Rapid bowling in cricket can severely damage the human body. Just ask Jason Behrendorff

Brett Lee. Mitchell Starc. Ellyse Perry.

Children grow up wanting to be like their heroes, and the situation is no different than young people who want to be the next generation of cricketers in Australia.

But while tracing Steve Smith or Alyssa Healy with a bat is safe, copying the actions of fast bowlers can cause problems.

Fast bowling puts a lot of strain on the body and is not a natural activity, so young players who copy functions are at risk of being injured or developing functions that their bodies cannot tolerate.

“I think it’s a trap you can fall into,” Perth Scorchers ace Jason Behrendorff said.

“For example, I want to bow as fast as Brett Lee or Mitch Johnson. And it has exciting elements you can take.

“But you have to be too, because my body doesn’t move in the same way that Mitch Johnson and Mitch’s actions are different than mine.”

At the age of 31, Behrendorff talks about the experience, after battling serious back injuries for years.

“Every time they recovered and recovered and went well, got better, everyone is happy, the scan looks good, came back to play. And then it happened again.”

After years of frustration, as the long left-handed man estimated he had succeeded in every campaign for about six months before breaking up, Behrendorff investigated the surgery.

“It came to a point where it’s really frustrating because I felt like I was trying a lot of different things to try to undo my problem, and it went on,” he said.

“So it ended up on a path where I talked to a few guys who had done it before about a surgical procedure.

“My case was quite, I guess A1, ready for it. It still broke from the same place. The other structure around it both above and above and below and next to it looked good and clean.

“So it was a case: ‘We’re looking good here and putting on the screws and cable and trying to close the fracture and hold it in.’ And so far it has worked wonders.”

The arrival of Matt Mason

Behrendorff underwent surgery in 2019, at the same time as Matt Mason became Scorchers ’bowling coach.

Behrendroff was going to miss the entire home season of 2019-20, but he started talking to Mason about his bowling.

“I just told him, ‘What do you see?’ I have tried different things, I constantly break. Is there anything you can see with a fresh eye? “”

Mason immediately recognized the obvious problem with Behrendorff’s operation, which saw him fall to the side as he fed the ball.

“We had a couple of small different adjustments to try and some worked, some didn’t.”

Much of the spearhead’s focus has been on holding its body forward to try to minimize back stress. For now, it works.

“We’re constantly trying to improve and improve … I feel like I’ve really started to settle down probably in the last six months,” he said.

“I’m 31 now and I’m just kind of starting to settle for something that’s really starting to work.”

Taneale Peschel’s WBBL return

Taneale Peschel won the final in the Perth Scorchers WBBL championship win over Adelaide Strikers last month, and Strikers needs 22 runs to win.

“I remember [Sophie Devine] will come to me, “he said.

– Maybe the 16th or 17th was over, and he wondered who was bowling what, how many runs we had and how much we needed to protect.

“And he came to me and said,‘ Hey, you’re playing the last game. ’And I was kind of like,‘ Are you sure? Do you really want that to happen? “

Peschel did indeed take the final, as the Scorchers won 12 runs and their first championship.

It was a significant turnaround from the start of the campaign, when Peschel was unable to hit his mark during his ascent because the problem was due to a serious injury to the femur.

The 27-year-old suffered a foot injury in the WBBL season of 2019-20, and he spent much of the off-season healing on his moon-boots on his foot.

The consequence of not running for several months, combined with the workload of the next WBBL season, led Peschel to develop tendinopathy of the thigh tendon – a lesion in the tendon that connects the femur to the bone high in the buttocks.

“My thigh muscles started to get small tears, which was pretty painful,” he said.

“We had a home quarantine mission after the Sydney hub, so I sat at home doing nothing and they seemed to flare up a bit.

Peschel stopped training and allowed the thigh muscles to heal before sitting down with the medical staff to look for a solution.

Blind run after learning to run again

The solution was to learn to run again.

“When I came to the bowl, I ran too much and ran out in front of my body,” Peschel said.

“If you look at the right technique, you run under your body and the placement of your legs is just below your body.”

With the help of the metronome, Peschel learned to speed up his legs and place his feet under his body in time. But correcting the running technique had unexpected consequences for his run, as he found himself unable to hit his mark.

Mason got a new idea to help him combine his new running technique and find his run.

Peschel started with a wrinkle, his face away from the field and ran – but with a twist.

“Close your eyes and run,” Peschel recalls Mason telling him.

“And then when you feel like you’re ready to bow, just go through the bowling. And that’s how I practiced to get a point.

While it’s clear that a change in his running technique has worked, it wasn’t an easy process for the fast.

“I had a lot of sessions that were pretty emotional,” he said.

“I’ve had the same startup for five years and I’ve probably never had any problems.

“Throughout the experience that I had to retrain your core skills, I highly doubted it.”

Injury prevention starts with children

While the injuries suffered by Jason Behrendorff and Taneale Peschel may not have been entirely due to bowling technology, Matt Mason believes there is a lot to be done in junior mode to prevent bowlers from suffering injuries on the course.

“I think at a high level in the game, we see techniques that often have bugs, and we have to do a lot of detachment,” he said.

“I really think it’s because we’re not starting to coach a technical model at a young enough age.

“I think the most important thing for me is to make sure we try to make the technical model less intimidating.”

Mason believes there is too much emphasis on helping children achieve certain outcomes, such as throwing a ball at a certain location or bowling at a certain speed, and that the focus should be on action instead.

“I have seen some young people achieve exceptional success in actions that I know are particularly distressing to their bodies.

“That’s the hard part. When things go well, it’s harder for a young fast bowler to say ‘yes, your results are great, but in fact you’re offending.’

“I think they often have to wrestle with it. So we’re just trying to explain to them how we could actually improve your performance, but put you in a situation where you don’t miss out on cricket games because little kids don’t want to miss out.”

Simple things can help you avoid injuries

Mason said focusing on the basics of technology could go a long way in creating a solid foundation.

“We want to be in balance. Everything we do, our bodies want to stay upright,” he said.

“So try to make sure they do everything they can during the start-up phase and through wrinkling, which makes sure they are in a balanced position.

“If they’re in balance and doing everything else right, usually you can’t go too far wrong. All their energy goes where it needs to go.”

He said the second key point was to ensure that children would not be unduly burdened and that they also have proper training in sleeping, dieting and recovery.

“Schools, Clubs, everyone wants their own little pound of meat,” he said.

“We have to take really good care of them, because if they keep missing due to injury, they’ll fall in love with the game or lose a huge amount of time in their development.”