India’s minor sports, if at all one can refer to them such as table tennis just do not have a system on regimented fitness training existing at any level. Be it sub-junior, junior or senior it simply does not exist at all.
I have had the pleasure of working with Soumyajit Ghosh, presently India’s No.3 in Table Tennis along with a host of other talents like seven time national champion Poulomi Ghatak, two times national champion Soumyadeep Roy. Even the current crop of national talents like Sutirtha Mukherjee, Arjun Ghosh, Ahika Mukherjee and Ronit Bhanja all train under me. So I know the ground reality.
Soumyojit in fact, trained mostly in Dusseldorf, Germany and he has a feel of top level fitness training. However, when it comes to representing India and the physical preparations – the less said the better. Indian table tennis players attend long preparatory camps either in Patiala or Indore. Their staple fitness programme consists of 30 minutes painstaking jog around the park. At times they also engage in relentless burpee jumps and old fashioned abdominal exercises.
Unfortunately the likes of Harmeet Singh, Mouma Das or Manika Batra are not blessed to have the monitoring of a fitness coach. Their TT coach exercises all his old time fitness theory which may have worked for him.
Consider the physical demands of the game. It has sharp lateral moves, great rotational force of the torso to generate power in the smash or top spin returns. A well defined centre of gravity will ensure balance. There is no rocket science to recognise that the essence is quickness and agility within a short space. You either move sideways, forward or backward. And you move with great speed. Having understood that, how come a paddler develop quickness by jogging around the park for 30 minutes?
In fitness parlance, there is a term called training specificity. In common man’s language it means if you want to develop running speed you have to sprint. For a cyclist, he has to practice cycling. Now how do you develop quickness and agility if your ground conditioning is predominantly long slow runs rather than quick off the blocks style training? Long slow runs would fire the type -1 slow twitch fibres where speed and power needs the type 2 fibres to come into play.
While the top Chinese, French and German players are lifting weights and developing great rotational core strength, our Soumyajit Ghosh, a gifted player was never exposed to functional strength training by the national coaches.
I was part of a special fitness camp for the elite table tennis players in Hyderabad where apart from Bengal, Abhishek Yadav from Uttar Pradesh, some national ranked juniors from Kerala, one Indonesian player and all the Bengal top guns took part. The training focused on sharp movements simulating the moves around the board. Quick feet on ladder, hoops and specific reaction drills formed the chunk of the ground training.
There were endurance runs too. But it was intense intervals like 2 minutes shuttle over a 20 metres distance. The major input was on the strength front where the players had no clue. From the basic core, we worked on the rotational strength of the torso as most of the shots played by a TT player demands the mid section to rotate.
Remember, the emphasis in a game like table tennis should be customising a player’s fitness regimen. Soumyajit Ghosh, the youngest Indian at the London Olympics is passionate about winning a medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. He makes it a point that I work on his weaker areas like greater balance and core strength. He is bull headed on turning his weakness into strength.
Irony is – what should have emanated from the Table Tennis Federation comes from an individual. Soumyajit, you belong to a minor sport – that’s the reality.
(Chinmoy Roy is a veteran fitness expert & trainer and has been associated in different capacities with Indian and Bengal cricket for decades)
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