If you could boil preseason training down to its most basic and important elements what would you be left with?

The answer is the following 4 ingredients that anyone can mix together to improve their game in the shortest possible time. Think of it as your cheat sheet for what to work on in preseason.

That’s something which is especially important for those of us with limited time to train.

How strong should you be? Well, that's relative, but here are some general benchmarks.

1. Get strong, REALLY strong

When it comes to fitness there are many opinions and methods. Most of them work in some way or another, but the single most important thing you can do is get stronger.

Strength is the foundation of everything we do in cricket.

If you can only nail one thing in the run up to the season it has to be strength.

That means joining a gym and progressively improving your ability to lift weight with your legs and with pushing and pulling actions.

Forgo the aerobics and start lifting heavy stuff. It will pay off come summer and is less time consuming.

Batting, bowling or fielding; one of the most common technical errors is not being balanced. If you struggled with technical problems last summer, preseason is the chance to put your balance right.

Your head position is all important as where the head leads, your body follows. So get yourself on video and see if your head is tipping you over.

If your balance is wrong, spend time in preseason working on drills to correct things.

For example as a batsman you can look to get throwdowns or bowling machine feeds from right arm round position. Look to stay open and drive the feed through mid on with a straight bat.

Bowler’s with the issue tend to lack both consistency and accuracy. Spend a few minutes at every training session ‘warming up’ by bowling in a net without a batsman to get your balance right. Use some cones and the drills here to help you.

3. Start toughening your hands

The start of the season is cold. If you want to make sure you can catch the first ball of the spring you have to start preparing your hands early.

This means taking time at every session (even indoors) to catch cricket balls.

Even a simple warm up tossing tennis balls for a few minutes, followed by cricket balls to a partner helps with getting your arm and hands back in the swing of things.

The ideal is to do some catching every day, progressively increasing the speed of the catch. By the time you get outdoors your hands should have gone through the early bruising stage and have toughed up nicely.

4. Combine elements in nets

Although net training has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, it’s still not as realistic as it could be for many players because it doesn’t incorporate running or tactical play.

One simple way to overcome this problem is by using BATEX: a simple audio CD plays telling the batsmen how many runs they have to score in an over. It brings together tactical thinking, conditioning and a competitive element to the training session.

You can download the BATEX files to play at your sessions from here (and if you want to get the BATEX files with other preseason training in a bundle click here)