Return to Performance Assessment
Testing before you go back, not after
A 60 minute appointment for players at the end of rehabilitation. Objective testing against the demands of your role, and a written verdict on what is left to do.
The pathway
From injury to performance
Six stages. Each one is earned before the next begins, and the assessment sits late in the pathway, when the question has become "is that enough?"
Settle and understand
Diagnosis, irritability, imaging where it changes the plan, and training modified rather than stopped.
Rebuild capacity
Strength, trunk, shoulder, lower limb and energy systems, built toward what your role demands.
Reintroduce cricket
Running, throwing, fielding and batting movements, progressed on purpose.
Return to bowling
Volume, intensity and frequency, one variable at a time, judged by the next 48 hours.
Return to training
Full training at the intensity of competition, with the response monitored.
Return to performance
Match availability, and load managed so you stay there.
The problem this solves
Most reinjuries happen to players who felt ready. Pain settles well before capacity returns, and the gap between the two is invisible without testing. A bowler whose back stopped hurting six weeks ago still has a spine that has not been loaded at match intensity. Nothing about feeling fine tells you otherwise.
The usual decision point is a conversation between a player who wants to play, a coach who wants them available, and a physiotherapist with no data to argue with. This appointment puts numbers into that conversation.
What gets tested
The battery is built around your role. A fast bowler, a spinner, a keeper and a top-order batter who fields at point have different requirements, and testing them identically produces a tidy report that means nothing.
- Strength and asymmetry in the structures your role loads hardest, measured rather than estimated.
- Capacity under fatigue. Most cricket injuries happen late in a spell or late in a day. Testing fresh misses the moment that matters.
- Running and sprinting where the role demands it, including repeated efforts rather than one.
- Cricket-specific loading: bowling, throwing or repeated sprints between wickets, built up to under supervision.
- Movement quality at the point of fatigue, which is where it deteriorates.
What you get
A written report with the numbers, what they mean against your role, what is still short, and a progression to close the gap. It is written so a coach reads it without needing it translated, because a report only the physiotherapist understands changes nothing.
Where useful, and with your consent, I will speak to your coach or your treating physiotherapist directly. Rehabilitation falls over at handovers more often than it falls over in the gym.
An honest limit
This assessment does not predict injury. Nothing does, reliably, and any service claiming otherwise is selling you something. What testing does is measure where you are against where your role requires you to be, and make the decision to play a reasoned one rather than a hopeful one. That is a smaller claim and a true one.
When to book it
Late in rehabilitation, when you are training without symptoms and the question has become "is that enough". Too early and there is nothing to measure. After you have returned and broken down again is the expensive version.
Booking
60 minutes. Choose Return to Performance Assessment in the calendar. The fee, and member rates, are on appointments and fees.