Cricket injuries
Injury guides for cricketers
What the injury is, what drives it in cricket specifically, and what a sensible plan looks like. Written for players and coaches, not for a journal.
Fast bowling back pain
Lower back pain in bowlers, including lumbar bone stress injury. Why the back is the injury that costs young quicks whole seasons, and what to do when it starts.
ReadBack pain in junior fast bowlers
For parents. What to do this week, when to see a doctor first, bowling limits, and the road back to bowling.
ReadSide strains in fast bowlers
A sharp pain in the side on one delivery. What tears, why the delivery stride causes it, and why they come back.
ReadThrowing shoulder
Shoulder pain that appears when you throw hard from the deep, and the throwing volume nobody counts.
ReadHamstring injuries
The most common injury in cricket and the one most likely to happen again, usually because rehabilitation stopped too early.
ReadBowling workload
Not an injury, but where a large share of them are decided. How much, how it is spread, and what rises too fast.
ReadMore guides
- Back and bone stress
Back stress fractures in fast bowlers
What a lumbar bone stress injury is, why young quicks get it, how it is managed in phases, and what recovery looks like. - Fast bowling
Return to bowling
Getting from cleared to a full match spell, one variable at a time. - Fast bowling
When a return to bowling stalls
Symptoms, gaps and pressure to speed up: which step to go back to, and what to record. - Rehabilitation
Testing before you go back
Why most reinjuries happen to players who felt ready, and what testing adds. - Performance and recovery
Round One is here: a practical cricket readiness guide
Demand, Exposure, Response and Adjustment: a practical way to plan the first weeks of the season, with a one-page checklist. - Performance and recovery
Recovery for cricketers: the boring stuff works
Sleep, food, fluids and the day after a match come before ice baths, massage and compression boots.
The pattern behind most cricket injuries
Cricket does not produce a random spread of injuries. It produces a fairly predictable set, because the game loads bodies in a fairly predictable way: repeated high-speed bowling, hard throwing from the outfield, repeated sprints between wickets, and long days that put all of it under fatigue.
Two things follow from that.
The first is that most cricket injuries are load problems rather than accidents. A hamstring that tears sprinting a third run rarely tore because of that run. It tore because of what the previous six weeks did to its capacity.
The second is that the schedule is part of the diagnosis. A bowler with back pain and eleven days before the next match is a different clinical problem to the same bowler with a match on Saturday, even though the back is identical. Any plan that ignores the fixture list is a plan for somebody else.
That is why every guide here spends as much time on what has been happening around the injury as on the injury itself.