The standard prescription for a young bowler who wants to be quicker is more bowling. More overs, more nets, more balls at the end of training. Put the work in and the pace will come.

It will not. Volume does not create pace. Volume creates repetition, and repetition only makes you better at whatever you are already doing.

If a bowler’s action leaks power sideways, a winter of extra nets produces a bowler who leaks power sideways more consistently, more automatically, and with more mileage on a growing spine. That is not progress. That is a fault being rehearsed.

Where pace actually comes from

Fast bowling is a sequence, and the order is fixed: base firms, hips drive, chest follows, arm last.

The front leg lands and stops the bottom half dead. Everything above it is thrown forward over that brace — hips, then chest, then, last of all, the arm. The bowling arm is the final and smallest link in the chain. It is the tip of the whip, not the hand holding it.

Which is why the single most useful number in coaching fast bowling is this one: 1mph gained at the hips can be worth up to 10mph at the arm.

Read that again and then ask what a hundred extra deliveries a week is doing about it. If the hips are not driving, or the chest is falling sideways instead of going down the pitch, no amount of extra bowling addresses it. The sequence is wrong, and the bowler is just running the wrong sequence more times.

Why “trying harder” makes it worse

Tell a young bowler to bowl faster and watch what moves. It is almost always the arm, because the arm is the part they can feel and control.

So they pull harder with the arm. The arm arrives too early, ahead of the body, which destroys the delay that stores the power in the first place. The bowler is now working significantly harder for the same speed or less — and because the body is no longer behind the ball, they start finding other ways to get it away. Usually that means collapsing sideways through release.

This is the honest reason so many hard-working teenage bowlers plateau at the same pace for three years. It is not commitment. They are pouring effort into the smallest link in the chain.

The cost side of the ledger

There is a second problem with volume as a solution, and it is more serious than a plateau.

Lumbar stress injury in young fast bowlers has two real causes, and they are both real. The first is mechanical — an action that combines rotation with sideways bending of the trunk, loading the same small section of vertebra asymmetrically, delivery after delivery. The second is a spike in workload — suddenly asking the body to do far more than it is conditioned for.

A technically sound action is not immunity from the second one. A bowler who does very little through the winter and then bowls eight overs a day at a June festival is at risk regardless of how good their action looks. And the two causes compound: a sudden jump in volume through a faulty action is the worst combination there is.

So “just bowl more” is a recommendation that carries a genuine injury cost, and it is usually given without a single glance at the mechanics it is being layered on top of.

What does make a bowler faster

Three things, in this order.

1. Fix the sequence. Find out what the action is actually doing between front foot contact and release — four or five frames of video — and correct the thing that is bleeding power. For most young bowlers there is one dominant fault, and correcting it unlocks more than everything else combined. This is the cheapest pace available to any bowler and almost nobody goes looking for it.

2. Build the physical capacity to hold the positions. A braced front leg, a stable trunk under load and a strong core are not optional extras. A bowler who cannot resist sideways collapse under load will collapse sideways under load, no matter what they have been told in the nets.

3. Then add volume — gradually, and on the corrected action. Volume is how a good action becomes a repeatable one and how the body becomes conditioned for a season. It belongs at the end of the process, not the start of it. And it should climb in steps, not jumps.

Notice that bowling more is on the list. It is just third, and it is worthless before the first two.

The uncomfortable bit

This is a harder sell than more nets, because more nets feels like effort and effort feels like virtue. Watching two deliveries back frame by frame and discovering that the problem is a head falling away 0.1 seconds before release does not feel like hard work. It just happens to be where the pace is.

Ten thousand deliveries with the wrong sequence is ten thousand rehearsals of not being fast.

Film two deliveries from directly behind at stump height and two from side-on. Look at what happens in the four frames after the front foot lands. That will tell you more about a bowler’s next 5mph than a whole winter of extra overs.

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