The new year start with a news for Indian cricket fans as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) held a review meeting after a dismal year for the team that saw them fail to reach the final of both the Asia cup and the T20 World Cup.
Board president Roger Binny and secretary Jay Shah were join by Indian captain Rohit Sharma, head coach Rahul Dravid, National Cricket Academy (NCA) chief VVS Laxman, and chief selector Chetan Sharma.
Amid a host of announcements, BCCI reveale a major change to the selection criteria of players as the team aims to stop the non-stop flurry of injuries.
The Yo-Yo test has return and made mandatory for players to be pick for the national team.
With that, the Indian cricket governing body has announce that players will have to take a ‘Dexa,’ before being select for the Indian team in all formats.
What is Dexa?
Dexa also call as the ‘bone density test‘ is an X-ray technology (dual-energy x-ray) which is use to measure bone strength.
This can help find out if the person taking the test has any risk of breaking or losing bones which can help figure out if a player is at risk of fracturing any body part.
Dexa also helps in measuring body composition and recording body fat and muscle mass.
What is Yo-Yo Test?
Yo-Yo is a variation of the Beep test, a running aerobic fitness routine that Indian cricketers had to undergo in the past.
But passing Beep was not mandatory for selection as is the case with Yo-Yo.
Yo-Yo probes a sportsperson’s endurance and ability to pace himself; towards the end of the maximal running aerobic fitness drill, an element of speed comes into play.
The gruelling routine has two sets of cones that are 20 metres apart.
When the beep is sound, an athlete has to reach the marker on the other side by the time the next beep sounds, turn and get back to where he start before the third beep.
The frequency of the beeps gradually increases for the subsequent trips, a trip is a successful completion of a run to the cones at the other end and back.
There is a gap of about 7 seconds between each trip.
What starts off as a fast jog at the start becomes distinctly quicker as the test progresses with the duration between the beeps decreasing.
The point at which an athlete misses two beeps (twice unable to finish trips before the third beep goes off) is his score.
Who Invented Yo-Yo Test?
The Yo-Yo test was invent by Dr. Jens Bangsbo, a Danish scientist and football coach, in the 1990s.
Dr. Jens Bangsbo test it on footballers to improve their overall fitness levels, with a routine that was not just about running long distances.
Gradually, other sport start adopting Yo-Yo Test.
For elite footballers, the benchmark score was set high at 21.
Yo-Yo was introduce to Indian cricket by the national team’s strength and conditioning coach Shankar Basu.
Ahead of India’s tour of Sri Lanka in 2017, the cricketers underwent these tests.
Why these changes made by BCCI?
The BCCI’s strict measures to ensure players’ fitness before their selection should come as a surprise as the team has suffer a major injury crisis for the last year or so.
Captain Rohit Sharma has lamented about the issue and hint that half-fit players are playing for India after the team’s loss to Bangladesh in the ODI series last month.
Rohit Sharma had said in a post-match interaction :
“I mean there are definitely a few injury concerns. We need to try and get to the bottom of it. I don’t know what exactly it is. Maybe they’re playing too much cricket. We need to try and monitor those guys, because it’s important to understand when they come for India, they need to be 100%, in fact more than 100%,”.
[…] Yo-Yo Test and Dexa will now be part of the selection criteria and implemented in the customize roadmaps of the central […]