A niggling pain in her right knee threatened to derail Shanti Pereira's route to a stellar 2023, a year that saw the Singapore sprint queen stamp her mark in Asia and Europe.
The 27-year-old competed in 47 individual races in 2023 - her most in a season - but the pain meant that she could not even train at times, her coach Luis Cunha told The Straits Times in a recent interview.
A meeting with Dr Nikos Apostolopoulos, 62, the founder and developer of microStretching - a technique of low-intensity gentle stretching followed by 10 stretching sessions ahead of the World Championships in Budapest last August, helped resolve Pereira's issue.
Cunha said: "The pain was a consequence of something else that we were able to identify early in January, but we were never able to find the solution to fix the root.
The root was an imbalance in the right hip, which leads to an imbalance in her stride.
"What I can tell you is that she was in pain, and then the pain disappeared (after seeing Dr Apostolopoulos)." Pereira went on to break her national 200m record with a 22.57second effort as she became the first Singaporean to reach the semi-finals of the world athletics meet, earning a Paris Olympics spot in the process.
Bu hikaye The Straits Times dergisinin January 10, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The Straits Times dergisinin January 10, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
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