So far, so good

Bell scored a ton as England beat Australia's youth

Warwickshire's Ian Bell gives BBC Sport Online his 'half-term report' from England's National Academy in Adelaide.

As I write this we are into the last quarter of this first term at the Academy and the physical work just keeps getting harder.

The guys are really looking forward to a bit of a break at home over Christmas, although I suspect we'll be given some homework!

During this period we have played a couple more games.

A one-day warm-up against the South Australian 2nd XI and our first four-day game which was against the famous Australian Academy.

This was the main game before the break and the one we were most looking forward to.

We have all heard so many times how good the Australian Academy is and how many great players have come through it.

We won the game against the South Australian side relatively easily by 70 runs.

So we were in good spirits going into the crunch game against the Aussie Academy.

As perhaps you would expect both Academy groups of players were of similar ages with the Australians aged between 20 and 22 and the English players aged between 19 and 24.

We started well after losing the toss and after being put in to bat and were 240-1 at tea.

The innings went from good to very good and we declared on 601-8 (Key 171, Strauss 110, Bell 104).

Bell hits a boundary in England's win

Now all we needed was to bowl the opposition out twice on a flat pitch - no problem!

The Aussies started very well and by the end of the 2nd day they were 200 for 4.

However Steve Harmison took 7 for 120 in the game and we won within 3 days.

We were delighted with the win - to bowl them out twice on such a good track was a great achievement.

So having now successfully completed all our matches this side of Christmas we are now into a series of fitness assessments to see how much we have improved (or not).

The whole concept of concentrating on core fitness levels has worked well.

It will be interesting to see how much all this hard work will impact on our performance next season.

One thing I have learnt is how much harder you can push yourself than you think.

Ian Bell

In addition to the fitness and playing side of life we have been kept busy doing number of other things.

We are all being put through ECB Coaching examinations. This is a real return to basics but the important spin off is that it will help us analyse our own game better.

One thing I have learnt is how much harder you can push yourself than you think.

It has certainly been stressed to us the importance of creating good habits if you are to play the game at higher levels.

These fitness rituals have been practised in Australia for 10 years and clearly the ECB are expecting the Academy players to introduce these into the county game which might be quite a shock to some.