Postural issues and how they can affect your concentration.

Now that you realise (or should do) posture training is a very important factor in your cricket fitness. Here are a couple of the areas that need attention when trying to achieve ideal and correct posture for you to transfer into your cricket. Starting from the top you must check how the head is faring in the posture stakes. Do you have a forward head position or lean in relation to the body in particular the shoulders. Can be referred to as the chook head position for obvious reasons. STOP and see how you are positioned reading this newsletter. There is a fair chance you are stooped over and you have the chook head position happening.

This will have consequences if this positioning of your head is carried into your cricket and even cricket fitness training. The consequences may seem minor and you don't seem to be suffering because of it. Well try these on for size. Your deep neck stabilizer muscles will not be working to anywhere near their full potential. These are the muscles surrounding your spine that keep your head upright and in the correct position. If these muscles aren't keeping your head in correct alignment then all of your superficial muscles are over activated and working overtime to keep your head from falling even further forward. Muscles such as the ones at the front of your neck and at the back of your neck. The reason you can keep your head in a forward position without pain is that these superficial muscles are stronger than your deep stabilizing muscles.These muscles if used for this purpose are being recruited for the wrong tasks.

You can see if someone has over activated front neck muscles by seeing two long lines(stick like in appearance) running down each side of the neck and are quite visible in their normal posture. Relating this to how it affects you the cricketer is the main issue and then correcting it should be on the agenda.If you have the forward head lean in your batting stance you will definitely not be totally relaxed. So if batting for long periods of time is something you want to do. This issue needs attention. Your neck or cervical muscles are working overtime and this means energy leaks and inefficiencies. Your energy leaks will cut short your concentration because of the amount of wasted energy used up. As soon as we start to tire our concentration drops off pretty quickly.

Then there is the issue of head position in all parts of your game. Batting, bowling and fielding. If your head is out of position initially you are going to be hard pressed to line it up in the heat of battle as you are bowling a ball or even throwing a ball. It will drag other vital muscles and joints out of alignment and cause more problems. The next area that would be affected by this is the upper back and shoulder region. This area isn't very important for your bowling, batting and throwing is it? Excuse the sarcasm. Anyway this area might have to be dissected later. But to fix this head lean may seem easy but needs quite a deal of attention and if not completed correctly can have serious implications.Headaches and so on have been known to occur not to mention structural issues that need medical attention to correct alignment problems.

You must get your head back into it's rightful position. This is where the ears line up with your shoulders when viewed from a side on position.Then you need to begin strengthening the deep neck flexors while in this position with certain exercises of varying time sequences.