Why Indian sports underperform: Inside the big strength and conditioning gap

Bellary: Walk into any elite training centre abroad and the weight room is as central to an athlete's day as the track or the court. In India, that culture is still catching up.

Ian Gatt, Head of Physiotherapy at the Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS) in Bellary, has spent the better part of his career working across international high-performance programs. What he has observed since arriving in India is blunt, and he does not soften it: Indian athletes, by and large, are not conditioning their bodies well enough.

"I'd condition them better," Gatt told The Bridge, when asked what single change he would make to Indian sport.

"Just by doing the right levels of conditioning for athletes, India could see massive differences in results."

The gap between where Indian athletes are and where they could be in terms of physical preparation is wide enough that the gains from closing it would be immediate and measurable. The talent, he argues, is there. The problem is that it has not been properly adapted.

The Conditioning Gap

Gatt's argument begins with a structural one. In Indian sport, the responsibility for physical preparation has historically fallen to coaches people whose primary expertise is technical and tactical.

The result is that strength and conditioning, a discipline requiring its own specialists, has been folded into coaching sessions or left to athletes to manage on their own.

"The coaches think they're doing the conditioning," Gatt says.

"And no offence to the coaches, if you're a coach, you focus on your technical and tactical parts. But leave the conditioning to people that understand the conditioning, which is a completely different kettle of fish."

Conditioning, Gatt says, is not a phase it is a career-long commitment. Persuading athletes to see it that way is its own challenge.

Early reluctance is common, particularly from those who find it easier to default to sport-specific training, eat, sleep, and repeat. But Gatt has seen attitudes shift.

Athletes who were initially resistant have started seeking out conditioning work after realising what they were missing.

When the body is not ready

The consequences of poor conditioning are not abstract. They show up as injuries overuse, traumatic, and re-injury that cut short careers and sideline athletes at the worst possible moments.

Gatt is careful to distinguish between what can be prevented and what can only be mitigated. Traumatic injuries, he explains, often arise from a perfect storm of factors: missed training sessions, fatigue, poor sleep, inadequate hydration.

Any one of these might not cause harm on its own, but in combination, they create the conditions for something to go wrong.

For hamstring injuries specifically a recurring problem in sprint-heavy and field sports the key lies in understanding not just the injury itself but the mechanics that cause it.

Hamstrings most commonly tear during the lengthening phase of movement. If the eccentric strength in those muscles the capacity to control lengthening under load is insufficient, re-injury becomes almost inevitable.

Gatt uses the shoulder in combat sports as another example: the posterior musculature of the shoulder, the muscles responsible for braking the arm during a punch or throw, are often underdeveloped because conventional training misses the eccentric component entirely. Without testing for it, you would never know it was weak until the joint gave way.

The same framework applies to gender differences in injury patterns. Female athletes sustain ACL tears at a disproportionately higher rate than males a trend seen globally in sports like football.

Female boxers, in Gatt's experience, are more prone to knee injuries than their male counterparts, while males show higher rates of hand and wrist injuries. Understanding these patterns means conditioning programmes can be tailored accordingly.

The federation problem

If the conditioning gap is a structural problem, the planning gap is a systemic one and it may be doing more damage. Gatt is candid about the frustration of working in a high-performance environment where decisions about competition schedules land with almost no notice.

"Federations tell athletes a week before that they compete," he says. "Sometimes a day before."

"I've been here six months and it still blows my mind. How can we be elite if this is the level of planning that people think is good for the nation?"

The consequences are most severe in weight-managed sports like wrestling and boxing. An athlete competing at a precise weight class needs five to six weeks of careful preparation: adjusting training load, managing nutrition, and tapering towards competition. When the window is a week, none of that is possible.

The athlete arrives underprepared and, critically, more vulnerable to injury. They may be technically capable of winning a gold medal but they may also pull a hamstring because their body was not given the runway to be ready.

Gatt's point is that high-performance sport is a system. A physio or a conditioning coach cannot operate in isolation. And neither can the support staff, however skilled, if the wider organisation is making decisions that undermine everything being built at the training centre level.

Nutrition, supplements, and a doping problem

The nutrition picture in India sits at the intersection of culture, infrastructure, and desperate shortcuts.

Dietary restrictions vary widely – religious, personal, regional – and the support to navigate them through informed substitution is often absent.

When athletes feel their energy or recovery is lacking, the instinct is to reach for supplements. And when supplements feel insufficient, some extend further.

"The only reason you need supplements is because you're not meeting demands physically or metabolically, or because of your choices of food. That's why India is number one in the world in doping," says Gatt.

Athletes are left to self-manage, they feel deficiencies they cannot explain, and they seek chemical solutions to what is fundamentally a structural problem.

A nutritionist, like a conditioning coach, cannot do their job without a training plan. If the coach has not outlined what the next six weeks look like, the nutritionist cannot calibrate caloric intake to training load.

Everything in high-performance sport is connected, and in India, too many of those connections are missing.

What data can and can't do?

Gatt completed his PhD in biomechanics, focusing specifically on wrist injuries in boxing. The research gave him a framework for understanding why those injuries happen and what preventative work looks like at the conditioning level.

In his day-to-day working, that understanding is complemented by performance analysis tools, countermovement jump testing, grip dynamometers that produce objective data on where an athlete stands physically.

The key, he emphasises, is using that data without being paralysed by it. Footage review, for instance, can help identify whether a recurring injury is linked to a specific movement pattern or a technical habit the coach has already noticed but cannot isolate.

Video gives the physio and coach a shared language. But the data only matters if the team around the athlete can act on it and act on it consistently.

"All of that is just giving you objective data," Gatt says. "It's then how you use that objective data, without overcomplicating it, which just helps support you in decision-making."

That is the tension running through everything Gatt describes at IIS. The institute has invested in the tools, the staff, and the systems. The database is live, the strength and conditioning coachess are in place, the collaboration is producing results.

Athletes who were once reluctant to spend time in the gym are now asking for it. Progress, in other words, is real.

The writer was at the Inspire Institute of Sport, Bellary on invitation.