Virat Kohli at 38: How he changed Indian cricketers' fitness, diet and recovery habits

Virat Kohli turned 38 today. Fans and former teammates are wishing him well, and the debate over his best innings has started again. But as he celebrates another birthday as an active international cricketer, his most lasting contribution, more than his runs, does not show up in the scorecard. He changed the way Indian cricketers prepare their bodies and then led the whole team down the same path.

Former India opener Virender Sehwag said this year that Kohli brought fitness culture to Indian cricket. Sehwag called him the fittest cricketer of this era.

Until a few years ago, fitness was the front on which Indian cricket lagged. Former coach Ravi Shastri has said India was far behind Australia, New Zealand and England in this respect. Kohli's own journey began here too. In his early days he was talented but a little heavy. After the 2012 tour of Australia, he decided to take fitness seriously.

The real change came when he started working with trainer Shankar Basu. It has been reported that the two spoke in 2014 and began working together from the following season. They borrowed ideas from track and field and built a precise weight programme based on speed and power. Basu says Kohli was the first cricketer to train like an Olympic athlete. In the 2016 IPL, Kohli began lifting weights on the morning of every match so that his muscles were awake before play. Basu has also said that looking fit is one thing and being athletically fit is another.

His diet changed greatly too. Kohli earlier relied on weights and plenty of red meat. He says this produced a strong athlete, but Test cricket needed something else. He gave up favourites such as chole bhature, aloo parathas and samosas. After health problems on the 2018 tour of South Africa, he became a vegetarian. Soon afterwards he wrote on social media that, as a vegetarian athlete, he realised many of his beliefs about food were myths.

According to reports, he eats very little dairy and relies more on tofu and soy. He drinks plenty of water through the day and occasionally eats something he likes. After his innings of 235 against England, Basu told him to eat whatever he wanted that night, and Kohli ordered a chicken burger and removed the top bun.

The clearest mark of the new culture was the Yo-Yo test, a shuttle-run endurance test. It came in around 2017 under Kohli's captaincy, with the pass mark set at 16.1 and later raised to 16.5. Players such as Ambati Rayudu, Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina were left out of the team after failing it. The message was clear: scoring runs alone would not be enough.

Kohli applied the same yardstick to himself. In 2023 he posted a score of 17.2 on Instagram, although the BCCI objected to players making their scores public. Shubman Gill topped that camp with 18.7. After India's 1-3 defeat in the 2024-25 Border-Gavaskar series, it was reported that the board was considering bringing back the Yo-Yo test as a strict requirement.

The effect showed most among the fast bowlers. According to Basu, from 2015 fitness was treated as a new skill, like batting, bowling and fielding, and not as a mere formality. The management wanted a pace group that could keep going. Bumrah was brought into Tests quickly, and Basu helped Mohammed Shami rebuild after the difficult period of 2017 and 2018. Indian fast bowlers sustaining their speed over five days has been central to this change.

Ankit Kaliyar, who later became India's strength and conditioning coach, says Kohli built culture and discipline in the team. According to him, when the top player is that fit, the rest follow. Kaliyar also said that in batting, skill and fitness, Gill follows Kohli's path. In 2019, Gill, Khaleel Ahmed and Kuldeep Yadav said they wanted to reach the level set by Kohli and Rohit Sharma. Rohit once said that Kohli never went to the National Cricket Academy's experts in his entire career, and asked young players to learn from that hunger.

Rest is the part nobody sees. In a tweet during an ODI series, Kohli described his idea of a good day: training, massage, a recovery pool session, good food and long sleep. Recently he called sleep the foundation of his routine and said that when sleep is good, there is no need for separate recovery such as ice baths or pool sessions. He has been just as open about mental health. Citing his struggle on the 2014 tour of England, he has said repeatedly that Indian cricket needs professional help for mental health.

At 38, Kohli has retired from Tests and T20 internationals and now plays ODIs. The 2027 World Cup is his next big goal. How long he lasts in that race will depend on the routine he built years ago. Whatever his final run tally, the proof of his influence is in the dressing room around him. Young Indian players today are expected to lift weights, run, eat carefully and sleep on time, and most of them learnt these habits by watching Kohli.