THE new sunday express Voices Anand Neelakantan Utkarsh Amitabh Sheila Kumar Anu Aggarwal Sathya Saran Swami Sukhabodhananda MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment april 28 2024 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Ahead of the Game Winning Hearts and Minds Shayamal Vallabhjee As India’s great sports revolution slowly begins to pick up medals and momentum, here’s looking at some of the men and women transforming training, motivation and practice to make it all happen T Sports psychologist Focus on the potential of mental training By Suruchi Kapur Gomes Deal with the impact of stress on performance hat unwavering hand. This strong shoulder. The penalty that was converted. The serve that went through like a rocket. The bullet that went truer than true. The hunger for victory, for gold, the podium. A great Indian sports resurgence is on, and medals and international victories, both individual and team, are coming home regularly of late even though it’s a trickle yet. Behind all that glitters, however, is hard work and the nurturing of talent across the nation. And smart work. Behind the scenes, there are makers of champions, trained through their own lifetimes, unseen heroes who are beginning to change the same old, same old of India’s sporting prowess. They study the art of sporting war—mind, body and soul—honing it with exposure, experiment and experience. They apply it to the best and the hungriest. More glitter, more glory . From ever-evolving physiotherapy to old faithful strength and conditioning, and from holistic therapy to mindfulness and motivation, here are some of these gamechangers putting India in the field of champions and on track to victories. There’s a tiny woman doing giant-killing. There’s a Mumbai man who’s changing and challenging traditional training precepts. There’s a vegetarian marathoner working on mind and body as one unit. There’s a YouTuber working on body dynamics. All are successful. All want more. And all are ahead of the game. Senior leaders, coaches and team ambassadors are key Champions Made Here Deckline Leitao Sport and Exercise Science specialist Train smart, not hard Prioritise staying uninjured I Spot talent early Leitao conducts a session with badminton player Saina Nehwal H is métier is clear: sourcing core beliefs to enhance body dynamics. Deckline Leitao’s life is as much about sports as it is about the philosophy of “training right”. From World Rank 42 golfer Avani Prashanth to World No. 9 badminton champion Lakshaya Sen, his student list is impressive. A state-level silver in Taekwondo in 1991, Leitao now trains elite athletes. The Jeet Kune Do philosophy of Bruce Lee has inspired Leitao as he transformed sports science from tradition to practicality . Schooled at St. Joseph’s in Dongri, Mumbai, then St. Xavier’s, a stint in merchant navy the boy with Goan , parents and Portuguese roots completed his bachelor’s in sport science from University of KZN in Durban, South Africa (2006) and a degree in sports science and culture at Roehampton University . Certified in strength and conditioning, performance enhancement, corrective exercise, and a slew of sports qualifications, Leitao’s understanding of the human body is intuitive, his lessons rock solid. Today his expertise at the RxDx , Sports Centre and the Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence in Bengaluru, fill his days. “It gave me a different outlook, of how sport affects culture, how bodies adapt to cultures, and about women in sport,” says Leitao. He met and fell in love with his Japanese wife Kyoko in London, and went on to embrace Japanese philosophies. “Dating and marrying a Japanese taught me to keep drama outside and efficiency inside my life,” he laughs. After initially working with tennis icon Prakash Padukone, elite athletes, and Olympians, coaching Avani Prashanth on hitting far could well be the core of his teaching, yet it is interspersed with recovery rest and right , training. His tryst with Bengaluru began in 2010, when he lived with his grandparents. During Covid he coached online across India, the US, Dubai and Australia. “I believe that the biggest mistake Indians make is to blindly copy training programmes suited for the body structures of Europeans, Asians and Africans,” he says. Be it badminton star Ashwini Ponnappa, swimmers Harinath and Mana Patel (last Olympics), boxer Mary Kom, shot-putter Inderjeet Singh, UK Formula 3 racer Akhil Rabindra, gymnast Deepika Kumari, table tennis champ Archana Kamath, he believes in making sports practical, not ‘hyper science’. “It is not rocket science with numerous tests, metrics, recordings, etc. It is important to know the biomechanics, physiology and exercise science behind throwing a punch, yet it’s more important to know how to throw a punch when it matters,” he says. “Gadgets advanced us, yet the human body is the same. Wearing a smartwatch will not make you fitter and stronger, exercising will.” His mantra? “Do no harm to athletes. Injuries can change destinies in sports. The priority is to stay uninjured, and then you have the option of going to play The Japanese philosophy of .” Zanshin guides Leitao, “It is about having situational awareness. To quickly anticipate, analyse, adapt and apply solutions in real time, like sport preparation,” he adds. As a stakeholder of Indian sports, he calls out partial or abusive coaching (which has been the norm) and helicopter parenting, “It can have a negative impact on a child’s mental health for a lifetime.” A straight shooter, he tells his elite athletes to keep stardom at home, “It is like working with a growing lion cub. You must let them know who’s the boss.” Leitao has been