Follow UsRecently, the Indian strength and conditioning coach Soham Desai was replaced by Adrian Le Roux, someone who has worked around the Indian setup in the past as well. However, such repeated changes in the fitness coach and training schedule are bound to have their effects on the team, and eventually, the player's fitness suffers.
Former Indian cricketer R Ashwin invited former strength and conditioning coach of the Indian men's side, Soham Desai, on his YouTube channel to talk about fitness and its different aspects. They discussed this issue of the different eras in fitness training in the men's side and how it affected the players.
“If we look back to 2010, Ramji Srinivasan was the trainer. That was, let’s call it the MS Dhoni and Ramji Srinivasan era,” Ashwin said on his channel, as quoted by ESPNCricinfo.
“Back then, we didn’t do much strength training. We used to run a lot. When you talk about aerobic capacity, what is aerobic capacity? If you do two rounds of the ground, that’s like a warm-up. Anything more than that, continuous running, is aerobic capacity.
“Then came the Basu Shanker and Virat Kohli era, who focused more on power and strength. So we had Olympic snatches, cleans—because of this, all the players benefited a lot for power production. After that, there was a phase where unilateral training came back as the Nick Webb and Soham Desai era came. Now, it’s Adrian Le Roux’s era.”
Ashwin pointed out how these different trainers meant different training regimes for the players, which is not only difficult to adjust to, but also increases the propensity of injuries to the players.
“I used to always ask all the trainers this: when a trainer changes, the testing mechanism changes, the training schema changes,” Ashwin remarked.
“This is a big problem for a player because, as players, we know the playing schema: how to play a back foot shot, or a front foot shot, how to bowl. But if the trainer keeps changing—if Soham came today and his belief is in one training schema and he applies it to everyone—it is virtually very, very difficult for the player.
“In fact, in many cases, this could also lead to injuries. And it has. Because I went through a cycle from 2017 to 2019, I was searching for my training schema because I was constantly injured,” Ashwin added.