Every winter, thousands of young fast bowlers are told the same three things by well-meaning coaches. Work on your run-up. Get your arm higher. Bowl more. Six months later they are bowling at exactly the same speed, and everybody quietly concludes the child just isn’t quick.

They are almost certainly quicker than that. They are leaking pace — and virtually none of it is leaking out of the arm.

Here is the sentence that ends most of these conversations at the Academy: one mile per hour on the hips can be worth up to ten miles per hour on the arm. Read it twice, because it dismantles most of what your child has been told. Pace is not produced by the bowling arm. The arm moves last and matters least. It is the expression of a sequence, not a substitute for one.

So if the base is wrong, nothing you do to the arm will help. And the base is nearly always wrong.

Fast bowling has a skeleton

Every bowling action, from a nine-year-old in the nets to a Test bowler, passes through four positions. We call them the Four Tent Pegs, because if any one of them is loose the whole tent sags — and no amount of effort elsewhere holds it up.

Back Foot Impact. The moment the back foot lands. Weight should be through the ball of the foot, light, with the body neutral — not leaning back, not stamping. The aim, as we put it to the bowlers, is zero on the weighing scales. Most young bowlers hit this position hard, the back knee flexes, the bodyweight settles back into that leg, and the momentum they have spent twenty metres building is decelerated in a fraction of a second. You cannot get that speed back later. It is gone.

Front Foot Impact. The stretch position, and the single place where the biggest gains in fast bowling live. The front foot blocks — heel first, then the whole foot plating into the ground. The front leg braces absolutely straight. The front arm reaches for the batter’s collar while the bowling hand reaches back for the sightscreen. A star shape. A stretch.

Release. The engine room. The back foot stays in contact with the ground, dragging, keeping the hip flexors working. The front leg stays locked. The leading arm rips in hard at the elbow. And because the base has been abruptly decelerated — like a car hitting a wall — the top half accelerates. Hips drive, chest follows, arm last.

Follow-through. Chase the ball down the track and leave nothing in the crease. This is the one every coach loves to correct, and it is the one that matters least, because the follow-through is a symptom. Fix what happens upstream and it fixes itself.

That’s the skeleton. Notice what isn’t in it: the run-up. Notice what comes fourth out of four: the arm.

The two things that are actually costing them pace

They’re landing on a tightrope instead of railway tracks. Look at your child from directly in front. The back foot and front foot should land roughly hip width apart, on two separate lines, like railway tracks. If they land on the same line — a tightrope — the base is compressed, the hips cannot rotate freely, and the body is forced to compensate late. It also wrecks consistency of line, which is usually the complaint that brings a bowler to us in the first place. Parents arrive worried about accuracy and leave having fixed the base.

They’re lifting the back foot too early. If the back foot comes off the ground before the ball has left the hand, the hip flexors disengage exactly when they should be driving hardest. The body has to find its power somewhere, so it falls sideways instead of driving forward. Pace goes sideways rather than at the batter. There is also a considerably more serious consequence, which we cover in a separate article.

Neither of these is fixed by bowling more. Bowling more with a compressed base simply grooves a compressed base.

Why “get your arm higher” is such bad advice

Because the arm is the last domino, and coaching the last domino first produces a bowler who is working extremely hard and going nowhere.

We assess every bowler across five things, which we call RSSSA. Range — is there usable stretch and lever length at the moment it is needed. Speed — how fast the system accelerates from front foot impact to release. Sequence — base, then hips, then chest, then arm, in that order. Separation — does the lower half lead while the upper half honestly delays. Alignment — does it all travel down the target line without leaking out of the sides.

Four of those five are decided below the shoulders. When a bowler gains five or six miles per hour with us in a session — and it does happen — nothing has been added. They have stopped throwing pace away.

What to do about it

Film them. Phone is fine. Two angles: one from directly behind, one from square on at hip height. Then watch for four things, in slow motion, and ignore the arm entirely.

Do they land lightly on the ball of the back foot, or stamp and settle? Do the feet land hip width apart, or on one line? Is the front leg braced straight at the moment of release, or does the knee keep bending? Does the back foot drag until the ball has gone, or lift away early?

If you can answer those four honestly, you know more about your child’s bowling than most of the people who have been coaching them.

And if you’d like someone who has spent a career coaching international fast bowlers to answer them instead, that is what the video trial is for. Send us the footage. We’ll tell you what we see — straight, and in plain language.

Ian Pont is Director of Cricket at the National Fast Bowling Academy. He has coached fast bowlers at international level and is the author of several books on fast bowling technique.