Indian Women’s Hockey midfielder Monika Malik reveals the high intensity training done by the players

The Indian Women’s hockey team are training hard at the Sai Centre in Bangalore as they prepare for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. However, the training gets even tougher on Saturday morning when the players go through the high-intensity sessions. These training sessions are known among the players as Red Sessions.

Elaborating on the highly energy-sapping training session, Indian Women’s team midfielder Monika said that these sessions were mostly done so that the players can get an experience of the match level intensity in training.

She said, “It is always a red session. Red sessions are mostly higher-intensity training sessions where we focus on match intensity with the idea of superseding match intensity with small-sided variations.”

“Each session is either focused on speed or endurance or direction focused. We have about two-three such sessions a week. Those are the days when our fitness levels are really tested. Each day we train anywhere between 2 hours to 4.5 hours.”

The 27-year-old who hails from Chandigarh also explained how the coaching staff are working hard to schedule week on week training so that the team can peak at the right time. “The focus now is to keep improving on our strengths and work on the week points. Our aim is to peak at the right time. Every player’s workload is taken into consideration and improvement is mapped accordingly.”

“Our awareness about each session, how it helps, what it’s for etc is much better now than before. Earlier, we would just blindly focus what coaches said,” she added.

This is not the first time Monika Malik will be travelling to the Olympics with the Indian Women’s Hockey team. She has already made her debut at the 2016 Rio Olympics where she was part of the Women’s team. So she understands the challenge and the intensity that the Indian Eves need to maintain to have any chance in Tokyo.

She further revealed that every player is given a chart that’s uploaded on to Google docs where the Scientific Advisor Wayne Lombard monitors the basics such as sleep, recovery, etc.

The midfielder said, “Surely, we have become more tech-savvy. We maintain a chart that has details of what we do the entire day. The team needs to mention details of activity it pursues for recoveries such as number of minutes spent for massage or ice bath or pool session etc. We also record the number of hours we sleep. I feel by doing these activities on our own, the coaching staff also inculcated a lot more awareness about how we must take care of our bodies and remain injury free.”

There is not much time left for the Summer Games and Monika assures that the Indian team is mentally prepared for the big event. However, the main drawback for them was when some of the players got tested positive for the virus and did not train for a few weeks.