The medal is only the beginning: How athletes can prepare for the next challenge
Team effort: The author worked with a number of Indian athletes for the Asian Games, such as Anahat Singh who won a singles silver in squash. | Photo Credit: PTI
Team effort: The author worked with a number of Indian athletes for the Asian Games, such as Anahat Singh who won a singles silver in squash. | Photo Credit: PTI
By the time you read this, the flame in Japan will have been extinguished. India’s contingent of around 500 athletes will have returned home with more than 80 medals.
I’ll be honest. This has been one of the busiest stretches my team and I have had in a long time. Late-night calls across time zones, meal plans rewritten because a heat was rescheduled, hydration tweaked after a weigh-in went sideways.
Tiring? Yes.
Is it worth it? Every single time.
Twenty years of working with athletes has taught me one thing — a medal is built over years, but the next one starts taking shape in the next 30 days.
The first 72 hours
Every athlete has the same instinct after a big event. Eat everything you’ve denied yourself for six months, sleep at odd hours and skip training because you’ve earned it. You have. But your body doesn’t read the medal table.
Competition leaves you depleted. Glycogen levels are low, muscles carry micro damage, and immunity tends to dip after a long, high-stress training block. That’s why so many athletes return home and catch a cold within a week.
Keep the first three days simple. Include carbohydrates in every meal: rice, rotis, poha, idli or sweet potato. Aim for around 20 to 30 grams of protein every three to four hours, whether from eggs, paneer, dal with curd, chicken or fish. And drink properly, because a long flight can leave you dehydrated even when you’re sitting still.
Sleep is your best supplement. Japan is only three and a half hours ahead of India, so jet lag is mild, but post-competition adrenaline can keep many athletes wired at night. Dim the lights and stop rewatching your own highlights at 1 am.
Have the biryani or your mother’s mithai. One celebration meal can’t hurt anyone. Two weeks of celebrating does.
Weeks two to six: where next season is decided
This is where bronze medallists quietly become gold medallists or where champions quietly slip.
Get your bloods done: Check ferritin, haemoglobin, Vitamin D, B12, thyroid and a basic hormone panel. I’ve seen athletes train for months with low iron and blame their coach. Women athletes, if your periods went missing during the build-up, that isn’t dedication. It’s a sign of low energy availability and needs attention now.
Watch the drift: Two or three kilos in the off-season is normal. Eight to 10 means you could spend the first few months of the next season fixing the off-season rather than building on it. Scale back your carbohydrate intake to match lighter training, but keep protein steady. Muscle is expensive to build and cheap to lose.
Repair the gut: Weeks of travel, unfamiliar food, supplements and stress take a toll. Go back to home-cooked food. Curd, buttermilk, idli and dosa, kanji, plenty of vegetables and whole grains. A happy gut absorbs better, and absorption is everything in sport.
Audit your supplements: Many athletes come home with a bag of powders someone recommended in the warm-up area. Anything you take must be batch-tested. One contaminated tub can end a career, and Indian sport has seen that happen far too often.
From bronze to gold
Some of our athletes in Aichi-Nagoya stood on the podium more than once, collecting silver and bronze medals across events. Athletes like that don’t need to change everything. They need the last one per cent, and most podium finishers are in the same position.
That one per cent rarely comes from a new supplement. It comes from boring things done every day. Never skipping breakfast. Fuelling before training, not just after. Rehearsing competition-day nutrition in training so race day feels familiar. Knowing the sweat rate so hydration isn’t a guessing game. Getting stronger without getting heavier.
It also comes from the head. I’ve watched fourth-place finishers carry that result like a sack of cement for a whole year. Take a week to process what you feel. Talk to someone you trust. Then write down three specific things that could have changed your result, and work on them one at a time.
And for the teenagers who won medals in Japan, this is the time to build habits that last 15 years, not 15 weeks.
My team and I will soon be back to our usual routine. Blood reports, kitchen conversations with parents, the odd 6 am call from a training camp. Honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Our own on the podium
A special word for the athletes my team and I have worked with. Anahat Singh won silver in women’s singles squash, becoming the first Indian woman to reach the final, after fighting back from two games down in the semi-final.
Abhay Singh took silver in men’s singles. Velavan Senthilkumar won bronze in mixed doubles with Joshna Chinappa, his first Asian Games medal, after a semi-final loss by a single point. And Mairaj Ahmad Khan claimed bronze in the men’s skeet team event alongside Anantjeet Singh Naruka and Bhavtegh Singh Gill. At 50, it is Mairaj’s first Asian Games medal, 20 years after his debut.
And to both cricket teams: back-to-back gold medals. Shreyas Iyer’s men beat Pakistan in the final, with Abhishek Sharma firing at the top. Harmanpreet Kaur’s side, featuring Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, Richa Ghosh and Renuka Singh Thakur, won India’s first gold of these Games.
You made the country proud. You made us prouder.
To every Indian athlete who wore the tricolour in Japan, thank you. Rest well, eat well and start the next chapter with intent.
Published on Oct 31, 2026
More stories from this issue
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.