A triathlete who became a rehabilitation coach.
Sukhdev Singh did not arrive at yoga through a studio or a retreat. He arrived through sport, injury, and thirty years of asking why bodies break in the same predictable places.
India, and a body that had to perform
He came up through endurance sport. In 1996 he represented India at the Asian Triathlon Championships — swim, bike, run, and the particular education that comes from asking one body to do three sports badly enough to get injured at all of them.
That is where the interest began. Not in postures, but in why the same shoulder gave out, why the same lower back seized in the same week of the season, and why nobody could tell him more than “rest it”.
Yoga was the system that finally answered. Not the version sold as flexibility and calm — the older, more clinical version concerned with breath, alignment, load and the nervous system.
Then the athletes started calling
Word moves quickly in professional sport. Over two decades Sukhdev worked with people whose living depended on their body doing exactly what they asked of it.
- 1996Represented India at the Asian Triathlon Championships
- 2001–2005Personal yoga & conditioning coach to Jyoti Randhawa, Asian Tour No. 1 golfer
- 2003–2004Coach to Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore ahead of his Olympic silver medal in shooting
- 2005Worked with Ernie Els, four-time Major champion
- May 2007Worked with the India squad at Eden Gardens, Kolkata — photographed by The Telegraph with Sourav Ganguly and by The Indian Express with Sachin TendulkarThe Telegraph, Calcutta, 4 May 2007 · The Indian Express, 5 May 2007
- 2007Invited by the BCCI, alongside Ravi Shastri and Wasim Akram
- 2008Travelled with the Indian squad on the Australia tour
- 2008–2011Performance and recovery coach to Mark Webber, Formula 1 Grand Prix winner
- 2012–presentBased in Singapore. Private practice in yoga therapy, posture correction and athletic performance
Every entry above is stated as a past professional engagement with dates. Nothing here implies a current endorsement by any athlete or organisation. Each line needs Sukhdev sir’s confirmation before this page goes live.
Why he stopped travelling
Sukhdev has been based in Singapore since 2012, and somewhere along the way the work changed. The elite athletes were rewarding, but they were already exceptional — a two per cent gain on a world champion is a small thing to give a life to.
The larger change was in ordinary people. A woman of fifty-four who had not slept through the night in four years. A managing director who could not carry his own suitcase. A golfer who had quietly accepted that his best rounds were behind him. Those transformations were not two per cent. They were the difference between a life that is managed and a life that is lived.
So the practice moved. Same method, same eyes, same thirty years — applied now to people in Singapore who need their bodies back.
What he actually believes
Breath before posture
Almost every client arrives breathing into the top third of their chest. Correct that first and half the neck and shoulder complaints reduce before anyone has touched a mat.
The pain is rarely the problem
A sore lower back is usually a stiff hip and an unloaded glute reporting upstream. Treating the site of pain is why it keeps coming back.
Film it or it did not happen
Memory is a bad witness to your own posture. Day one is filmed. Session ten is filmed. You see the difference; you do not take his word for it.
Ten minutes daily beats ninety minutes weekly
The session is where the correction is learnt. The change happens in the small daily practice he gives you, which is filmed on your own phone so you have it forever.
Thirty years is a long time to spend on one question.
Fifteen minutes is a short time to find out whether the answer is useful to you.