Cultivating Composure: How Breathwork Became a Pre-Season Ritual

Case study: a Victorian Premier Cricket Club (Session 1)

Ask a cricketer where a game is won or lost and most will point somewhere physical: the technique, the fitness, the hours in the nets. Almost nobody points to their breathing. Yet the breath is the one tool a player carries onto the field in every format, in every condition, at every level and most have never been taught how to use it.

When I began working with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club, breathwork was where we started. Not because it's the most sophisticated part of the program, but because it's the most accessible. It gives players something they can use in the first week, and it earns trust for everything that comes after.

Why start with the breath

We are never not feeling an emotion, and how we feel shapes how we perform. The problem is that in the pressure moments such as waiting to bat, walking back to your mark, standing at slip as the game tightens, the body's stress response is already running before the thinking brain has a chance to catch up. Breathing goes tight and high in the chest, carbon dioxide climbs, and the anxious feeling feeds on itself.

Breathwork interrupts that loop. It's a physiological lever, not a motivational one. That distinction mattered to this group, who, like most serious cricketers, had a healthy scepticism about anything that smelled of a motivational talk. I wasn't asking them to believe anything. I was giving them a technique and inviting them to notice what it did.

The two techniques

We worked with two.

• “Box breathing” is the everyday tool - a slow breath into the belly, a hold at the top to feel the stillness, and a long release. It's about creating space between the breaths and treating that space as a quiet centre. I framed it the way I frame it for every group: when your mind wanders, and it will, bringing it back is the rep. It's a weight routine for attention. The more you bring the mind back to the present, the stronger it gets.

The players quickly found the moments where it fit: bowlers walking back to their mark, batters stepping away from the crease between balls, fielders resetting between deliveries, keepers settling as they take up position. None of it looks like anything from the boundary. That invisibility is part of why it works.

• “Stress-response breathing” is the heavier tool for the more intense moments.  Strong breaths in through the nose and hard out through the mouth, then faster, then a long final hold. It's not something you'd do mid-over, but it's powerful before a game, while padded up and waiting, or the night before when the mind won't stop rehearsing what's ahead.

The part that surprised me

The breakthrough at this club wasn't the techniques themselves. It was what the leadership group did with them.

We'd talked about rituals and how deliberately slowing down and doing something together builds connection and makes a behaviour stick. The group took that idea and ran with it, embedding box breathing into an existing moment every cricketer already shares: the pitch inspection.

Now, once the team is out on the pitch, they stand together in a circle and the captain talks them through five slow cycles - in for four, hold and feel the silence, out for four, hold - before they inspect the wicket. It costs ninety seconds. It turns a routine walk-out into a shared reset, and it means the first collective act of the day is a calm one.

That's the moment breathwork stopped being “my” technique and became “theirs”.

What players took away

The honest measure of a first session isn't how it felt in the room. It's whether anyone uses the tool the following week. By the time I was back, players were describing where they'd used box breathing without me prompting them: at the top of the mark, walking out to bat, in the field between balls.

Nobody had been transformed. That's not how this works. But they'd learned that composure isn't something you hope turns up on the day but rather it's something you can switch on. And that shift, from “hoping” to “doing”, is the whole foundation everything else in the program is built on.

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If you'd like to talk about building the mental side of your players' game, get in touch.

 

More from this series

This is the first of three case studies from a season with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club, each following one session of the mindset program.

→ Switching It On: Building a Peak Performance State — how players learn to switch on their best state on purpose, rather than waiting for a good day. https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/switching-it-on-building-a-peak-performance-state

→ Letting Go of the Last Ball: Dumping Strategies — a fast, personal way to clear a mistake and get back to the next ball. https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/letting-go-of-the-last-ball-dumping-strategies