How ‘gymnast’ Pant vaulted back to fitness

Even those who believed in Pant’s mental fortitude thought it could take at least a few years for Pant to return.

The doctors who attended on him and ran a string of surgeries on his battered body in February last year reckoned it would be at least 24 months before he gets back to playing. Mind you, they were not talking about professional, hard-nosed, fast-paced cricket.

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Those were the odds. Pant has defied them. About a week from now, the 26-year-old will be walking out for the toss as Delhi Capitals’ captain in Mohali, and he is expected to don duties as both a batter and a ‘keeper.

Nishanta Bordoloi, the strength and conditioning coach at NCA, told bcci.tv on Saturday that Pant’s gymnastics background was a ‘big asset’ in his ‘miraculous’ recovery.

Pant needed to have a little more than just being an athlete go his way to come back from that. Maybe then gymnastics during his formative years did have a part to play, but the surprising bit is that few people even knew of Pant’s tryst with the sport.

Perhaps his rotund silhouette has something to do with that, but think back on the times he has performed a kip-up, a back-flip or a front-flip, and you can see the remnants of his childhood.

Shankar Basu, the former strength and conditioning coach of the Indian team, says he noticed his gymnastics background in the way he moved when he arrived on the international scene in 2018.

“Ah, Pant, the gymnast. That’s a story (laughs),” Basu told DH. “I saw him moving and I knew he had some kind of a gymnastics background, those kinds of flips don’t come naturally to everyone. That was around the Nidahas Trophy (2018). When I told him I knew about his background, he was stunned. I don’t think many people knew about that. I initially thought he learnt those moves from the TV or something but the more I saw him, the more certain I was that he had some formal training in gymnastics. Turns out, I was right.”

“He has done a lot of gymnastics in his formative years,” he added.

That does explain how Pant would go on to become such an integral force for the Indian team in the last few years with his nimble feet and unnatural strength, but it still doesn’t quite reveal how he was able to rehabilitate at the rate at which he did.

Besides flexibility, gymnastics allows for a greater range of motion, improved muscle strength, mind-muscle connection and a larger neural network to work with.

What all this means is that the muscles involved in recovery will be more involved in the process of said recovery in comparison to others who are not gymnasts. Most athletes have this advantage over common folk, but gymnasts have it better because of constant contraction and full utilisation of all muscles of the body.

“Most athletes recover faster because their muscles are more robust and they have stronger ligaments,” says renowned knee surgeon Sanjay Hegde. “Usually, you can’t do anything much for six months, no loading, but after that, you can start loading and slowly get back, but 15 months in his case is unusually quick.”

Dhananjay Kaushik, lead physiotherapist at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, revealed the extent of damage to bcci.tv. “… in his right knee alone: Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), Posterior Cruciate Ligament, Lateral Collateral Ligament (LCL), Medial Collateral Ligament (MCL), Popliteus Muscle in the lower leg as well as a part of the quadriceps… you name it and he didn’t have it.”

No wonder, Amit Bandan, a city-based senior physiotherapist, is also surprised by Pant’s swift recovery.

“Usually, after a surgery the muscles around the ligaments will atrophy (shrink), which is why we have started doing physiotherapy as soon as the surgery is over,” Bandan said. “The athlete in question would not have lost a lot of muscle but he would have had to get his mind to move those muscles properly. That’s the hard part, and then to trust those muscles and load the knee… it’s so hard. It’s amazing that he recovered so quickly.”

As they say, ‘you can’t keep a good man down’, least of all a once-upon-a-time gymnast Pant.