When mistakes feel right
Dip bars are called parallel bars, but nobody said parallel to the floor. I dropped the back end so the wrist stays straight through the descent and the load sits mid-palm.
Blog
Thoughts on training, nutrition, running a gym, building our own equipment, and the state of the fitness industry.
On strength standards
Sam came back from a week away and did her dips exactly as well as before. We don't run benchmarks at the gym. The numbers are a consequence of consistency, not a target to hit by month six.
Long way up
Why I deadlift a t-bell with the handles flush to the floor — nine extra inches each way, a knee angle closer to a squat than a hinge, and what that extra range asks of you.
Old man strength
Watching Ramesh carry a fridge up a staircase taught me lifting capacity is four things — and the one people skip is practice. On old man strength, and the awkward job.
A side quest in Kerala
A side quest from my working holiday: getting a simple gym up and running in Kerala — what's in, what's on the way, and the freedom of building from scratch with more room.
A slice of personal heaven
Tired of complaining about Madras, I started carving out a slice of personal heaven in Kerala — a gym full of the gear I love, and a first heavy lift on a trap bar I built ten years ago.
The dip progression
How a fixed-bar dip block turned into a ring-dip build — and why slow-burn stability moves scale gently while the big patterns let you pile weight on.
Thor, my ten-year-old trap bar
A nostalgic profile of Thor — the wildly overbuilt 47 kg trap bar I built in 2015 — and the design and build choices that have let it age without a single thing I'd change.
In praise of Raja
The unsung hero who scrubs every piece of our kit each week with a 3M pad and coconut oil — and why, if you'll own equipment for decades, stainless steel pays for itself.
Measure fifty times, cut once
Building four cable stations from scratch meant three weeks of quiet thinking and nine design decisions — because with equipment, unlike coaching, you get to weld only once.
Pricing power in the fitness industry
Cult today is cheaper, inflation-adjusted, than Talwalkars was in 2008 — what that says about pricing power, where gym money actually goes, and the pizza business.
The terrible economics of gyms
Where gyms overspend and screw up — AC bills, all-day hours, wasted floor space, discounting, and treating coaches as a cost rather than the product — and the one number our space is built around.
How to retain clients
Lawyer Srinath Sridevan's six cardinal principles for keeping clients — reposted with permission — plus a coach's addendum on excellence and the fee.
The only tool that matters is you
A year-by-year timeline of every tool we've added to the gym since 2014 — the list is past fifty now and still climbing, but the most important one has never changed. It's you.
The dancer as an athlete
One of my first moments of clarity as a coach came from training Bharatanatyam dancers — deconstructing a performance into a gym stimulus, and why movements that look alike adapt very differently.
The smallest portions
A once-a-month scoop of ice cream with my daughter, 30 grams and 60 calories, dragged out over six spoons — why food is a tool for memories, and why micro-portions beat exclusion.
Burning calories is the wrong metric
You don't strength train to burn calories — you burn a few in order to strength train. Ten things that happen in the gym that '200 calories burnt' can never capture.
There is no natural food
The food-world twin of 'there is no natural movement' — humans have manipulated the food supply for millennia, and the natural/organic/ancestral nostalgia does a disservice to how far we've come.
Patenting the obvious
Eleiko patented an obvious way to balance an open-back trap bar — an idea that wasn't theirs, and one we'd already solved in 2018. On patents, pricing, and protecting the obvious.
Positional tolerance
How Covid, a too-short t-bell and two plyoboxes led me to a deficit deadlift I've kept for five years — and the coaching lesson about individual tolerance you won't find in most books.
Why I love exercise
The result is proportional to effort — not time, not money. Why exercise is the rare investment where the body never lies and the returns are yours to claim.
An education in exertion
How hard should you push in the gym? Not by rep counts or the clock, but by how many reps you had left in the tank — and learning to read that number honestly.
Process beats personal story
Coaches sell with personal stories, but a testimonial isn't evidence. Why a coach's process — not their transformation yarn — is what tells you whether something will work for you.
