Ask a room of junior coaches where a fast bowler’s pace comes from and you will hear about the run-up, the arm, the wrist, the front leg. Almost nobody mentions the back foot. It lands, it pushes off, it gets out of the way. Nothing to see.

That is exactly why so many young bowlers are driving around with the handbrake on.

The back foot touches the action twice, and at both moments it can quietly delete pace before the ball has even been released. Once when it lands. Once when it leaves. Get either wrong and the rest of the action spends its time compensating for it — usually through the arm, and too often through the back.

Moment one: the landing

Back Foot Impact is the first of the Four Tent Pegs, the four positions every fast bowling action passes through. It is the moment a bowler stops running and starts bowling, and it is where most of the momentum from the run-up is either kept or thrown away.

The weight should go through the ball of the foot. Light. The body neutral, neither leaning forward nor back. The phrase we use with the bowlers is zero on the weighing scales: if there were a set of bathroom scales under that back foot, the needle would barely register, because the body is travelling through the position rather than arriving in it.

What you actually see in most junior nets is the opposite. The foot slaps down flat. You can hear it. Or, more subtly, there is no stamp at all — but the back knee bends, the bodyweight settles into that leg, and for a fraction of a second the bowler sits back. The run-up stops. Twenty metres of built-up speed is decelerated in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and there is no way to get it back later in the action.

This is not a heavy-versus-light switch. It is a spectrum, from soft and flowing, through slightly sitting back, to a full stamp. The slight version is the one that gets missed, because it doesn’t look dramatic. It just costs pace every ball.

The check is simple. Film from behind or side-on and watch the back knee at the moment the foot lands and the instant after. If the body keeps moving forward smoothly, the landing is light. If the knee flexes and the body settles, the weight is sitting back. Look at the momentum, not the noise.

Moment two: the leaving

This is the one almost no club coach talks about, and it is the more expensive of the two.

Between front foot contact and ball release — the stretch position through to the release, the engine room of the whole action — the back foot should stay on the ground. Not planted, not stuck, but in contact and dragging forward through the crease until the ball has left the hand.

Young bowlers are routinely taught the reverse. “Get off the back foot.” “Drive up and through.” “Get your back leg over quickly.” It feels athletic. It looks energetic. And it lets the handbrake straight back on.

Here is why. While the back foot is in contact with the ground, the hip flexors on that side are fully engaged and the hips can be driven forward hard. The moment the foot lifts early, the hip flexors let go. The hips stop driving. And because fast bowling is a sequence — base firms, hips drive, chest follows, arm last — losing the hips takes everything after them down too.

One mile per hour on the hips can be worth up to ten miles per hour on the arm. Now think about what it means to switch the hips off early.

The back foot is what buys the arm its delay

There is a second consequence, and it is the one that surprises parents most.

At front foot contact a good bowler is in a star shape: front arm reaching for the batter’s collar, bowling hand reaching back towards the sightscreen, a full S-T-R-E-T-C-H between hips and shoulders. The longer the bowling arm can stay back in that delayed position, the more range the bowler has to work with and the more power is stored for release.

That delay does not happen in isolation. The back foot staying down is what allows the arm to stay back. Lift the back foot early and the whole body starts rotating through too soon. The stretch window shortens. The arm comes round before it should. The bowler loses range, loses the stretch, and loses power at release — and none of that shows up as a “back foot problem” to anyone watching. It shows up as a bowler who “hasn’t got a quick arm”. The arm is fine. It just never got the time it needed.

So when someone tells your child to work on their arm speed, it is worth asking whether anybody has looked at their feet.

And then it goes sideways

When the back foot comes up early and the hip flexors disengage, the body loses the thing that was driving it forward. It still has momentum, and that momentum has to go somewhere. Very often it goes sideways.

That is lateral flexion: the trunk bending to one side between front foot contact and release, with the head and shoulders falling away from the target line. It is a pace problem, because the energy is heading towards the off side instead of down the pitch. And it is a safety problem, because rotation combined with sideways bending under load is the mechanical fault most associated with lumbar stress injury in young fast bowlers.

Not every early back foot produces lateral flexion. It can come from a narrow base, from the head falling away early, or simply from habit. But an early-lifting back foot is one of the routes into it, and it is worth ruling out whenever you see a bowler collapsing sideways through release.

What it doesn’t replace

None of this makes the back foot the whole story. The front leg still has to be coached directly — heel first, whole foot, braced straight and locked through release. A perfect back foot drag into a front leg that buckles is still a car hitting a hedge rather than a wall. The back foot drives the hips forward; the front leg gives them something to drive against. You need both.

The point is that the back foot is almost never coached at all, and it should be. It is one of the cheapest bits of pace in the entire action.

How to check it at home

You need a phone, a net and about two minutes.

Film side-on for the back foot drag. Stand level with the crease, far enough back to get the whole body in frame, and use slow motion if the phone has it. From front foot landing to the ball leaving the hand, watch the back toe. Is it still on the ground, dragging? Or is it already in the air? From behind the bowler at a distance this is much harder to see, so get the side angle.

Film from behind for the landing and the lean. Watch the back knee at back foot contact — does the body carry on forward, or settle? Then watch the head and chest from front foot landing through release. Do they go down the pitch, or drift off to one side?

Don’t try to fix it off one clip. Film six or eight balls. One early lift is a bad ball. Six is an action.

The handbrake is easy to miss

The reason this matters is that it hides so well. A bowler with the handbrake on still bowls. They run in hard, they look committed, they try. They just come out slower than they should, and they work harder for it — and when effort doesn’t produce pace, young bowlers reach for the only thing they can feel, which is the arm. That makes it worse.

Before anybody decides your child isn’t quick, look at the back foot. Twice.

If you’ve filmed them and you’re not sure what you’re seeing, send us the footage. Reading the whole action — back foot included — is what a video trial is for.

Ian Pont is Director of Cricket at the National Fast Bowling Academy and has coached fast bowlers at international level. This article is general coaching guidance and not medical advice — if your child has back pain, see a doctor or physiotherapist.