Lewis Hatchett found yoga and never looked back

NICK FRIEND: For six years, Hatchett defied the odds as a professional cricketer. Since his retirement, he has committed himself to yoga, mindfulness and meditation. He opens up on battling stigmas, identity loss, egoism, mental health and breathing

Lewis Hatchett thinks back to his Twenty20 debut and wishes he knew then what he knows now.

Opening the bowling for Sussex against Paul Stirling, his single over cost him 22 runs: four leg byes, four, four, four, six, four. His mind was muddled, the sense of occasion crippling, his coping mechanisms non-existent.

“I was just crazy lost on that day,” he recalls. “I remember being at the top of my run-up and being so blown away by all that was going on – I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time because I was egotistical, but I was engaged in everything that was going on and I didn’t have a focus on what I was doing.

“The skill of concentration that I’ve learnt from meditation and mindfulness would have helped then because they help me now when I get distracted and lose my train of thought. I can go back to being on task.”

Still only 30 years of age, Hatchett is four years retired – one of county cricket’s most remarkable careers brought to an end by a stress fracture and subsequent medical advice.

The first part of his story has been well told, though that renders it no less extraordinary: born with Poland Syndrome, a condition that left him without his right pectoral muscle and two ribs behind it, his body was not built for professional cricket. Only, a staggering work ethic pushed him into “an environment where I was probably not meant to be”.

Through his career, few knew of the unique challenges he faced; he consciously kept his story to himself. There was a cruel irony, then, to the manner of its injury-enforced conclusion.

Ever since, however, he has devoted himself to passing on the secrets of yoga – not in a mystical, esoteric manner but in layman’s terms, as an athlete sharing the benefits he discovered with others in his position.

“You don’t have to be blessed holier than thou or join the Ashram in order to do these sorts of things,” he laughs. “I don’t see myself as a breathwork yoga coach. I am a professional sportsman who learnt this and can now meet you where you’re at. That whole way of doing things – it comes with a stigma. But at the end of it when people see the result, they get it.

“The goal – whether it’s physically or mentally – is to help people have these methods to stop that feeling of being lost.”

^{Lewis Hatchett took 102 wickets before being forced to retire}

He has launched Sport Yogi, an app three years in the making and six in its initial conception, to assist people with their sport wellbeing. If that sounds like mysterious, hipster speak, then put it this way: once he immersed himself in the techniques during his playing days, his regular stream of soft-tissue injuries dried up and, post-retirement, “these methods saved me from spiralling out of control”.

On the app, there is an array of video demonstrations, which show options for physical stretches, and audio sessions, which – in Hatchett’s voice – walk the listener through coping mechanisms for different situations.

One of them has ‘Making Your Debut’ as its headline, with its roots in his T20 bow and the value of what he has since learnt about the magic of breathing.

“I wish someone had told me how to use my breathing as a form of blocking out distraction when I’m going to get overwhelmed,” he says. “The reason that breathing is so fundamental in our sporting careers is that it’s your lowest-hanging fruit. My app won’t be there when you’re out in the middle, but if you learn the techniques from it, you’ll have that tool with you.

“If you’re rushing into the shed to find a tool, you hope there’s something there rather than nothing. When you feel that ultimate panic and pressure because you have nothing left and you’re cooked, you still have your breathing.”

Vaguely speaking, Hatchett’s yoga journey has Ryan Giggs to thank for its genesis. The former Manchester United midfielder – a yardstick for longevity in top-level sport – had released a DVD and, through his reputation, became an unwitting precedent and champion for its potential. Hatchett reckons it was in 2013 when, on a pre-season trip to the Caribbean with friends, he hid behind a palm tree and performed a sequence of movements, using an instruction sheet he had printed off and carried in his rucksack through the entire trip. “I felt great afterwards,” he remembers. “I committed to doing it every day and felt better for it.”

That he hid is interesting, however, driven to discretion by the accompanying stigma. At first, he maintained that element of secrecy, aware of the discipline’s perception. He remembers arriving at hotels for away games during his time with Sussex: yoga mat tucked under his arm, hovering at the back of the queue to check in, before approaching the concierge privately to ask if there might be a conference room he could use. “Ultimately, it was where I wasn’t going to get seen.”

"I had lost that label, which was being a cricketer. Ultimately, I was fortunate because these methods saved me from spiralling out of control"

Even in naming his app, Hatchett consciously pinned the focus on sport “because yoga is seen as feminine, hippy”. The psyche of male athletes is what he knows best, but he has a wide-ranging target audience – men, women, elite athletes, amateurs.

