Are India’s hockey players fitter than Virat Kohli & Co?

Are all members of the Indian hockey team fitter than Virat Kohli, considered as the super athlete among elite cricketers? This may sound like a revelation, but Hardik Singh – a leading member of the bronze medallist hockey team in Paris Olympics – dropped a bombshell while comparing the results of their endurance tests.

Speaking at a recent podcast which has now gone viral, Hardik said: ‘’In cricket, if anyone is scoring 19 or 20 on the Yo-Yo test, people call it the fittest, whereas Sreejesh, who is a goalkeeper, scores 21 in the test.’’

No prizes for guessing that the midfielder’s dig is at the master batter, whose highest score in the test had been in the region of 19.  Manish Pandey, a former international who now plays in the IPL, has a recorded score of 19.7 as one of the all-time high for cricketers. 

 Not only that, the jaw dropped when Hardik claimed that their junior women’s hockey team’s Yo-Yo test scores were equal to that of Kohli. “The main level starts from 15 and there are eight sprints. It progresses until 23.8, which is the final level. We have seven players who have achieved 23.8,” said the vice-captain of the national team, who missed out on the Asian Champions Trophy gold due to an injury.

What then is the Yo-Yo Test, a common practice in disciplines like football and hockey till Kohli – then the national team captain – introduced it in cricket in collaboration with Shankar Basu, India’s strength and conditioning coach, in 2017 as a benchmark for selection?  

 In the early 1990s, Danish soccer physiologist Jens Bangsbo first introduced the 3200-meter test as a measure of fitness evolution. The term yo-yo originates from the way that a yo-yo is testing back-and-forth. The Bangsbo test replicated the activity pattern of soccer - including short bursts of high-intensity activity which would start and end with a beep, followed by brief recovery periods. The Yo-Yo Test gained popularity in European soccer and later emigrated to the courts of other team disciplines.

During the test, athletes run back and forth between two cones that are 20 meters apart and they need to reach the cone before the beep. The going gets tougher progressively as once they progress through each level, the beeps come more frequently and the athletes have to keep pace with it.

Once introduced in Indian cricket to keep up keep up with the changing mores of the sport, the minimum cut-off score was kept at 16.1 for national duty which saw a star batter like Suresh Raina being left out of the team once after failing to reach the mark. A number of other senior players suffered the same fate while Kohli, known for his work ethic and dedication to fitness, logged 17.2 in 2023.

Cricket: A stop-start sport

However, Chinmoy Roy – a former National Cricket Academy (NCA) trainer and an experienced strength and conditioning coach of Kolkata felt it would be unfair to draw conclusions about fitness on the basis of Yo-Yo Test findings alone. ‘’First up, any endurance test like this is determined by the need of the sport and hence, comparisons are unfair. While all tests are generically called an Yo-Yo test, they conduct an intermittent endurance test for sport like hockey or football where there is no time for recovery. For cricketers, what is conducted are intermittent recovery tests.

‘’The one for football or hockey hence is certainly tougher but let’s not forget that cricket is a stop-start sport where you essentially need short bursts of speed. The cricketers are required to complete a sprint between the two beeps and then get a few seconds of recovery time to catch their breath before running another lap, while there is no such gap for the footballer or hockey player,'' Roy broke it down for the National Herald.  

Explaining his point further on the dynamics of fitness in cricket, Roy said that the longest cricketing action on the pitch is while taking three runs. ‘’As I have seen in the NCA days, it takes nine seconds on average to complete three runs while someone like Mahendra Singh Dhoni excelled by completing it in 8.9 sec. Hence, the requirements of the two sports are different,’’ he reiterated.