Science says an elite cricketer such as South African star A.B. de Villiers reacts about 50 milliseconds faster to an oncoming ball than your average club batsman.
It’s less than the blink of an eye, but the best players seem to have all the time they need. Popular wisdom says their muscle memory is in control. Yoga says they are ”in the moment” and the main muscle they’ve mastered is their mind.
Psychologist and yoga practitioner Doris McIlwain, with philosopher and partner John Sutton, of Macquarie University, has an Australian Research Council grant to see whether lifting yoga techniques from the mat to the bat might elevate more players to the level of a Sachin Tendulkar or Donald Bradman.
In partnership with the Australian Cricketers Association, they are also investigating emotional resilience in professional cricketers.
Former Australian Test opener and now Western Australia coach Justin Langer says yoga and meditation, which he has been practising since 1993, teach you to put all your attention and focus on what is important right now.
”If you are facing a ball at 150 kilometres per hour, you want to be very present in that moment, because otherwise you’re going to get hurt or you’re going to get out,” Langer says. ”Seeing the ball leave the bowler’s hand is almost like slow motion.”
This involves the ”subtle application of embodied intelligence to reflexes”, says Associate Professor McIlwain. By the time the ball leaves the bowler’s hand, the mind and body are so integrated that thought is not an obstruction.
One challenge is to understand what’s happening when yoga instructors get instructions to ”alight on the body to promote observable change” in their students, so as to adapt it for other disciplines such as sport, dance and music.
As Australia ponders the $20 million it cost to win two silver medals and a bronze at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, there’s a ”tremendous hunger” in the sporting arena for new and better ways to talk about mental skills, Professor Sutton says.
An enormous gap persists between time devoted to physical training versus mental training regimes in elite sports, and the old cliches – that you must be either ”mentally tough” or ”let your body take over” – no longer cut it.
Langer, who famously stripped to his undies for a transformative master-class with guru B.K.S. Iyengar on the Test tour of India in 2004, says it’s always been fascinating to him that ”everyone says cricket is such a mental game, yet we spend all our training time running laps or hitting balls”.
His WA team does twice-weekly yoga sessions.
The researchers are quick to acknowledge there’ll be no magic formula, and for some time yet they will have more to learn from the players than they can teach them.