“The benefit and the market is in the amateurs,” he says. “More than often, it’s just getting them to move their bodies and stretching to make sure that they can play the game for longer, so they reduce their injuries.” The key, though, comes in convincing them to give it a go, encouraging them to realise that their preconceptions might alter from the reality.

“I interviewed a guy called Ameer Abdullah, who’s the running back for the Minnesota Vikings,” he recalls. “We were talking about the perception of men doing yoga. If you look at the app itself, even though it’s branded as Sport Yogi, on my website I very rarely mention the word ‘yoga’ because I ultimately found – even from a marketing sense – that if you go to a man and ask if they want to do yoga, the answer is often negative.

“I’ve called it mind training and stuff like that, just changing the narrative around it. The other day, a mate of mine told me his hips were tight and asked if I had anything for it. I showed him something, but it’s not about lighting a candle or anything. It’s not done like that.

“I’m meeting them where they’re at because I understand where they’re at. Athletes have egos. I didn’t learn these methods and then try to mould myself to sport; I was moulded in sport and then learnt the methods. That’s the way I look at it because I understand locker room talk.”

For Hatchett, any associated stigma was outweighed by the obvious results. And having battled the odds throughout his cricket career, difference has never been a concern. “In anyone I’ve ever seen who’s ever done something worthwhile, they’ve gone against the grain and been outliers,” adds the former left-arm seamer, who should know that better than most. Doctors once told his parents that throwing and impact sports were not an option, so he responded by taking 102 county wickets. “Batting was the most vulnerable thing I could ever do. If I got struck it could kill me,” he said in a 2018 interview. He wore a specially designed chest guard as protection.

He often returns to the notion of egoism and the iron-clad mentality expected of elite sportspeople. Having rarely opened up while he was a professional cricketer, he has witnessed first-hand the changes that yoga and mindfulness have brought out in his own character, even if he first approached the techniques in an attempt to help his body. He believes now, however, that the pair are interlinked.

He explains: “My journey began through the physical doorway, and 95 per cent of people that do this go in through that route, but it’s the unlocking of the mental doorway that happens down the line. I held in there long enough to get it.

“Now, I have this great awareness of where my body is at, and I have this understanding that if I’m feeling tight, there is a greater chance that I’m going to feel agitated because I’m subconsciously agitated in my body, which is then going to be projected into my emotional state.”

^{Hatchett first turned to yoga to help his body cope with regular injury issues}

On the morning of this conversation, Hatchett has already posted on Instagram, admitting to feeling “overwhelmed”. Even that – in the grand scheme of his mind’s transformation – represents a lengthy step.

On his first date with his now-girlfriend, Hatchett spoke openly about his mental health; on their second date, she told him how that openness had impressed her.

He traces that ability back to a yoga teacher training course he attended. “It was such an eye-opening experience,” Hatchett chuckles, “so far the other side of the spectrum for me as an egotistical male athlete, who was so wrapped up in his own ego and had these emotions going on in my mind but didn’t want to access them or talk about them. I probably didn’t know how to do it – it is a skill.

“You have to do it once and then keep doing it until it becomes normal. I’m at a point now where those conversations are quite natural; I find that by doing it, it actually helps other people understand that it’s okay to talk about those things.”

Whether he was at that point during his playing career, he isn’t quite sure. “I could have been better,” he thinks. “I ultimately believed that I was hardened and driven enough to overcome my condition and be in an environment where I was probably not meant to be.

“However, once I was in that environment, did I have the self-awareness and understanding of how my mind worked best? I don’t know. I do know that if I had these methods now, I would definitely have managed the ups and downs a lot better.”

He imagines the trajectory of a sportsperson’s stress levels on a graph, constantly rising and punctuated only by sleep. Without any consideration of wellbeing, a tipping point is eventually reached.

“You’re driven by performance,” he says. “I knew that if I kept performing, I’d keep going, so I’d attack that as hard as I could. Ultimately, that has a cost.

“There are wellbeing apps out there that do what I’m doing, but I’m merely putting it in a sporting context because that’s what I know. It may resonate with the right people – how it can complete them as an athlete.”

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He recalls one occasion at Sussex when a yoga teacher was brought in to lead a squad session. Having already taken it up independently, he was excited and intrigued. But when the lights dimmed, ocean music came through the speakers and pillows were spread across the room, Hatchett winced. “She started saying everything in Sanskrit,” he laughs. “It was a form of yoga that was very relaxing – super-peaceful, which you should do at the end of a day to relax you. But we were about to go into a full day’s training and everyone was fast asleep.

“What she didn’t recognise was that they needed something powerful to wake them up – she didn’t recognise how training in sport worked.

“I looked at it and wondered what would happen if the person at the front was talking to them and teaching them methods that would set them up for their training and educate them, rather than not understanding them and messing up their training. That was where the business started from.”

