The defeat was hard to take. The manner of it, however, offered PV Sindhu and her team something to take away.

Wang Zhi Yi had just ended Sindhu's bid for a sixth BWF World Championships medal on Thursday, beating her 21-11, 15-21, 21-17 in an 88-minute pre-quarterfinal at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium. The Chinese third seed, five years younger than Sindhu, had survived a demanding three-game battle and cramps to keep her title hopes alive.

Sindhu was disappointed when she walked into the mixed zone afterwards. But she was not physically spent. There was enough left in the tank to discuss the match, the moments that got away and the impatience that hurt her.

That, perhaps, was the more telling takeaway. The next phase of Sindhu's career could be shaped as much by science as by skill. (Photo: )

The World Championships ended without the home medal Sindhu wanted. But at 31, after years in which injuries and questions about her movement had become recurring themes, she had gone deep into a match against one of the world's best and still had plenty to say afterwards.

The engine room is working. The work on it began months ago.

No quarter given as Wang Zhi Yi rivals Pusarla V. Sindhu .#BWFWorldChampionships #NewDelhi2026 pic.twitter.com/aa2GgrSqSO— BWF (@bwfmedia) August 20, 2026

The stress fracture in her left foot, suffered after the 2022 Commonwealth Games, began a difficult stretch. Sindhu eventually recovered, but the months that followed often had the feel of a player desperately trying to rediscover her old self.

Then came another setback in 2025. In October, Sindhu and her team decided to shut down her season after a foot injury and hamstring issue. It was not an easy decision for a player who had spent most of her career pushing through tournament after tournament. But this time, the priority was to give her body a proper recovery window and avoid compromising the following season.

That was when Wayne Lombard, Sindhu's head of performance, began his second stint with her. He calls the approach "reverse engineering".

"I think it's a really good observation," Lombard tells the Badminton Association of India, recalling the decision to end the season.

"When they reached out again in October, she had the foot injury and then when we had a look at everything we said we need to shut the season down. If we didn't shut the season down I think it would have really affected this year."

The decision was to start again by asking what Sindhu needed to do on a badminton court, and then work backwards.

"A couple of things that we needed to look at is not only from what she's doing on court but what she's doing off court," Lombard says.

"Everything that affects performance, sleep, nutrition, what the physio is doing, what the S&C is doing from a full performance team perspective."

The team around Sindhu includes Lombard, sports physiotherapist Heera Mundluru and coach Irwansyah, with nutrition and strength-and-conditioning specialists also part of the wider support structure. The emphasis has not been on simply making Sindhu work harder. It has been making the work more specific.

"I'm a big process-driven person," Lombard says.

"The outcome is not so important for me. Hopefully that the outcome takes care of itself and we get the processes right."

For Sindhu, those processes have increasingly been built around data.

Indoor badminton rules out conventional GPS tracking, so Sindhu's team uses an accelerometer-based inertial movement system instead, extracting distance covered, change of direction, the numbers behind what the eye sees.

The value isn't the distance itself. It's knowing where opponents are targeting her.

"Over the last couple of things I've got a map of different matches from one to 12 o'clock and we can see exactly where everyone is targeting her high-intensity movements and where the slightly low-intensity movements are going," Lombard says. "And then we can start mimicking that in training as well. So, OK, we're doing a lot of work there, but maybe we need to move a little bit faster in this direction or whatever it might be."

One number stood out: 4.1 kilometres, the distance covered in a single match at the Japan Open. From there the team built a second metric, player load, a composite of acceleration, changes of direction and other movements, and started grading training sessions against it.

"We start looking at the data per minute so we get the intensity, we get the load and then we start comparing that to what happens in training and are we matching that," Lombard says.

"In the training we give the coach a value so we're at 85% of match intensity, 85% of match load or whatever it might be."

It is not simply about preparing Sindhu to run more. It is about making her comfortable with the kind of movement and intensity that an elite opponent can produce.

"And especially the top players like your Chinese players and someone like An Se-young," Lombard says. "It also gives Sindhu a lot more confidence. OK, we've done it in training, whatever they throw at me in the game, it's OK."

That confidence in her body is visible in the way Sindhu is playing again.

There is still the big rear-court attack. But there is more variety around it. She is prepared to play longer rallies. The net game has become a more prominent part of her construction of points. Drops from the rear court can change the rhythm. She does not always need to force the finish.

The Japan Open was the clearest evidence. In July, Sindhu became the first Indian to win the tournament, beating reigning world champion Akane Yamaguchi 21-17, 21-17 in the final. It was her first major title in nearly two years and her first Super 750 crown since 2018.

That change has also come from treating recovery as part of the performance programme rather than something that happens after training.

"I think what a lot of people forget is that the recovery has to be planned just like your training," Lombard says.

His approach can be counter-intuitive. Rather than layering on ice baths and the usual one-percenters, he sometimes strips recovery back to nothing.

"Sometimes I actually take away a lot of the recovery modalities that you're doing, ice bath or whatever the one-percenters are looking for, because I want physiology to do the work. I want physiology to adapt to the training," Lombard says. "And then we start seeing a switch in how quickly she's recovering. Because now we starved the body, if we can call it that, of some of these modalities and then as we start adding them in, we start seeing how the recovery starts actually improving."

