were different.” Even assessing 91 players, randomness is still a factor that can impact results; true knowledge of how to reduce the prevalence of lower back pain in bowlers might take several years. But by the end of the summer, the ECB hope they are more knowledgable about how to reduce back pain. THE INDEPENDENT