Rules and principles
Diets built on rules work by quietly restricting calories, then fall apart the moment you break one. Why principles — conviction in the outcome — outlast them.
Paralysis through information and excuses
We drown in fitness information and hide behind excuses. A Lee Kuan Yew line, the excuses we reach for, and two simple truths that cut through them.
Lifting weights ≠ bodybuilding
Going to the gym isn't bodybuilding. Lifting is a set of tools that produce many different outcomes — bodybuilding is just one of them, and you never have to chase it.
You vs society
The hardest part of changing how you eat and train is the people around you. Why your circle may push back, and why your conviction is the only thing that carries you through.
Why we won't chase you
Most gyms are built to chase you. We're not. Our three-strike rule, why conviction beats persuasion, and who our coaching is actually for.
Strength is a basic capacity
A newspaper finally takes muscle loss seriously — good. But its frailty tests are table stakes, not a finish line. Strength isn't a specialty; it's a baseline for a life with agency.
Short on time
Three to four hours a week is a useless instruction. The same target broken into 15 to 40 minute sessions and four movement buckets you can actually put in a calendar.
The next gen of coaches and trainees
Twelve years in, the kids who started with us at 12 are in their mid-twenties. What a decade of strength training from a young age actually produces.
Profit fuels progress
Profit is the signal that your price is right. Subsidised pricing buys customers, not a moat, and a customer trained to pay nothing will uninstall the moment you charge.
The most comfortable tool for something uncomfortable
My favourite equipment does one thing really well. Why single-purpose beats the do-everything machine.
Why pull-ups are harder than chin-ups
The difference isn't just your grip. Why the pull-up is genuinely harder — the handicap of the grip, the scapula, and rotation.
Little boxes and not being stuck in them
Nothing in my institutional experiences or college courses could have guided me to doing what I do. On exams, dead ends, and trying things.
Ikea has no patina
On being a discerning consumer: what it really means to ask how the things we use are made.
Blast from the past
Following in the proud tradition of my dad and grandad, I walk into my forties proclaiming art was much better when I was growing up.
Don't just brace, embrace the curve
Why we run both back-extension machines and add Jefferson curls. The spine is built to move, so we move it.
An ode to single leg squats
Single-leg work deserves centre stage, not accessory status. More depth, freer hips, and real symmetry.
Eccentrics are a different contraction
Lowering slowly isn't the whole story. Why the eccentric is a genuinely different contraction, not just a tempo cue.
The habit of reading
As content gets more interactive, narrow and focussed, I have to fight stupidly hard to ensure the skill to read and dive into detail is never lost.
How you get hurt even when you do everything right
A muscle protests before it fails. Tendons tear without warning. Creep fatigue, explained through my own rupture.
The talent dilemma
A country of 1.4 billion has a potential Wimbledon champion within its borders. The problem is they don't know who they are.
I tore my achilles tendon
It happened with a pogo jump over a hurdle. The same kind I have done thousands of times over the last 12 years. Here is how the repair and rehab went.
Details matter
The hand-laid knurling on our bars, and the machinist who has been laying it down, by hand, since 2016.
The weights that anchor me
100 days outside Madras in 4,200. Owning a gym is a maximalist life that weighs you down in literal tonnes.
The 10,000-hour myth
The 10,000-hour rule is false. Why a few thousand focused, well-practised reps do more than endless mindless hours.
The oldest barbell we made
The first barbell we built in 2015 is still going after 150,000 reps. On making things to last, not to look the part.
It just works
Designing a pivot that never fails: stainless bushings, sea air, and putting function ahead of form.
Same muscle, different functions
How grip width changes what a muscle actually does — the same muscles working in distinct ways across variations of a pull.
I cannot run my gym for ₹18,000 a year
The business of gyms rewards absentees. The business of coaching needs you to show up. They are not the same.
Building tools is being human
Reverence for tools and how we make them is as human as it gets. On why building equipment satisfies so deeply.
Why deadlifts hurt people
Warm-ups, mobility and bracing won't injury-proof your deadlift. The real reasons people get hurt: bar path, grip, fatigue, and position tolerance.
