⚠️ This is the same abstract as the 2018 BASES item
The PDF text of this 2023 congress abstract is word-for-word identical to the 2018 BASES abstract in this cluster — same 20 bowlers, same anthropometrics (age 19.32 ± 2.33 years, height 1.88 ± 0.06 m, mass 83.00 ± 6.50 kg, max ball velocity 35.02 ± 1.74 m/s), same numbers, same conclusion, same closing sentence calling for injured-vs-uninjured comparison. The only differences are the document metadata (created April 2024) and the venue.
I verified this by extracting the full text of both PDFs and comparing them directly. There is no new data in this item. It is the same study re-presented to a cricket-specific medical audience five years later — a normal and legitimate thing to do (a BASES sport-science audience and a cricket sports-medicine congress are different rooms), but a cataloguer and a coach should both know that reading it twice adds nothing.
For the full write-up — findings, coaching cues, caveats — see 2018 Alway — Upper vs Lower Lumbar Spine Kinematics in Fast Bowling in this folder.
Research theme
Compare upper (L1–L3) and lower (L3–L5) lumbar spine kinematics during fast bowling, on the argument that treating the lumbar spine as one rigid L1–L5 segment (as most motion analysis had done) hides real differences between its halves. 20 elite male fast bowlers, three overs of maximal-effort bowling each, 18-camera VICON MX at 300 Hz, marker scheme adapted from Seay et al. (2008). Fastest delivery analysed. Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
What they measured
- Upper (L1–L3) vs lower (L3–L5) lumbar joint angles in all three planes.
- Bending forward / arching back (flexion / extension).
- Leaning sideways away from and towards the bowling arm (contralateral / ipsilateral side flexion).
- Twisting (ipsilateral / contralateral rotation).
- At back foot contact (BFC), front foot contact (FFC), ball release (BR), and the maximum value.
Findings
Identical to the 2018 abstract. All significant at P < 0.05 with r > 0.50. Mean differences ± SD between segments:
- Lower lumbar segment showed greater flexion than upper at BFC (12 ± 10°), BR (6 ± 6°), maximum (5 ± 8°).
- Lower segment showed 7 ± 9° less maximum extension than upper.
- Lower segment showed greater maximum contralateral side flexion (8 ± 10°) and greater contralateral side flexion at FFC (13 ± 9°).
- Lower segment showed 4 ± 7° less maximum ipsilateral side flexion.
- Upper segment showed greater ipsilateral rotation at FFC (6 ± 6°), BR (3 ± 6°), maximum (7 ± 6°).
Conclusion as stated: the upper lumbar spine contributes most of the extension, ipsilateral side flexion and rotation; the lower lumbar spine contributes most of the flexion and contralateral side flexion — “which may affect the aetiology of lumbar stress fractures.”
Correlational and descriptive. No injury data.
What a coach should look for on video
Identical to the 2018 item — see that file for the full treatment. In summary, this abstract supports no injury-prevention cue on its own. It supports two ways of looking:
- Judge the low back in two halves, not one. Front-on at front foot contact, watch whether the sideways lean away from the bowling arm is spread through the mid-back or hinges sharply just above the belt line. The lower segment already does 13 ± 9° more contralateral side flexion at FFC than the upper — and the lower segment is where L4/L5 fractures occur. Mechanism hypothesis only.
- Distrust any single “lumbar angle” number from an app or a report — it averages over a 13° difference between two halves of the same spine.
No corrective cue is supported. Anything prescriptive here would be invented.
Caveats and limits
Same as the 2018 item, plus one specific to this listing:
- No new data. Cataloguing this as a separate research contribution would double-count a single 20-bowler study.
- 20 elite male bowlers, mean age 19.3.
- One trial per bowler (the fastest).
- Descriptive only — no injury outcomes measured.
- Skin-mounted markers over lumbar spinous processes approximate vertebral motion.
- Conference abstract: only between-segment differences reported; absolute joint angles are not reported in the source I could access, and there are no per-variable p-values, only a blanket “P < 0.05, r > 0.50.”
Relationship to other Felton work
- Duplicate of 2018 Alway — Upper vs Lower Lumbar Spine Kinematics in Fast Bowling. Same study, different venue.
- Superseded on the injury question by the 2020 ISBS paper (2020 Alway — Does Lumbar Spine Kinematics Contribute to Lumbar Bone Stress Injury?), which applied this exact two-segment model to 45 MRI-screened bowlers and found no significant differences in any lumbar joint angle between injured and uninjured groups.
- Superseded on the coaching question by the 2021 MSSE paper (2021 Alway — Cricket Fast Bowling Technique and Lumbar Bone Stress Injury), which found the injury-relevant motion one joint lower — at the lumbopelvic junction — plus at the rear hip.
CONTRADICTION (chronological oddity worth flagging): This abstract was presented in 2023, but its closing line — “Future research should compare upper and lower lumbar spine kinematics between stress fracture and non-injured fast bowlers” — had already been carried out by the same authors in 2020, with a null result. Read in 2023, the abstract’s implication that segmenting the lumbar spine will explain stress-fracture aetiology is not supported by the team’s own subsequent work: splitting L1–L5 into two did not separate injured from uninjured bowlers, and the useful signal turned out to be at the lumbopelvic junction and the rear hip instead.