You need to rethink your current fitness plan.

You could be starting out or have years of training experience, but those who are not actively thinking about their fitness are just spinning the proverbial wheels.

You are not training because its a-good-thing-to-do, you are training to be a better player and to do that you need to be thinking about it almost all the time.

Here is why.

1. One size never fits all

There are hundreds on online training plans available to you. A lot of them are excellent, some are terrible. No matter how good the plan is, it's been designed without you in mind.

This means the plans stay very general and balanced. There is no sense of context. A pre-designed fitness plan has no sense of who you are, where you have been or where you are going.

Good fitness plans have to be based on your specific needs. You might be strong without a great deal of endurance, or flexible without power. What works for you will not work for someone else. Each aspect of your fitness needs to meet the exact needs you have. If you don't you are wasting your time in the gym.

You might still get results from what the Americans call 'cookie-cutter' plans, but they will not be as good as they can be. More importantly, they may not be the right results. For example, if you work on improving your power when you don't have mobility and stability you are far more likely to get injured.

2. Research is always changing the landscape

New research emerges all the time from sport science labs. On top of this, coaches and nutritionists are working on new methods to improve things on their players and clients. This ever changing world means you can't stand still for long.

It was not that long ago that the established method s for cricketers included a high carb/low fat diet, lots of long, slow distance running and hamstring curls. All of these methods are largely discredited for most cricketers now.

Yet I still see plenty of people following the old ways because they heard that's the right way from people behind the curve.
There is a huge amount of information on these pages to help you stay right up to date. Don't ignore it.

3. You have good days and bad days

For some reason, sometimes you go for a workout and you feel on top of the world. You beat all your personal records with ease and stroll away whistling a happy tune. On other days your energy is gone.

Either way, if you don't adapt your plan you are missing out. You could be using a good day to make fast progress or taking a day off on a bad day. Don't be afraid to go with changes in your workout if it suits your needs.

A good fitness plan always has room to adapt on the fly.

4. Different times have different goals

You can't do everything at once. You don't have time and even if you did you would burn out fast if you tried to improve every aspect of your fitness in one go.

That means you need to decide what your fitness goals are in advance. For example, a good time of year to work on endurance (or work capacity) is right after the end of your normal season. It's much harder to do this during the late season when you may be playing a lot of important matches and don't want to be too tired for the games.

This is why you need to plan ahead so you know when you will be working on different fitness goals. I plan out in rough form the next 12 months of training. I might not know every workout but I at least know the general goals of each part of the year.

This planning also allows you to make small but significant fitness improvements during the season. A weakness of a lot of training plans is that they only account for training in the off season and fitness is left to just playing in the summer. That's a missed opportunity.

5. You improve faster (or slower) than you think

Your body is designed to adapt to any stress that placed upon it. It doesn't take long for an exercise to become useless because you have adapted as far as you can with it.

However, the pace of adaptation varies not only between people, but also within people. It's relatively easy to improve your press up numbers but much harder to keep adding chin ups for most.

That's why you need to change your fitness plan regularly enough to keep your body guessing but not so often you fail to make improvements. This will vary largely but the easy way to tell is when you stop improving on an exercise. At that point it's probably time to try something else.

6. Life gets in the way

No matter how much you plan, there are times your plan goes out of the window, so you have to be adaptable to life.
You might get injured or be playing more often than you thought. You could be on a trip and away from healthy food or a gym. You might have a lot of work on and can't manage a full hour to train. The list is endless.

For times like this, you need to have a backup plan.

I have a contingency for when I can't get to the gym of a 20 minute bodyweight workout I can do in my garden. When I'm travelling I plan my meals to make them easy to transport and I always look for places where I can get to a gym easily.

It's best to combine this planning for 'emergencies' with the ability to think on your feet by knowing the principles of fitness yourself.

This way, if you do go 'off plan' for any reason (life, bad day, fast improvements or new research) you can adapt fast and keep moving towards your fitness goals. That way you are always thinking and always improving.

Photo credit: steven.webster76