Former Indian skipper Virat Kohli’s passion for fitness is well-known. Kohli is also credited with improving the fitness levels of the Indian team as well. It is Kohli’s determination for being fit that he is considered as one of the fittest athletes around the world.
Speaking on the same, Basu Shanker, the strength and conditioning coach of Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), the team Kohli has been with since the inception of the Indian Premier League (IPL), while speaking on RCB Podcast Season 2, said that he has never seen a guy like Kohli and that his zeal towards excellence is mind-boggling.
“Virat has seen me training Deepika Pallikal (India squash player and the wife of Dinesh Karthik) and that time she was in the top 10. So, Kohli told me ‘don’t treat me like a cricketer and work with me like an individual athlete’. So, I told him you will have to train like an Olympic athlete and I used to quote Novak Djokovic to him then. I am not tired of telling this but I have never ever seen a guy like Virat Kohli. He can do the simple, most boring things of life every day and it does not matter whether he is performing or not (on the field). But that zeal and extraordinary passion towards excellence is mind boggling. It helped me put across my syllabus to him,” said Basu.
Basu, who has has worked with Team India in the past, also talked about an incident from 2014, which made some drastic changes to Kohli’s fitness regime.
“The onus of this change (passion for fitness) is on Virat. I have been seeing him since 2009. In 2014, he said he has a stiff back and can you do something about it? It was only for six weeks and we could not do much then. But in 2015, he said you should do a bigger role. So, I told him we will make a template for you and I will have to make drastic changes to the training that you are doing now. He asked a lot of technical questions and after several conversations back and forth, he said: ‘Ok let’s start,’ told Basu.
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