AFTER PV Sindhu and Wayne Lombard started working together last October, the South African instituted several changes. These changes mostly pertained to her training sessions. When he was looking at the data coming out of her WHOOP, he was struck by one thing.
She wasn't, in simple terms, sleeping properly. Or, to put it in other words, her sleeping patterns didn't tally with that of an elite athlete. Lombard, Sindhu's head of overall performance, got to work. This was a problem but the South African, who has 'easily worked with over a 100 Indian athletes', approached it differently. "I didn't want to put pressure on her," Sindhu's head of overall performance tells The New Indian Express. "If you put pressure on athletes by telling them 'you are not sleeping enough', that can become stressful."
Because athletes can be 'overstimulated', a lack of sleep can be a common issue because the two are linked. Here's Lombard's observation. "That was one area where we needed to work on a lot because Sindhu's sleep patterns weren't the greatest to be honest. As you can imagine, as an athlete, you are always stimulated, you are training a lot and you are always hyper. We monitored that and we devised a strategy she could use to improve because sleep and nutrition is extremely important in the recovery process."
So, Lombard set about 'changing her mindset'. "The science is also changing a bit," he says. "I look for a total amount of sleep of around eight to 10 hours in a 24 hour cycle. If the athlete doesn't sleep super well in the evening, it's not good. If an athlete only gets four hours of sleep, it's not great. But we try to make it up in the day with different naps over a 24 hour cycle (to reach that mark of eight to 10 hours)." While Lombard, who continues to work with a whole array of Indian athletes including Jyothi Yarraji and the women's hockey team now, understandably doesn't want to reveal her sleep data, he says they have split her nap times. "If we have double session days, try and get a 90-minute nap. If there are single session days, then maybe, try and get a longer sleep in the afternoon so it's all about changing the mindset."
Sleep pattern was just one part of the puzzle. Lombard kind of deconstructed her data before reconstructing it, brick by brick (he's quick to credit Sindhu because her buy-in was immediate). "We went in-depth," he says. "What we wanted to see is what's the load she experiences on court or in a gym session or in a conditioning session and what's her internal response to it? What's the physiology telling us with reference to how she's responding to it? They stripped down her strain score (something every WHOOP gives) to arrive at customisable solutions.
"We also look at heart rate variability (HRV) just to see how the sympathetic and para-sympathetic systems are working. If the sympathetic systems (fight or flight) are overstimulated, it means she's not recovering well. If her parasympathetic systems are working well (right-digest), it means she's recovering well. We analysed her heart-rate patterns as well."
Because GPS doesn't give out accurate data indoors, the team started analysing data put out by an inertial measurement unit (IMU). "It gives me a really good indication of how much acceleration, jumps, how many smashes she might have on court etc. It's based on a tennis algorithm because badminton is not quite there yet but at least it's a good objective measure of what's happening on court to give feedback to the (coaches, Sindhu and the team on the ground)."
All of these changes have helped the team 'to push her harder than in the past but in a safer manner'. "Ultimately, she needs to perform at a really high level so if we are only managing load by reducing loads, she will never get to a point what you saw today (the conversation with Lombard was on the day she won the Japan Open on Sunday)," the specialist says.
Even as athletes in other sports have managed to extend their careers well into their 30s, badminton, because of its extremely physical nature, sees athletes retiring a few years after they hit 30. How does Lombard see this? "That was one of the first things I asked myself last October," he says. "Her enthusiasm for training, training intensity and her ability to commit to a process that we put in front of her is second to none. That's a really important thing because you spend so much time training so if you are not going to enjoy that process, the results are not going to come. For someone like her, it's more about her body and physiology. So, for her, age shouldn't be a factor. I also say that with all due respect, in India it becomes too much of a factor where when someone is reaching this age, they need to retire because that's what's given. But certain individuals are just phenomenal athletes and someone like Sindhu, who has so much experience, doesn't need to train as much. She knows how to play badminton, we just need to make sure she remains fresh and can adapt to the intensity rather than the volume (in terms of her training)."
At the World Championships next month in New Delhi, Indians fans will get to see this version of Sindhu up close for the first time. Don't bet against something special.