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What's the story?
The Indian shooting contingent, comprising of Tokyo Olympics 2020 bound shooters such as Manu Bhaker, Apurvi Chandela among others recently underwent a five-day training and conditioning camp in Bellary in order to fine-tune their skills ahead of the global event set to be conducted from July 24th in Tokyo, Japan.
In case you didn’t know
The training camp, organised as a joint effort between JSW Group and the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) at the Inspire Institute of Sports (IIS) was aimed at training the shooters with regards to specific aspects such as nutrition, diet, managing the expectations from fans on social media, the importance of injury prevention among other topics.
Heart of the matter
Notably, this was the second occasion when the IIS hosted the senior shooting team, with the men's boxing national camp players having undergone a training session that was organised by the Boxing Federation of India late last year.
The 11-member team was accompanied by Pistol coach Ved Prakash Pilania and junior national Rifle coach Suma Shirur, both of who accompanied the shooting team over the five-day period.
Manu Bhaker, one of India's biggest medal hopefuls shared her two cents about the training period -
"Initially we were all a little confused when we were told that we would be spending a week training without our weapons and anything related to our sport. But when we reached here, I was blown away by the positive training environment at the institute"
Bhaker, who was a 2018 Commonwealth Games champion added -
"I have never stayed at a hostel before, and the discipline followed by all the athletes here was my biggest takeaway from the week."
Suma Shirur, the high-performance coach of the junior national Rifle team commented on the training camp as well and said -
"This camp was a great introduction to the team to understand the various facets of high performance training, the shooters could interact with specialists in their fields, so overall, they benefitted from this exposure"
What’s next?
The shooting contingent will be competing at the ISSF World Cup set to start next month in Delhi. With the big names undergoing this training to hone their skills and outlook towards the value-based techniques such as injury prevention, diet among other topics, one can expect the shooters to give their best in the upcoming World Cup.