instrumental in creating an online strength-andconditioning course (S&C) specifically aimed at the Indian and South Asian population for IIT Madras’ NPTEL (National Programme on Leitao with Lakshya Sen, Srihari Nataraj and Ashwini Ponnappa instrumental in creating an online strength-andconditioning course specifically aimed at the Indian population Technology Enhanced Learning) platform to help parents, coaches and students make fewer mistakes, and learn how to save their bodies for play and not for rehabilitation or surgery , . In India, sports potential is untapped. “We don’t have anybody in the football leagues. Apart from Rohan Bopanna, in doubles and a few in singles tennis, there are not many Indian sportspersons doing well internationally While . our genetics and epigenetics are more mentally inclined, we have outliers. What is not happening is protection of talent as the philosophy in life to succeed here is hard work.” His role as an S&C coach is to ensure the body is safe. “Train smart, not hard. Recovery is not focused on. You want a fresh, light and strong athlete,” he says. t’s strange to envision the psychologist of the Indian men’s football team as someone deeply immersed in the tabla. For the Durban boy who has played the tabla for 15 years, it’s all there. “If my life didn’t move into sports, I would have been an entertainer in the music industry Shayamal Vallabhjee says. ,” And thank heavens it did. Growing up in a conservative Indian community , Vallabhjee’s upbringing in Tongaat, South Africa, was a cornucopia of strong values amid socio-economic and racial diversity as the pall of apartheid enveloped all. Sports was of prime importance. Yet, his biggest contribution came when he integrated technology into sports. “With the Dolphins Cricket Team in Kingsmead, I was first to integrate real-time heart rate monitoring in matches, to predict fatigue. The team with Jonty Rhodes, Shaun Pollock, Andrew Hudson and others won five tournaments in four years,” recalls Vallabhjee. As a young boy who experienced firsthand the turmoil of apartheid, he felt the need to look at life in terms of holistic foundation and spiritualitybased action. In a country deeply segregated by apartheid, this young lad found that “sport, which should have been unifying was used to isolate. This realisation has had such a profound impact that I have dedicated my life to creating systems that empower athletes to unlock their fullest potential”. At KwaZulu-Natal (BSc sport science), then University of Hertfordshire (MS Psychology) and Adler (MA in Industrial and Organisational Psychology), Vallabhjee tasked himself with understanding the mercurial relationship between the mind and body That . diversity in perspectives is his greatest asset. The esoteric nature of life intrigues him, especially since he spent four years learning with monks at the Sri Sri Radha Radhanath in Chatsworth, Durban. Straddling physiology and spirituality he learnt discipline—wak, ing up at 3 am, bed by 9 pm, diet cooked at the temple with two meals. “It has been one of the most transformative experiences in my life,” he says. It’s this wisdom that makes him a stalwart—be it the SA and Indian cricket and football teams, and six years on the ATP Tour (tennis). He introduced meditation and mindfulness with the football team. “Senior players—Sandesh Jinghan, Sunil Chhetri and Gurpreet Singh—embraced this, helped me integrate it into routines. The results have been remarkable,” says Vallabhjee. Veg, as he is fondly called in SA, as a vegetarian, entered the Indian sporting ecosystem in 2007 to help the Davis Cup team prepare for Beijing. “I noticed the quality of physical training was lacking and the quality of support staff at an international level was a gaping hole.” The solution came through HEAL, his startup to help doctors and physios understand the methodology of working with elite athletes. “Our coaches are still behind the eight ball on the integration of technology on performance—this is his startup, heal, helps physios understand the methodology of working with elite athletes always going to be a knife’s edge.” With football coach Igor Stimac, Vallabhjee is in the midst of a passion project: building a groundbreaking research and data set to understand the relationship between psychometrics and personality in coping with stress at elite levels. “The lack of support for mental work from administrators and coaches, funding to run research tests and collect widespread data sets and importance given to the impact of mental work in athletes’ performances needs to be addressed,” Vallabhjee says. He is also a part of the teaching team at Stanford Business School’s LEAD Program. Instrumental in helping Bengaluru FC win the I-League in its inaugural year, he is a leadership coach, with Vallabhjee with David over 1,000 workshops to Miller and Kings XI his credit. On the road 40 head coach Brad Hodge weeks a year, he dabbles in golf, and is an avid marathoner. “Winning Grand Slams with Mahesh Bhupathi and Sania Mirza, working alone with Sachin Tendulkar at the 2003 World Cup, training with the runners in Iten, Kenya, and sitting in the room with Abhinav Bindra after he won the first Olympic gold medal for India—we didn’t work together but we were all living together in the Olympic village. These and a million tiny memories nudge me forward,” he says. Turn to page 2
Express Network Private Limited publishes thirty three E-paper editions of The New Indian Express newspaper , thirty two E-paper editions of Dinamani, one E-paper edition of The Morning Standard, one E-paper edition of Malayalam Vaarika magazine and one E-paper edition of the Indulge - The Morning Standard, Kolkatta.