Changing training trends in Indian badminton - Part 1

Physical training in Indian badminton has remained a grey area for decades, and although the expertise available now is better than it ever was, one wonders if there are aspects to training that the Chinese, for instance, use to great effect, and are unknown outside of that country.

In the early years of Indian badminton, the most obvious deficiency was physical. Players such as TN Seth, Suresh Goel, Nandu Natekar and others were celebrated as artists, but were unable to match the best opponents of their times in the fitness department. Fitness routines consisted of a few rounds of jogging and shadow play; weight training was unheard of even until the early 1970s.

Former Asian champion Dinesh Khanna – easily the fittest Indian player of his generation – remembers how his friend Suresh Goel, a magician on the court, would fool the team coach by wetting his T-shirt with water, to show that he had completed a run although he hadn’t. The first team coach to introduce physical training was Darshan Kumar Tandon, who put the team through a strenuous session before its 1969 Thomas Cup tie against Indonesia. Tandon got the team to do hill and desert runs, and the players got into such good shape that they took two matches off the formidable Indonesian team at Jaipur.

The first player to take weight training seriously was Prakash Padukone. As a young boy, he had watched Rudy Hartono doing a skipping routine at a team hotel in Jabalpur, and the experience transformed Padukone’s attitude to fitness. In 1977, he and Syed Modi trained with the Indonesian team in Jakarta, and that radically changed Padukone’s career. The most important lesson he learnt was in weight training, of which little was known or practised in India.

Badminton is among the most complicated sports in physical training, for the sheer complexity of movements the body goes through. In few other sports do we see the body requiring the range of motion that it does in badminton – for it moves not just on the ground, but also in the air. Explosiveness is perhaps the single most important physical attribute in a player, and to develop it requires a fine understanding of both the body and the loads it can be subjected to.

The first coach to bring extreme methods into Indian badminton was the Chinese coach Zhao Min, who was associated with the Indian team from 1990 to 1994. Zhao introduced a regimen that was so intense, few could survive it. But those who did went on to achieve international success. Pullela Gopi Chand was part of that bunch of players whose career went on the upswing following the intensity of that training.

U Vinod, one of the best doubles players India has produced, remembers that training vividly. “It was very very tough,” he says. “We did extremely heavy weights. It certainly helped me. We would do half-squats of 150 or 160 kilos. I’ve even gone up to 180 kilos on the half-squats, and full-squats of 120 kilos. It was intense training, and your body breaks down. In the initial period, it was totally unacceptable to the body. I had severe body pain and swelling of the joints. It was killing. Many in the team could not take it. But those who did, went on to do well internationally. When you are subjected to such intensity, you actually enjoy playing on court, because it becomes so much easier. You lose fear. It breaks you down physically and emotionally, and then you slowly start accepting it.”

Unfortunately, Zhao Min’s expertise wasn’t used by India, and there was too much local politicking that eventually drove him away. For much of the next decade, Indian badminton groped in the dark. A few individuals, like Gopi, figured out their own path, but the team did not have the resources or the expertise to follow contemporary training methods.

Things have gradually turned around, and there is a lot more local expertise available. Indians who have studied sports science and nutrition abroad have brought in a wealth of knowledge and experience to training methodology. With greater advance in sports science, methods of training – not to mention the critical area of sports nutrition — have changed radically. The methods of Zhao Min might seem almost crude today – but have the Chinese themselves deviated from that path? What exactly is it they do that makes them better than anyone else?

The series continues in Part 2.