The mantra that keeps Kohli ticking

When MS Dhoni announced his retirement from Test match cricket late last year, he left new captain Virat Kohli as the only Indian to have featured in all three formats of the game for a sustained period of time.

Look around the cricketing world, every team has its own few cricketers who have made all three playing XIs but few have done so for such a long period of time at such a level of excellence.

The current Indian set-up has the likes of Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, Ajinkya Rahane, Ravichandran Ashwin and Kohli, who have all been a part of the Indian playing XI in T20Is, ODIs and Tests but Kohli is the only player who has never had a question mark over his place in any of those sides in his career so far.

All the rest have had their problems tackling one or the other form, having also been dropped from the side.

Not so Kohli.

Add that to the two-month long IPL and here's a batsman who's invariably playing throughout the year.

It also makes one wonder the reasons behind his continued successes in the three formats of the game.

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Kohli himself puts it down to three simple things.

Train hard. Eat right. And sleep well.

"You go to the gym six times a week. You eat healthy. You get proper sleep. I think those things matter a lot in this day and age," he revealed.

"It might sound very boring, but these are the things that I keep a check on, on a daily basis. The meals that you have, the kind of training that you put in, the kind of recovery and rest that you put in."

It's often said cricket is as much a mental game as a physical one. Very often a player's mental toughness is credited as a factor when an apparently less-talented cricketer goes on to carve out a better career than a highly-talented one.

Kohli belongs to a different school of thought.

The world's number three batsman in the ICC's ODI Rankings not only believes both those aspects are related but also one's mental strength is a direct function of his physical capability.

"If your body is not supporting what you're doing then you're not able to focus mentally as well. I think you require physical strength to focus mentally and do what you're doing," he explained.

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"You might be mentally very strong, but if your body gives up after 40 of 50 runs, there's no use of you being able to think about the game."

In this day and age of the sport being played around the clock and across the formats, there is precious little downtime.

As a result, even short time-offs like the one between the ODI and Test series work as godsend for Kohli. It's good to train hard, he says, but equally vital to not overdo it.

"You need to find different ways of keeping yourself phsically fit and mentally fresh at the same time. It's very important to go away from the game as well whenever possible," he said.

"A lot of times we end up over-practising, but you don't realise how many games you play or how many practice sessions you attend anyway.

“Little windows that we have, like what we have after this series, that time is very important to manage.

"If you get too desperate to keep working or over-practice then your body will be fatigued. I think all these factors have to be kept in mind."

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