Mirabai Chanu wins India’s first gold medal Commonwealth Games, ‘can snatch over 90kg’ physio claims

Nearly 20 minutes into her warm-up routine, Mirabai Chanu shows otherworldly ranges of flexibility not a lot not like Neeraj Chopra’s insane drugs ball stretch, which broke the web final 12 months.

With a resistance band wrapped round her proper leg, she lies down on her abdomen, bends the precise knee, and brings it up and below the chest whereas the left leg stays stretched straight. Then, as an alternative of remaining static in that place, she pulls her hip again and brings it ahead in order to open it up and activate the muscle tissue earlier than she begins the heavy lifting.

Then, with straps round her calves, Mirabai will get right into a crab place, raises one arm overhead, adopted by a leg and spins like a windmill. It’s excruciating to even watch however she does it the identical approach she lifts iron that’s twice occasions her physique weight – with a pleasant, huge smile.

“She is one of the most determined lifters I’ve ever worked with,” weightlifting coach and physiotherapist Aaron Horschig, who has labored with Olympic weightlifters, worldwide footballers, baseball gamers and American footballers, tells The Indian Express.

“Most don’t see the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work Mira puts into keeping her body healthy and training to achieve her success. If you want to be the best in the world, you need to not only train hard and work to lift big weights, but also do the little things ‘behind the scenes’ to keep the body in working shape.”

All this, only for one fundamental objective – enhance her efficiency within the snatch.

Not at her peak

That the Indian lifter would defend the 49kg gold medal on the Commonwealth Games was a foregone conclusion. The 27-year-old, in any case, has dominated her weight class on the CWG like a monarch. She completed with a complete of 201kg, 29kg greater than silver-medal winner Marie Ranaivosoa.

What makes Chanu’s top-of-the-podium end on Saturday much more particular is that she, in line with her coach Vijay Sharma, wasn’t competing at her peak. “The Olympic qualification events as well as the World Championship will be in December. It’s tough to maintain a lifter’s peak for so long. So, our aim will be to just check how far we have progressed,” Sharma had informed this paper earlier than Saturday’s occasion.

The craving for progress is essentially within the snatch section. Like Chopra, who’s chasing the 90m mark in javelin throw, Mirabai, too, is concentrating on the identical quantity. Apart from one lifter from China, Hou Zhihui (96kg), nobody has managed a 90kg-plus snatch raise within the 49kg class. Hence, for Mirabai – among the many few on the earth who can problem the Chinese – it’s a major goal.

Chanu holds the world report within the clear and jerk (119kg) part of the occasion however in snatch, the place the barbell must be lifted above the top in a single swift movement, her private better of 88kg, twice her body weight of 49kg – which she equalled on Saturday together with her second try – is eight kilos lower than the world report held by China’s Zhihui.

“Our main aim is to close this gap by the time we reach the Paris Olympics while remaining injury-free,” Sharma had mentioned. “At this level, ek-ek gram improve karna mushkil hai (improvement by even a gram is difficult). So, even if we improve our snatch score by 1kg in every competition we take part in, I’ll be happy because then, we’ll be in a position to fight with the Chinese lifters.”

To add that ‘one kilo’ in each competitors, Chanu and her group have been placing in numerous hours behind the scenes.

Sharma, who has been teaching Chanu for near a decade, had been following Horschig’s movies on YouTube – the place he uploaded Chanu’s total warm-up and coaching video on Friday – when she suffered an damage and acquired in contact with him. After preliminary exchanges, they travelled to St Louis, USA, in late 2020 to satisfy Horschig in individual. Since then, they’ve been visiting the ability ceaselessly.

Chanu can ‘snatch over 90kg’

Horschig, who made it his precedence to ‘fix’ Chanu earlier than the Tokyo Olympics, says the lifter ‘has the strength to snatch over 90kg but requires some minor adjustments in technique and stability.’

“For example,” he says, “Mira had a small deficit in left shoulder external rotation strength and stability which would lead her to have some very small compensation when snatching. At moderate weights, the problem wasn’t consequential, but at extreme loads, these problems lead to missed lifts. So, enhancing stability and control was one focus.”

When in St Louis, Chanu would go to Horschig thrice per week and spend an hour and a half ‘working on enhancing her stability and control with corrective exercise work.’ The remainder of the times have been spent within the health club.

For occasion, small cross balls can be positioned subsequent to her shoulder blades to work on the smooth tissues, which might assist in upward motion of the shoulder blades. The clean upward rotation is necessary to get into a superb overhead place for a snatch raise, Horschig explains. And Chanu, previous to the Tokyo Olympics, was ‘inefficient’ on this division.

“We are constantly making adjustments in her training warm-up and rehab work to ensure that she is able to minimise the severity of these small issues so they don’t become big problems with side-track training,” he says.

Horschig, who has competed on the nationwide degree within the US, says Chanu’s willingness to study and infinite motivation set her other than most lifters.

“If you ask her to do a certain exercise for “x” quantity of reps at “x” tempo, she is going to execute it with the identical depth she does a contest raise. You will hear her depend out each second of the tempo “one, two, three” and by no means skip a repetition,” he says. “Many stronger lifters may see these as basic or too simple or reject the idea that they fit into the training aspect of a world-level weightlifter. (But) Mirabai knows and has seen the difference when she performs these alongside her heavy training.”

It’s these mundane particulars, in any case, that can determine whether or not she will be able to improve her Olympic silver medal in Paris two years from now. Chanu is aware of.