Hatchett’s ambitions go beyond cricket changing rooms, however. The app marks an opportunity to reach people globally, with far greater growth potential than wondering into classrooms on a Wednesday afternoon.

He is speaking over Zoom from Adelaide, where – in part, due to the coronavirus pandemic – he is in the middle of a prolonged stay; he suspects that it could only be in May that he returns to England.

In the meantime, though, he heads up the junior section at Southern Districts Cricket Club, while opening the bowling under head coach Carl Hooper, the former West Indies allrounder, for the club’s first grade outfit.

Having been forced to retire from the professional game more than 1,000 days ago, he admits that playing is difficult on the mind; he is in his prime years as a seamer and was the club’s leading wicket-taker last season with 45 in 18 games, including separate innings hauls of seven and eight.

“You’re sitting there, going: ‘I just want to jump over the fence,’” he smiles. “It is really tough. It’s worse when I play games and I feel so good on the day; it’s a very tough realisation to understand that if I was to train every day, then maybe the chances are high that the injury would happen again.

“But I’m absolutely flying, I feel better than I ever have done. Right now, I feel so in control of everything that I’m doing, but you’re just gutted that you can’t reap the rewards of it.”

^{Hatchett has launched the Sport Yogi app}

And for Hatchett, of course, there is the added factor of the unique obstacles he faced in even reaching the county sphere, defeating significant physical odds in the first place, before overcoming the stigma of body image that came with his condition – one shoulder sits slightly higher than the other, while the right side of his chest appears almost flat. Fast bowling and Poland Syndrome are, put simply, a sporting paradox.

“I’ve had to work and scrap and fight for absolutely everything,” he reflects. “I pride myself on it. I don’t take that away – I know that it’s something that’s engrained in my identity as a person.

“It was such a big part of my life – as it is for any cricketer who ever plays the game, but I think with the hurdles that I’d overcome, I felt like I had so much more to offer – to have it ripped away is brutal. It’s an identity loss. I would challenge everyone who says they will ever get over it. I doubt any cricketer ever gets over it – it’s just such a unique experience to ever have.

“It’s such a different lifestyle, and you’re not equipped for everything else and everyday life. You’re thrown out there. It feels harder because of how hard I had to fight for it. I don’t want to sound like every other sportsman who has ever retired and says that their mind gets lost, but for me it was the utter thought that I just wanted to be doing that again. I just wanted to carry on doing that. That’s what I want to wake up and do. Ultimately, when I felt lost, I just didn’t know what I was going to do or how I was going to do it.”

Hence, everything since. He has separated Poland Syndrome from yoga – there is no reference to it on the new website: “I want people to look at me in the same way as anyone else. If you find out about my condition, it only inspires you. I don’t like mixing the two up.”

Not that he doesn’t remain immensely proud of his achievements. His other website, housing his public speaking portfolio and a podcast series with other inspirational sporting voices, looks after his own story. He receives monthly messages from strangers with his condition and, for the first time, he met two women with Poland Syndrome after giving a talk last year. “One of them had never spoken about it before,” he says. “She’d been riddled with the shame of having it as a woman.”

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As for the formation of Sport Yogi, it comes with its own backstory: beginning with the purchase of a camera, followed by YouTube lessons in how to build a website from scratch.

Without money for a purpose-built studio, Hatchett dismantled his bed, slept on a mattress, which he would store elsewhere during daylight hours, and turned his bedroom into his performance space. That arrangement continued for two years.

As if further evidence was needed of his resolve and willpower, then perhaps that is where it lies. The release of the app represents an important milestone, having built up to this moment even from when he could still call himself a professional cricketer. “I fundamentally knew that it was something that I wanted to do; I’d been doing yoga, mindfulness and meditation when I was playing,” he explains.

But once he retired, those thoughts came as a conflict: “I always knew there was an idea here. And while that was awesome, I still wanted to be a cricketer.

“I felt lost in the sense that I didn’t know what I was going to do – I fundamentally knew who I was, but I didn’t know what I was going to do because my ‘what’ was cricket and it had been ripped away from me.

“We need those tags as people, we need that tagline. If someone asks what I do, I still struggle with it now. I don’t really know how to describe to someone what I am: I’m not really a yoga teacher, I’m not really a mindfulness coach. I think I’m an athletic advisor. That’s the best way I can describe it.

“Because you need that label. And I had lost that label, which was being a cricketer. But ultimately, I was fortunate because these methods saved me from spiralling out of control.”

And so, that is the new goal – to pass on those methods to anyone else who might benefit. Having spent his professional life challenging stereotypes, he has every chance.