Last Word: Training for peak performance

Training was a social occasion in the early days. Gradually, other elements came in. Role-playing for team building, for example — Anil Kumble has, in his book, pictures of Indian players at the Sholay camp, where players enacted roles from that movie.

Good old days: The Indian cricket teams’ training in the 1980s mostly involved running around the ground a couple of times, and then taking catches or batting in the nets. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

Watching teams train often gives a hint to new methods or old techniques and a chance to learn how they inculcate that delightful element called ‘team spirit’. Training is not a modern concept, but today’s teams train with the kind of intensity and range once reserved for the armed forces.

I remember watching Indian teams train in the 1980s. It mostly involved running around the ground a couple of times and then taking catches or batting in the nets (for cricket), short passes and dribbling (hockey and football), lectures from coaches, and gym work (not very intense). There was always coffee and tea to be had on the side, a bit of a laugh, and some leg pulling. Training was a social occasion.

What innocent days those were!

Gradually, other elements came in. Role-playing for team building, for example—Anil Kumble has, in his book, pictures of Indian players at the  ‘Sholay’ camp, where players enacted roles from that movie.

For the World Cup rugby in September, the Welsh team in training had hoods pulled over their heads while being doused with water and subjected to the sounds of babies crying. Psychological preparation, as they call it. The intention is to take the players out of their comfort zones and get them prepared to meet the unexpected. But every day is not brutal, the conditioning coach tells us. That’s good to know.

It’s not unusual either. A previous England coach had taken his team to the RAF base in Cornwall for a night of survival training (but there were no sounds of babies crying to deal with).

Thankfully, nothing has yet matched the South African training a couple of decades ago. They even had a name for it: Kamp Staaldraad, or ‘Camp Barbed Wire’. One of the many things players were subjected to was jumping naked into a freezing cold lake, crawling across gravel, and falling into a foxhole (also naked, I think) while the English national anthem was played at full blast. There was also the part where they had to kill chickens with their bare hands.

I am not sure such things increased their speed, muscle, or reaction time, but the team was knocked out in the quarterfinals.

The coach, Rudolph Straueli’s primary intention, as it emerged later, was to eliminate a sense of individuality from the players. According to some reports, when players tried to get out of the freezing lake, they were forced back in at gunpoint. There were too many bare-knuckle fights as part of the programme. All these stories emerged after the tournament was over; the whistleblower was the video analyst Dale McDermott, who leaked pictures from the camp. A few months later, McDermott killed himself. Do you see Sunil Chhetri killing chickens with his bare hands or Ravindra Jadeja crawling across gravel, or worse?

From a whole range of surprises in the above methods conceived and executed by coaches, there is one that is more puzzling than most. Crying babies. Is that meant to awaken indifference or provoke empathy?