How ace shuttler Ashwini Ponnappa is training smart for the 2024 Olympics

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Lounge. Ponnappa shot into fame as a rookie shuttler when she won the women’s doubles at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. Since then, she has made advancements in her career including making it to the London (2012) and Rio Olympics (2016) and picking up several medals along the way.

There have been a few bumps too including injuries and illnesses. For instance, a serious month-long bout of dengue while playing a pre-Olympics tournament in Canada impacted her performance in Rio de Janeiro (in 2016). Then, another illness struck that scuppered her hopes of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Ponnappa suffered a serious back injury the same year as her Commonwealth Games success. Since then, she hasn’t been able to follow the same fitness routine as the other shuttlers. “Any badminton player’s off-court training routine includes a whole lot of running.

But my back injury was so serious that I couldn’t run at all. I simply couldn’t do the training that everyone else on the squad was doing," recalls Ponnappa, who has ever since been doing off-court and strength training separate from the rest of the team. Training six days a week, three times a day
Now that Ponnappa is in her mid-30s, she trains smart and not hard, she says.

She has been working with her own strength and conditioning coach Deckline Leitao, who takes into account her back injury and the limitations owing to it. Ponnappa has been training with Leitao, who has a degree in sports science and certifications from National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), for several years now. Typically, she trains with him six days a week three times a day, with each session lasting between an hour to 90 minutes.