The effect of increased strength on ball release speed and front foot contact-phase technique in elite male cricket fast bowlers

Felton, PJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9211-0319, Shine, KJ, Yeadon, MR and King, MA, 2025. The effect of increased strength on ball release speed and front foot contact-phase technique in elite male cricket fast bowlers. Journal of Sports Sciences. ISSN 0264-0414

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Abstract

Research on strength in cricket fast bowling has focused on ball release speed over technique. This study investigates how increased strength affects performance and front foot contact-phase technique during fast bowling. A planar, 16-segment, whole-body torque-driven simulation model, customised and evaluated for 10 elite male fast bowlers, was used to optimise the technique for maximum ball release speed under 3 conditions: 1) original strength; 2) 5% increased lower body strength and 3) 5% increased lower body + shoulder strength. As strength increased across conditions, discrete and continuous one-way ANOVA’s with post-hoc t-tests, highlighted ball release speed increased (40.7 vs 41.3 vs 41.5 ms−1; p < 0.01), vertical front foot ground reaction impulse decreased (p < 0.023) and mid-phase bowling shoulder extensor torque increased (53% to 61%; p < 0.05). No significant differences were found in phase time, ground reaction forces, joint kinematics or joint kinetics, although the increased strength techniques exhibited less knee extension, reduced trunk flexion and greater shoulder extension, contrary to expectations. This suggests that increased strength may lead to alterations in the front foot contact technique which allows greater muscular momentum to be generated. Caution is advised when considering using strength interventions to alter the front foot contact-phase technique.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Sports Sciences
Creators:	Felton, P.J., Shine, K.J., Yeadon, M.R. and King, M.A.
Publisher:	Informa UK Limited
Date:	24 March 2025
ISSN:	0264-0414
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/02640414.2025.2480921 DOI 2426938 Other
Rights:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	14 Apr 2025 08:53
Last Modified:	14 Apr 2025 08:53
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53397

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