India, Sept. 25 -- In the fall of 2017, when Tejaswin Shankar arrived at the Kansas State University in the US as a freshman, his 19-year-old body weighed 78kgs with a fat percentage of around eight percent. At 6'4," his frame was lean with relatively little upper-body muscle mass and he checked most of the anthropometric characteristics associated with elite high jumpers.

"His leg-to-torso ratio was in excess of 50 percent, and he had a high centre of mass. Those are the broad factors you'd notice in elite high jumpers," strength and conditioning expert Wayne Lombard recalled.

Nearly nine years on, Tejaswin weighs 90kgs with a markedly more muscular build. The fat percentage has dropped to 5 percent, and his pectorals, latissimus dorsi...