‘How did he do that!’ To watching athletes train

Once-secret training routines are now on full display online. They’re thrilling proof of just how far the body can be pushed

Neeraj Chopra, India’s first global track and field star in decades, posted a training video on social media a few days ago. It’s the kind of video that provides a peek into the rarefied world of elite athleticism; the kind of video that makes you go, “No, no way, how’s that possible?” and then laugh and shake your head for a few moments at the miraculous things a human body can do.

Chopra stands tall with his arms raised above his head, holding a weighted ball. Then he starts dropping his knees towards the ground (so far, so good). With his knees inches from the ground, his heels in the air, and all his weight on his toes, Chopra begins to bend backwards.

Now it’s starting to get loony. You think, wait a minute, he can’t do that, can he? Let me try and paint an anatomical picture here: Knees bent outwards from the body, half a finger’s length from the ground, in the air. All of the body still balanced only on the toes. All of the upper body arched backwards like a curved bow (think, the full bridge position in yoga, chakrasana) till the weighted ball is half an inch away from the ground behind him.

You think, okay, that’s some crazy flexibility. Fine, he’s a top athlete after all, but it ends here. Any moment now his knees will land on the ground and the ball in his hands will touch the floor and he’ll be in this hyperextended — but still believable — bridge position. No.

Still with only the toes in contact with the ground, Chopra unfurls like a scorpion’s tail delivering a strike, or one of those massive stone-throwing catapults from medieval times, going from full convex to half-concave, and hurls the ball.

A confession: The spark that led to me becoming a sports journalist was exactly this. My first reporting assignment was to watch and write about Olympic athletes in training — boxers, the women’s hockey team, weightlifters, sprinters, discus throwers. It turned my world upside-down. I became like a weak-kneed child to whom the wonders of the universe were being revealed.

It’s only when you have the privilege of watching elite athletes in training that you truly understand the extraordinary possibilities of our physical selves.

There was a time when this part of an athlete’s life was closely guarded and very few people got to see it. But over the last couple of decades, a truly oceanic flood of information about how elite athletes train has been made available to the general public (why that happened is perhaps the subject of another column).

Now we need only tap in a few keywords to access detailed, in-depth, granular information, as well as hours and hours of video footage, on every aspect of athletic training. How Kenyans train for marathons. How

Track and field athlete Neeraj Chopra and women’s hockey captain Rani Rampal are among those posting riveting videos of their training routines on social media.

Usain Bolt trained for sprints. Why athletes don’t do musclehead stuff like dumbbell bicep curls. Why controlling your opponent’s triceps is essential in wrestling.

Terms like HIIT (high-intensity interval training), Nordic curls, Fartlek, active recovery and VO2 max have gone from being used only at Olympic training camps to being part of everyday fitness language.

In athletic training, there are no secrets anymore. That is not to say you can become an elite athlete just by watching videos or reading articles. The full ecosystem for an elite athlete — coach, trainer, fellow athletes, nutritionists etc — is irreplaceable. Besides which it would be quite unsafe to try and replicate their advanced moves without the right training. But you can have endless hours of fun watching how they do what they do.

Some of my favourites: Our top Olympics contender, the boxer Amit Panghal, and his extremely high-intensity conditioning videos; tiny, fiery clips that he posts almost daily on social media.

Women’s hockey captain Rani Rampal, who posts a clip of a new exercise every day, mostly essentials for building strength.

And the Olympics Channel on Youtube, where one fascinating highlight for me was the way athletes adapted to lockdowns last year and performed mindboggling fitness and skills routines at home. Please seek out the gymnasts and the sport climbers, especially the video of Italian climber Stefano Ghisolfi using nothing but a dining table to do things you would never imagine possible with a table. Don’t worry, it’s SFW.