When, at the successful conclusion of his Wimbledon fourth round epic this year against Richard Gasquet, Andy Murray pulled back his T-shirt sleeve to reveal an unexpectedly decent bicep, he was sending out a message. I’m paraphrasing, but the message read something like: “I’m not a lanky, sulky teenager with a propensity for pulling a muscle on a weekly basis anymore: I’m an elite, highly tuned athlete.”
All right, he got minced by Rafa in the next round but the message seemed to get through. On being quizzed about his new ‘punch me there’ washboard stomach and all-round improved fitness level, Murray raised a few eyebrows with the revelation that he had incorporated a spot of Bikram yoga into his training regime. For the uninitiated, this is basically ‘ordinary’ yoga performed in what amounts to a sauna. Doing stretching exercises in temperatures of 40°C and high humidity would be hard enough for anyone but for a lad born and raised in Scotland, not a land noted for its balmy climate, it must have been doubly tough.
But could Bikram yoga work for table tennis players? Are there any other alternative approaches to training that table tennis players should consider? Or, if they want to improve, should table tennis players just concentrate on playing lots and lots of table tennis, maybe going on the odd run for stamina when the mood takes them?
Ian Pyper, strength and conditioning coach at the English Institute of Sport, has worked with many of England’s top players. He very much recommends keeping an open mind when it comes to training. “I would definitely not rule out using any form of yoga-based training with any sports person, no matter what their sport is; it is a form of core training which really means providing the key link between the upper and lower body - but it is definitely not the only way of training the core.”
Pyper does, however, warn of falling for fitness fads. “When a mainstream sports person backs a certain type of training, more often than not it can just be a good bit of marketing by a person or company that happens to be in the right place at the right time. Often ‘new’ types of training are just repackaged and renamed types of old training that people have been doing for hundreds of years.”
From a brief vox pop of players and coaches, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of yoga, Bikram blend or otherwise, having hit the table tennis scene in a big way to date. But that does not mean that the sport hasn’t got to grips with other approaches to performance enhancement that take place well away from the table tennis table.
