Badminton legend Gopichand turns mental fitness trainer

Pullella Gopichand, Director – Dhyana, Head Coach of the Indian Badminton Team says, "The ability to stay positive and focus-driven is a quality that one needs to cultivate, particularly in these trying times when most of our goals for the year have been waylaid by the pandemic."

Hyderabad: Dhyana, one of India’s leading meditation and mindfulness tracking brands, which launched the world’s first OTC (Over-the-Counter) meditation tracker in 2019, has announced the launch of a new set of carefully curated guided meditation sessions for athletes on the Dhyana app called ‘Dhyana for Sports’.

Designed with the Chief National Coach of the Indian Badminton team and Director of Dhyana, Pullela Gopichand, each of the sessions voiced by himself is inspired from his personal experience around conditioning and building the mental strength of world-renowned and Olympic-winning athletes like P.V. Sindhu, Saina Nehwal, Paruppali Kashyap, Kidambi Srikanth, B Sai Praneeth, RMV Gurusaidutt, Satwik Sairaj, Sikki Reddy, B Sumeeth Reddy, Siril Verma, H.S Prannoy, Sameer Verma, Sourabh Verma and others.

Pullela Gopichand

The 10 sessions in the ‘Dhyana for Sports’ section in the app, named Uniting Your Innerself, Forgive, Winner Instincts, Gratitude, Stillness, Visualization, Strengthen Discipline, Pre-Workout, Post-Workout and End of the Day, are tailor-made for athletes for assisting them in monitoring and analysing their state of meditation in order to help inculcate a champion’s mindset.

This is done with the help of the Dhyana wearable ring that is capable of measuring the constant variation in milliseconds between a user’s heartbeats (HRV) which along with advanced algorithms in the app simplifies a meditation session into three core tenets –Breathing – This analysis tells a user how deep and focused their breaths are

Focus – This is an intelligent guide in the app’s interface that understands a user’s emotional state and trains them to concentrate better.

Relaxation – This is a live wave that visualises the state of mind - the calmer the mind, the more tranquil the wave.

The meditation-tracking feature can also be accessed without the ring in the ‘Dhyana Lite’ mode where a finger placed over the smartphone camera can give a user information related to their HRV and related data. The Dhyana Lite mode is designed to make tech-assisted meditation accessible to even more people during the ongoing pandemic, to help athletes and others alike build and strengthen their mental wellness.

Pullella Gopichand, Director – Dhyana, Head Coach of the Indian Badminton Team says, “The ability to stay positive and focus-driven is a quality that one needs to cultivate, particularly in these trying times when most of our goals for the year have been waylaid by the pandemic."

We designed ‘Dhyana for Sports’ to help athletes and others alike achieve a strong emotional wellbeing, motivate them and enable them to focus on the road to excellence. Victory doesn’t always go to the stronger or the faster person. It ultimately goes to the stronger mind, the tougher spirit. I am certain that these guided sessions will prove to be fruitful to anyone wanting to become the best version of themselves.”