Are you choosing the right exercises to improve your cricket?

BEN SCOTT: The former Middlesex wicketkeeper explains how we can judge the usefulness of a sport specific exercise

Specificity - Sport Specific Exercises

I see people trying ‘sport specific’ exercises in the gym all the time. The classic boxing exercise of punching with weights in your hand, skiers on bosu balls only weeks before heading for the slopes, and of course cricketers trying to mimic shapes with equipment which can sometimes even get me scratching my head!

I’m not ruling these exercises out completely, but choosing sport specific exercises is slightly more complex than that. It’s important to understand why we do these exercises so we can do them effectively and not waste our time.

Enter the MERCS scale; a cheeky little method used to identify whether or not an exercise is specific or not for what we want to achieve. Is getting down on one knee and practicing our sweep-shot with an olympic lifting bar in the middle of a crowded gym actually helping or just making us look like plonkers? 

So how does it work?

There are five questions to consider when gauging whether an exercise is worth doing or should be avoided, which we can judge by rating them accordingly. The higher the total rating, the more relevant the exercise.

- Muscles engaged Are these muscles used during the specific part of cricket you are looking to develop?

- Energy system taxed Is this the predominant energy system taxed during cricket?

- Range of Movement (ROM) within the joint Are these the active joints used in cricket?

- Contraction type Is the contraction type and speed similar to that required in the action? 

- Skill Is the skill or movement sequence similar to that required in cricket?

Let's pick two exercises: leg press vs walking lunge with a bar rotation. Now, we need to go through each of the above questions and score these exercises against them.

Just to note, the leg press is what is known as an open chain exercise, where we are pushing the weight away from us, as opposed to the lunge where we become the weight, which is known as a closed chain movement. This is also a useful tool for identifying how specific a movement really is for us.  

Leg press - 15/25 vs Walking lunge - 21/25

This shows us that the walking lunge is the more cricket specific exercise out of the two. This absolutely does not mean that the leg press is out of bounds! It will have its place in the world of fitness but it is not as useful as the walking lunge in terms of what we are trying to achieve.

There you have it; now you can pick your programmes and exercises to perfection or head to Kinetic Cricket where all of the programs are designed in this fashion to help deliver training that really helps.