Cricket Cardio Endurance with Chinmoy Roy

You talk of modern cricket – it’s defined either by Gayle storm or Stokes curry. It’s powered by the brute force of an Andre Russell or Jos Butler.

The advent of T-20 cricket has tilted the scale even more towards power. Having said that the total duration of a match is quite long. Therefore, cardiovascular endurance, apart from power, is another parameter that has to fit into a cricketer’s training programme. In short, training under fatigue is defined as cardio endurance or simply put, stamina. Fatigue is inevitable in a six hours a day five day test or seven hours a day ODI or for that matter 3 hours in a T-20 match.

How many times have we seen an Andre Russell throw his wicket away under fatigue or a Joffra Archer struggling during a long spell. Former Aussie great Glen Mcgrath said, “To me endurance for a fast bowler is defined as bowling the last over of the day with the same intensity as the first one.” Exactly so. But then, how does one develop that stamina to sustain the quality of performance in a game that has a longer duration than most sports.

This episode endeavours to crack that. England team does a 2 km. time trail quite often to check the cardio endurance level of the cricketers. Here Ben Stokes is the benchmark. For me 3 km. time trail may be a better choice once in 15 days when there’s no match. The target for an Olympian to complete 3 km is under 8 minutes. The target for an intensely continuous sports is around 12 minutes.

I do not say that the system I have shown in the video is the best to execute. But keeping the stop-start nature of the game of cricket in mind, which is defined in training parlance as intervals, I have broken the 3 km run into 4 cycles of 4 minutes intervals. Since one core exercise is drilled in between every cycle I have set the target to finish 3 km. at 16 minutes.

Option:

· One can discard the in between core exercises if he likes and just make it a 3 minutes interval and do 4 cycles of it.

Run set up:

· All you need is a stop watch and find a way to measure a distance of 3 km. A 400 metre track is an easy option. You can use your car’s milometer to mark out 3 km.

Target of the run:

· Develop higher lactate threshold to delay muscle fatigue at a higher intensity.

· Develop VO2 max to enhance oxygen consumption at cellular level