Movement specialist Dr Vishwanath Prabhu said sports and fitness are not the same, stressing that athletes must first understand movement to stay injury-free and perform better. Speaking at the Yuva Kshamata Sports Conclave, he said India lacks movement literacy and needs to align movement with nutrition and psychology to compete with countries like China.

Mumbai: Playing sport requires an athlete to be fit at all times but sports and fitness are two different things, was the opinion of Dr Vishwanath Prabhu, a movement specialist and panelist at the Yuva Kshamata Sports Conclave, here on Thursday.

Dr Prabhu also spoke in detail about the dynamics and importance of movement.

"Sports and fitness are two different things, but there's a vision in people's psychology that if you want to be fit, it is a matter of sports. These are two different things. So fitness is very different, but does the sports have fitness? Yes. I mean you need to be fit to play a certain game and stuff like that. Having said that, where do I come in the picture? What is a movement specialist per se?," he added.

"Movement specialist is a specialization where I would rectify or I would align a certain movement to understand and make your body more movement free, having the freedom of movement and lessen the chances of injury. But to understand movement, I think our country per se does not or is not movement literate yet," Dr Prabhu revealed.

Dr Prabhu stated that for India to compete at the same level as China, Indian athletes will have to have a good understanding of movement.

"And we are already aiming for medals and we are competing and we want to be with China and we want to be with other forward nations. I think it starts at this level to understand first movement, then align with nutrition and then align with psychology. We need to understand what are the dynamics and potential that a particular body can and have with gender respect and then probably we need to walk upwards. But here at this point, there is too much of misinformation, there is too much of masala that is being put across and everybody just trains themselves to kind of just be a procurer of medals. I think that should be the last by-product and it should be a passion which kind of walks you there. So that is my take on it," he added.

Sports nutritionist Kinita Kadakia Patel stated that grassroots is critical in development of sports along with paying attention to mental health of aspiring sportspersons.

"Grassroots is critical because what is happening across the world if you want to compete in sports is everything is starting very young. You can't start the four areas that each one of you are experts in, you can't start at 20 or 25 and expect to have the results at the highest level.

Children abroad are getting mental coaches from the age of 8 and physical coaches and everything from that. Their diets have been structured from that age."

Patel added that implementing concepts at the grassroots level would require two factors.

"One is affordability for the masses, the tier 2, tier 3 cities you mentioned. And the second is the infrastructure. And by infrastructure I don't mean physical infrastructure. I mean are there people with the knowledge who can do this? Because there are only, there are four of you here. But if we want to change India at the grassroots level. So what is the current state? Obviously it's not great. But what in your opinion for your fields needs to be done to make it affordable as well as to build the human infrastructure, the knowledge infrastructure to implement this? And Kalita, since you led us into this, I would like for you to start. Okay great. So let's again answer this whole grassroots level infrastructure. What all we can do to build it or make it better? Can we make it better? Do we have the will and the vision to do it? The answer is absolutely yes. We have done it. We have had a lot of private investments that have happened, sponsorships in sports that have happened," he added.