Monday, October 29, 2007

Exercise & Fitness

If you've been following the blog over the months you'll have read about the occassional injuries that I've suffered - shoulder injuries, thigh muscles, thumb swelling, back injuries and calf muscles being the most recent when I played the last game of the season. I'm not that young anymore (47) but for my age I'm probably not that bad, I've always been quite sporty and interested in staying fit and eating well. Seeing my 'Fit' uncle die at 40 was quite a shock leaving a wife and two small kids behind kind of made me realise that along with his Dad dying in his early 60's and my Dad dying a couple of weeks after retiring that there was a propensity amongst the blokes in our family to croak quite early. So at the age of about 23 - 24 I decided I wasn't having any of that and that I'd see if I could take the record and hang in there till I'm at least 70. That'll do me fine my youngest will be in his early 30's and he'll be able to deal with it by then and not impact on his life too much.

Thing is I never accounted for cricket and now I've discovered it I want to be playing it till I'm 70 as well. Which means I don't want to be going down with injuries every weekend every time I run for a ball in the outfield, or put in a spell of 20 overs back to back when I'm practicing and suffer shoulder injuries. So tonight I got an email from my mate David Hinchcliffe at www.harrowdrive.com and it was covering his favourite subject "Core stability". He loves it core stability, he can't get enough of it and it's his mission it seems to turn the rest of the UK and probably the world into cricket athletes. I'd love to go and see his team play - I've got this image of 12 blokes doing warm ups and warm downs and they all look like Olympians in cricket gear. The opposition on the other hand will be a bunch of Lager bellied blokes tucking into their pre-match cans of Lucozade washing down bags of crisps and Macdonalds. I'm digressing a bit here so let's get back to where I was. So tonight after a recent good practiceI was thinking as I was reading David's email, maybe part of the reason I am bowling well is that I've taken on some of David's advice regarding shoulder exercises? So with that I tried to read it and decipher some of the language used (It's all very technical when it comes to the muscles and exercises) and as usual kind of lost my way with it and began to think I need something visual here I thne looked at the forum and some of the fitness plans and that sort of made more sense and was tempted to ask on the forum for a personalised plan. I erred away from that because it doesn't seem right that he'd spend half hour writing a plan for an old bloke like me simply playing Sunday friendly matches and that his time would be better spent replying to some young bloke who's got years in front of him as a cricket player. So I drifted away and googled "Core stability". Anyway to cut a long story short I found this - www.trainwithmeonline.com and within it exercises that relate to shoulder strength using resistance bands. But more than that a load of core stability stuff (I think) and it all comes with little video clips showing how the exercises are done. Looking at it - it looks like a really useful website if you're looking to improve areas of your fitness, or at least as a starting point. I reckon this website along with Davids mantra of 'Cricket specific exercise' and training I can see myself going on at least till I'm 50! This could become a new aspect of my blog - who knows?

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