Lakshya Sen on Champion Mindset, Olympic Heartbreak, Injuries & Comebacks | FO504 Raj Shamani
Indian badminton star Lakshya Sen discusses his journey to the Paris Olympics 2024 semifinals, his mental training philosophy, dealing with injuries and setbacks, and how he builds a champion mindset. He shares detailed insights into his pre-match routines, visualization techniques, and the psychological battles he faces both on and off the court.
Summary
Lakshya Sen, one of India's top badminton players, sits down for an in-depth conversation covering his entire athletic journey from childhood to the Paris Olympics 2024. He opens by reflecting on the heartbreak of the Paris Olympics, where he became the first Indian male badminton player to reach the semifinals, but ultimately finished fourth after losing the bronze medal match. He describes being so emotionally drained after the final that he locked himself in his room and didn't want to eat, before his family coaxed him out.
Sen discusses his early development as a player, including a formative experience at age 12 when he and his doubles partner wrote a handwritten letter to their coach Vimal Sir, pledging to work harder after losing to the same pair in multiple tournaments. He describes this as his introduction to manifestation and goal-setting — writing down aims and working toward them systematically.
A significant portion of the conversation focuses on overcoming fear of international opponents. Sen explains how as a young player, Chinese and Indonesian players seemed invincible, but through training camps abroad (including Indonesia at age 12) and gradually winning against these opponents, the fear dissipated. He articulates the philosophy that 'everyone has two hands, two legs, and the same racket' — a mindset instilled by his father and coach Prakash Padukone.
Sen provides an extraordinarily detailed breakdown of his match-day routine: waking at 7-8am even for evening matches, light cycling and mobility work, activation exercises, napping based on fitness tracker recovery scores, coach tactical discussions, music (Arijit Singh for calm, Karan Aujla and Badshah for energy), arriving at the stadium 90 minutes early for physiotherapy, taping, and progressively hitting target heart rates of 140-150 BPM during warmup to ensure he enters the match already in an optimal physiological state.
He discusses his mental training approach extensively, including working with a mental trainer who had him visualize losing to Shi Yuqi (world number one) three days before their All England encounter — a counterintuitive technique to remove the fear of losing to someone he had lost to three or four times previously. This 'lose first in your mind' strategy helped him win the match. He connects this to Napoleon's pre-battle visualization of all possible ways he could die, and Michael Phelps's similar technique.
Sen explains the concept of 'winning line fever' — how players leading 19-10 can paradoxically lose because the stress of protecting the lead causes physical stiffness and mental overthinking, while the trailing player attacks freely. He discusses breathing techniques (5 seconds in, 5 seconds out) for resetting between points.
The conversation also covers the infamous birth certificate FIR filed against him, which he faced with relative equanimity because his family's documentation was always in order, though he acknowledges it was hard on his father. He discusses the Indonesia Istora stadium's unique atmosphere, the technical aspects of shuttle drift caused by AC systems, racket weight (3U vs 4U), grip thickness, and what separates world number one Shi Yuqi from himself — primarily consistency across tournaments.
Finally, Sen discusses his post-Paris slump — six to seven months of first-round exits exacerbated by back-to-back injuries (ankle, shoulder, back) that prevented him from playing without painkillers. His recovery culminated in winning the Australian Open, which he describes as having to fight his 'inner demons' — doubts about whether he could even complete a match without pain.
Key Insights
- Sen and his mental trainer used a counterintuitive pre-match visualization strategy before the All England first round against world number one Shi Yuqi — deliberately visualizing himself losing across three days to remove the psychological fear accumulated from losing to him three or four times previously, only switching to winning visualization on match day itself.
- Sen describes his optimal performance state as a 'calm, cool, composed' automatic mode — not the aggressive 'inath' anger-driven state seen in Serbian athletes like Djokovic — and says attempts by coaches to make him play angrier actually hurt his performance, because his best badminton flows from internal stillness rather than external aggression.
- Sen explains that he targets a specific heart rate of 140-150 BPM during pre-match warmup — deliberately gasping for breath before the match starts — so that his body is already physiologically calibrated for competition, preventing the mental overthinking and physical stiffness that occurs when the heart rate spikes unexpectedly during the first few points.
- Sen describes the post-Paris period as the worst of his career — not the Olympics loss itself, but the subsequent six to seven months where back-to-back injuries (ankle, shoulder, back) meant he could not play without painkillers, causing him to withdraw from tournaments and doubt whether he could even complete a match, before ultimately winning the Australian Open.
- Sen articulates a specific theory about why leaders at 19-10 in badminton frequently lose: the player protecting a lead experiences stress-induced physical stiffness and begins playing 'to not lose' rather than to win, while the trailing player is in a dopamine-fueled attacking mindset with no psychological pressure, creating a structural disadvantage for the leader despite the scoreline.
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