Abhinav Bindra's High-Tech Performance Centre Paving Way For India's Future

7/30/2017 Abhinav Bindra's high-tech performance centre paving way for India's future - Times of India
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Abhinav Bindra's high-tech performance centre paving

way for India's future
TNN | Jul 30, 2017, 10.13 AM IST
You are not standing dead still even when you are standing still.
You wobble a little. Everybody does. Unless of course you are Abhinav
Bindra, India's only Individual Olympic gold medalist, who spent a lifetime
standing still so that he could shoot straight. You realise this when you visit
the Abhinav Bindra Targeting Performance Centre in Mohali on a late July
evening.
As an elite athlete, Bindra spent two decades visiting sports science

centres across the globe and working with the world's best known sports
medicine experts either to improve performance or recover from injury.
Among the people he worked with was Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt -
the German national football team's doctor and former club doctor of Bayern Munich.
It is not surprising, therefore, that after retiring from international sports, he has set up what is arguably one of India's most high-
tech high performance and rehab centre at Mohali and Delhi.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/abhinav-bindras-high-tech-performance-centre-paving-way-for-indias-future/articleshowprint/59829306.cms 1/7
It has been almost a year since Abhinav stood on the stabilometry platform, which was his constant companion while training
for the 2016 Rio Olympics. He claims he is a little nervous as he climbs on to the device. It is a bio-feedback system that
measures balance and assesses posture control of an individual. It also captures even the slightest wobble.
Abhinav is afraid that he may no longer be as still as he used to during his shooting days, but gets on it just to show you how it
works. "I am sure I am very bad at this now. I used to be so good," he says, almost ruefully.
But when the results come in, both Abhinav and Dr Digpal Singh Ranawat, the performance director at the centre, are
pleasantly surprised. The results are near perfect, which means Abhinav has the ability to stand still - perfect static control -
even one year after he gave up shooting. "You have to be a stone to be steadier than this," Ranawat jokes. "I am telling you, you
are ready for Tokyo 2020 (Olympics)," he tells Abhinav - only half in jest - indicating that the shooter still has some international
medals left in him.
But, Abhinav shoots down the thought and makes it clear that he's done with being an international sportsman. Instead, he
wants to talk about how there is a massive gulf between the technology that the world uses to train top athletes, and the
almost rudimentary support Indian sportspersons get.
More than that, he believes that sports science and technology can even help people who are not sportspersons to recover
from injury and surgery.
After Abhinav, a TOI correspondent got on to the platform and tried to remain as still as possible, but the parameters on the
screen in front went into an out-of-control fastpaced samba! "High performance sports and medical tness are very closely
linked," Abhinav states. "I've worked with a number of doctors during my sporting career and the one person I worked very
closely is Muller-Wohlfahrt. In India, rehab and medical tness is very backward. We do a lot of orthopaedic surgeries, but there
is no occupational therapy. In the sense, we don't get people back to life and back to work."
PRIMITIVE SPORTS MEDICINE
Where is India in terms of sports medicine?
"It doesn't exist," he says emphatically and accepts that this is one reason why some of our top athletes often break down and
take a long time to recover. "Go to the National Cricket Academy and you will be shocked," he says bluntly.
"I was initially so excited to visit NCA and see the place everyone comes in for their rehab and get assessed. But they have a
facility that is below par. It doesn't even justify being a testing centre," Ranawat, who has been working with Bindra for a long
time, says.
You try to argue that there have been some attempts at bringing hi-tech into Indian Olympic sports. For instance, the Sports
Authority of India centre at Sonipat uses a hypoxic chamber to simulate high altitude conditions for wrestlers.
But Abhinav is not impressed. "In Munich, Germany, you get a hypoxic chamber in a recreational gym nowadays," he says. "I
used a gym in Munich and trained there for a very long time. They had a hypoxic chamber."
Some of the machines at the Mohali centre are the same as the ones used by AC Milan, AS Roma, Real Madrid to train and
assess their footballers. "After injury, it is the recovery that counts. When Abhinav was failing and going through injury, these
devices helped us get him back in shape in the shortest possible time," Ranawat expresses.
Ranawat puts you on what is known as the 'Walker View'. It looks and works like a treadmill but it is in fact a mini lab in itself. Its
sensors, 3-D camera and TV screen allows you to study and assess every part of your body in motion in real time.
"Running is the basis of any sport," Ranawat quips. "On a simple treadmill the only measure you get is the distance covered and
heart rate. But running is more than that. It's about how much weight you put on each side and how it aects your joints. How
much control you have in your pelvis and how much you compensate from your trunk. The real time results you see allow us to
make a precise training programme according to the results."
The system is based on what is called sensory motor integration (relationship between the sensory system or nerves and the
motor system, which are the muscles). Ranawat says that for a bowler to complete 10 overs, he has to run at least 12 to 13 km
with pace and also have control.
"When a bowler starts, he needs static control, which he converts into dynamic control when he runs and then he needs to stop
and then get into static control and then deliver. The body has to adjust to it. You can't measure it during training and that is
where injuries happen. When you talk about high performance, it all depends on the number of repetitions an athlete performs.
But no one talks about the control parameters in that one repetition. And, that is what denes the thin line between improving
performance and getting an injury."
EXTENDING A HELPING HAND
Although the centre is a business venture, Abhinav has ensured that professional sportspersons don't hesitate to come to him
just because of the cost. His foundation has supported some 50 sportspersons who have gone through assessment and
training at the centre, free of cost.
Among the players who have come at the centre to improve their performance are: Kings XI Punjab's Manan Vohra, Indian
national hockey team members Rupinder Pal Singh, Birendra Lakra (both went through rehab after injury), captain PR Sreejesh
and squash champion Sourav Ghoshal. Top shooters Ravi Kumar, Heena Sidhu and Apurvi Chandela, too, have gone through
performance enhancement.
In the end, Abhinav insists, "The beauty of some of the latest technologies used in precision training for professional athletes is
that they can be used by non-sportspersons, as well, to recover from conditions like a knee surgery or any muscular-skeletal
issue."

Abhinav Bindra's High-Tech Performance Centre Paving Way For India's Future

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7/30/2017 Abhinav Bindra's high-tech performance centre paving way for India's future - Times of India

Abhinav Bindra's high-tech performance centre paving

As an elite athlete, Bindra spent two decades visiting sports science

PRIMITIVE SPORTS MEDICINE

Where is India in terms of sports medicine?

EXTENDING A HELPING HAND

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