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Dr Mark King
E: M.A.King@lboro.ac.uk
Home to England’s National Cricket Performance Centre, Loughborough University is already recognised as the country’s leading centre for player development. Now Dr Mark King, a sports biomechanics lecturer with an international reputation in cricket research, is working alongside the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to safeguard player fitness and influence fast bowling practice. Amanda Overend takes up the story.
Injuries amongst England’s star bowlers are always big news, with the likes of fast bowlers Freddie Flintoff, Matthew Hoggard and Steve Harmison amongst those who have been put under the media spotlight following time out with injuries. For the danger men of cricket, who deliver balls at up to 90 miles per hour and are subject to forces of up to nine times their bodyweight through their body at impact, injury is considered par for the course, until now.
Dr Mark King of the University’s School of Sport and Exercise Sciences (SSES), one of just a handful of International Cricket Council (ICC) human movement specialists in the world, has been working with the ECB since 2004 to look at the prevalence of lower back injuries in fast bowlers, with the ultimate goal of reducing the number of players affected.
At any one time around five per cent of professional cricketers in the UK are injured, but for fast bowlers that number increases to 15 per cent. Lower back injuries are consistently the most common amongst these pace bowlers, with lumbar spine stress fractures accounting for the greatest loss of playing time.
“Over the last 20 years there’s been a fair amount of research carried out into cricket, mainly in Australia, but there was no conclusive evidence as to why fast bowlers were getting injured,” explains Dr King. “The ECB were keen to understand why and then find out what they could do about it.
“The research started off analysing what bowlers actually did and it has progressed into a more substantial project with the ECB now funding a studentship over a four year period.
“We are now starting to understand what’s happening within the body during a fast bowling action, what forces act at the various joints, and whether some techniques are better for you than others – are there techniques that a bowler could use where they’d be less likely to get injured?”
Dr King and PhD student Peter Worthington have tested 20 to 30 players on average each year and to date have conducted close to 100 tests on England’s fast bowlers, from junior and county players to England’s elite senior squad.
A mobile testing lab is set up in the National Cricket
Performance Centre on the University campus, with 22 cameras
recording the bowler’s every move. By sticking reflective
markers on the body the motion analysis system, known as
Vicon, is then able to accurately track how the body moves
during bowling. This motion data is used with force plate data to
get a full picture of the effects of fast bowling on their bodies.
“It’s all done in a computer environment,” explains Dr King. “For the coaches we provide some skeletal images, but we’re far more interested in what the real numbers are – from the positional data we can calculate angles and velocities.”
To identify just how far a player’s back flexes during fast bowling, the range of movement is compared to a static test, where bowlers lean and extend as far as possible in various directions from a standing position.
“We’ve found that during bowling there can be up to 50 per cent greater side-flexion compared to side-flexion while standing, it’s an extreme position,” Dr King adds. “To bowl you need to side-flex your body so your arm can come over the top. This extreme position allows that but some bowlers side-flex more than others. The thought at the moment is that this is a crucial factor in injury issues.
“Essentially we’ve identified this issue of side-flexion. Because we’re looking at forces going up through the back, we’re now working to identify the relationship between side-flexion and forces in the lower back.
“Everybody side-flexes to some extent, but at what point does it becomes an injury issue? If someone is 20, 30 or 40 degrees side-flexed is that okay or not? If you can change that sideflexion angle by three degrees, by improving their technique for example, how much less force will go through the back?
“There might be a bowler who has a dangerous technique from this point of view and you’d recommend they bowl less or change their technique. But for another bowler who has less side-flexion, their technique is more robust and they are less likely to get injured, so perhaps they can bowl a bit more and be safe. It’s that sort of relationship.”
Dr King is a member of the ECB’s fast bowling group which determines the guidelines and protocols for the players. England fast bowling coach Kevin Shine, who heads the group and is responsible for nurturing the players and sharing best practice with other coaches, has been impressed with the results so far.
“We’ve already used quite a few of the findings and put those into coach education, training our coaches to use different techniques,” said Shine. “It’s actually really simplified everything we do with regards to teaching and coaching bowling.
“The research has led to us being able to look at the mechanics in a lot more detail and understand that if we take pressure away from a particular area of the back we can actually clean up the bowlers’ technique as a whole and make them a lot more efficient.
“It’s been a wonderful offshoot from a coaching perspective, and there are a few young England bowlers at the moment who’ve really benefited from the research and the coaching interventions that have come from them.
“We’re now trying to target our young bowlers coming through and making sure they’re screened properly in line with the information we’ve got from the research. In the long term that will make the biggest difference – to make sure that all the young bowlers coming through are in a position to be what we call safe, even though bowling isn’t a particularly safe occupation, but it definitely does give them a better chance of making it through a long career.
“Obviously we have to be very mindful of the fact bowlers get injured but we also have to look at performance – the bottom line at my level is we’re here to win games of cricket and produce world-class bowlers, and this research is going a long way towards helping us do that.”
As the project unfolds performance is becoming a more important factor of the research which, Dr King feels, has massive potential to advance England cricket as a whole and help achieve their goal of becoming the best in the world.
“The project is only a few years old and so there are plenty of questions still to be answered. By undertaking this level of research not only can we try and quantify the relationship between technique and injury, but we can also start to understand how to perform better.
“England are working to become the best team in the world, with the best support, and we’re trying to establish ourselves as the leading group for cricket research in the world, so we’re coming at it from all fronts.
“It’s a unique opportunity to be involved in a project where you can actually make a real difference at the business end of a sport.”
