Kinetic Cricket’s Ben Scott – the former Surrey, Middlesex and Worcestershire wicketkeeper-batsman – gets you in shape for the new season.

Exercise No.1 – Handcuff rotation

Within cricket we need a lot of mobility through our shoulders when we’re fielding and batting, and obviously when we’re bowling. There’s one exercise in particular that I think is fantastic for opening up the shoulders – the handcuff rotation exercise.

It’s fairly self-explanatory, we’re going to start off in a handcuff position and get our hands as high as we can. Keeping our shoulders back, we’re going to rotate the arms all the way round as high as we can again, and then we go into this second handcuff position.

From there we’ll open our arms up and take them back round into our starting position. What that does is open up all of the angles of the shoulders, and gets the shoulder blades gliding nice and smoothly. It’s a great warm-up, certainly before you go out to field, and especially if you go out to bowl.

Exercise No.2 – The lateral lunge

Our adductors are a neglected muscle group. It’s really important to solidify the leg and work through the hip, as it does get overlooked.

One exercise which doesn’t necessarily strengthen the adductors, but which uses them to get into a good position, is the lateral lunge. We’re going to look to sit back on our glutes as we go to the side and get nice and low in the position.

Our backside is going backwards and our weight is through our heels. If we find our weight is going through our toes, we’re going to get some problems through the knees. So we’re going to sit back, stay nice and low, and make sure you come right up to the middle, and tilt the hips so you’re in a starting position to go down to the other side.

Read part one of the series here