Sleep is treated with the same specificity. Badminton does not make a conventional eight-hour sleep schedule easy. Match timings are often confirmed late at night. A player can finish late, eat, recover and then discover that the next day's match is scheduled at an awkward hour.

The solution is to look at the entire 24-hour cycle.

"What we try to look at is that in a 24-hour period can we get at least 10 hours of sleep regardless of when it is," Lombard says. Sindhu's team has moved beyond the eight-hour rule, focusing on quality sleep across 24 hours. (AP Photo)

That can mean combining overnight sleep with naps.

"If she gets seven hours there, can we find another space for another two or three hours of decent sleep somewhere else? And we find that really works well for her."

"We kind of time it so it's either 30 minutes or 90 minutes, nothing between," Lombard says.

The reason is sleep latency. A 45-minute nap, he explains, can leave an athlete feeling tired and lethargic after waking.

"We've moved away from that eight-hour theory a little bit," he says. "We're looking at if we can get quality 10 hours in a 24-hour period, then we're moving in the right direction."

There is more technology around Sindhu than the movement tracker. Lombard's team uses Whoop, while another device, Temple, is being trialled alongside it for a second layer of internal-load data. Temple tracks the familiar, heart rate, heart-rate variability, but is also beginning to probe cognitive function, an area Lombard admits the science hasn't caught up to yet.

"It will be really interesting to see how heart-rate variability and cognitive function all affects performance as well," he says. "Still in the early days of collecting that data and seeing how it works." The tiny Temple device is helping Sindhu's team collect more performance data. (AP Photo)

Its size is part of the attraction. "It's quite exciting because it's a really small device, you don't feel it, it's sitting there, it's out your way."

"Sometimes wearable technology moves faster than the science can keep up," Lombard says.

For the performance team, though, more data is useful only if it changes a decision.

"The more information we get, it just informs our decisions," he says. "We say, OK, we think we're seeing this, is it actually what we are seeing? Have a look at the data and then we can just adjust accordingly."

The 2025 shutdown was important for another reason. Sindhu needed to trust her body again, not just heal.

"We actually said take a break now, go to America," Lombard says.

The confidence was not restored overnight. Lombard describes the progression over the following months as incremental.

"It's like almost like it's one step a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better." A pain-free Sindhu is giving herself a fresher mind and a better platform to compete. ( Photo)

Sindhu herself could see it. Before the World Championships, she spoke about the information her team was getting from the technology around her.

"You have all these gadgets now to record your strain, how tired you are, can you push yourself or not," Sindhu said.

"These are some metrics where you make sure and take precautions that, okay, maybe tomorrow it's a different kind of training that you do."

"Physically and mentally, it's been quite good. I'm able to actually see the changes in my game and in my movement."

There is an acceptance, too, that elite sport does not come with perfect physical days.

"There are days when I know I can't be 100 percent," Sindhu said. "I need to figure out how to get the job done when I am 60 percent. All the players do it."

That is where experience becomes valuable.

Lombard does not see age as the defining issue. When asked about Sindhu's ability to keep playing at this level, he talks about the very basic aspect of athletes taking up sport: the love for the game.

"It's not about age, it's about whether she's still enjoying the process," he says.

And Sindhu, he says, remains one of the easiest elite athletes to work with.

"I honestly feel she's probably one of the best professionals to work with."

She asks questions. She takes information. She tries things.

"When I said to them, let's try the GPS and see if we can get some information from it, open to it," Lombard says.

That openness matters because the science is not being imposed on an unwilling athlete.

"She's willing to take advice and try and implement it and then if it doesn't work then we have those conversations."

The team around her matters, too.

"I think if you've got an athlete who's open to input from the team, I'm just the guy that steers the ship to make sure everything's working as well as we can make it work."

And after more than 15 years of elite badminton, Lombard believes there is little point simply adding more work for the sake of it.

"When someone like Sindhu, who's played badminton for so long, probably less is more sometimes," he says. "Trying to keep the quality really high, the volume doesn't always need to be as high."

"She's done so much badminton and she knows it backwards, she knows her body better than what we know," Lombard says. "We are just giving her more information."

Sindhu is part of a generation that has refused to disappear. Akane Yamaguchi is 29. Ratchanok Intanon and Nozomi Okuhara are 31. Their longevity is not simply a matter of having preserved the bodies they had at 20. The game has changed, and so have they.

There is still the big rear-court attack. But there is more variety around it now, longer rallies, a sharper net game, drops that change the rhythm of a point without forcing its end.

We could see it this week. In fact, all year long.

“Not sure if Wang had an injury or if it was a tactic. I should have been a bit more patient in the end. Disappointed, obviously disappointed. Happy with my fitness. I will be more determined to win.”PV Sindhu's first reaction after losing to China's Wang Zhi Yi in the Round of pic.twitter.com/4PSfQ5tvWl— India Today Sports (@ITGDsports) August 20, 2026

"Physiology loves consistency," Lombard says.

From January 2027, badminton changes again. Best of three to 15, not 21, the rally-point era's biggest reform in two decades, approved by BWF's members in April and set to take effect on 4 January. Whether it favours a player built on variety and economy, or punishes anyone slow out of the blocks, nobody yet knows.

What is clear is which Sindhu will find out. Not the one who spent 2024 fighting her own foot. The one Lombard spent a year rebuilding.

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