My own museum of failure
Seventeen gym-equipment builds that didn't work, and what every one of them taught me.
You don’t know what you are missing
It's a pain to go to parties, events or gatherings and be a sane person.
Gyms are libraries
If the gym felt boring, don't blame the gym. A gym is a library; whether it comes alive is on the librarian — the coach.
Why your knees and hips need to move
One in three over-50s dies within a year of a hip fracture. Train the joints through the range they were built for.
The neighbourhood aunty's first pull-up
Why do strength coaches chase athletes? There is no fame in an aunty's first pull-up. Only joy.
The reasons I write
To rant, to clarify, to profit, to promote. Why I keep writing on a forum I have complicated feelings about.
Daily stressors
The stressors you can dodge, the ones baked into where you live, and why I put my gym 150 metres from my front door.
You do you
Most of our rituals are outdated and dumb. A case against defending tradition while living a life that resembles nothing our ancestors did.
When you say nothing at all
The worst kind of comment is the one someone fed to an AI first. If you had nothing to say, nothing needed saying.
What a gym needs to excel at
Ten questions I use to judge our own gym and coaching service: streaks, comebacks, hand-holding, the range of skill in one room, and keeping the joy in it.
The universal currency we all fight for is attention
Running, yoga, lifting, parkour, and everything else a day demands. As a coach you are not competing with other gyms, you are competing with Netflix.
The Devil eats whey
The protein science did not come from marketers, and the protein boom is what happens to every economy whose income grows. None of which makes protein chips less rubbish.
Right place, right time and right business
Running this gym in 1980s India would have been a nightmare. The tailwinds that made it possible, none of which I had anything to do with.
Respect my authority
No quarterly plans, no annual discounts, no haggling over the monthly fee. Credibility is something a coaching service has to demand.
Recap
Everything I have written about since 2022 in one list: equipment, energy balance, hunger, pain, protein, sleep, training goals and the rest.
My space, my rules
Dress codes, veshtis near a loaded plate rack, and school uniforms. Every institution is allowed its own rules, and you are allowed to take your money elsewhere.
Marketing
I am allergic to marketing and it still works on me. Toyota, Goruck and Casio, and why explaining how you made a thing is the most authentic marketing there is.
Gym envy
Watching someone stronger or more jacked do their thing can make you wonder why you bother. Five questions to ask before you let it get to you.
Do, don’t show or tell
Bodybuilding is a sport with a scoreboard, and Instagram is another one. I would rather have the capacities than the striations.
Business is personal
I despise 'it's business, not personal'. The man who sold me my house signed it over before the cheque cleared, and that is what trust in a transaction looks like.
Almost 2 out of 3 people who train with us are women
Not by design, and not through any marketing. We assume everyone who walks in wants to get as strong as they can, and a lot of them happen to be women.
A squat for the back and plank for the legs
The back extension is a squat for your spine. Why we keep both a 45-degree and a 180-degree unit, and what changing the angle changes.
Why we make our own equipment
The question we get asked most: why not just buy it? Control, cost, proportions, durability, and fun.
Why gyms quietly die
Rents, poor retention, coaches who leave with clients. Why I'll never open a second space, and the model we flipped.
Does getting stronger make you a better person?
Lifting builds discipline, resilience, and trust in the process. But is it as transformative as the hype claims?
An adult sandpit
Not every business wants to change the world. Mine is just somewhere fun to work while paying the bills.
The non-negotiable capacities (and the optional nice things)
The training capacities every single person benefits from — throwing, pushing, squatting, hinging, jumping, rotating — and the nice-to-haves that come after.
Two events cured me of networking
In 2015 I needed clients, so I went to the parties. Two was all it took to send me back to just coaching.
The spinning dumbbell
Machining a bearing-free rotating dumbbell to spare the wrist under heavy overhead load.
The last hour of coaching
There will be a final coaching hour someday. A last cue for a last client. The thought terrifies me more than death.
Brands, methods, activities, outcomes
Most people start with the brand and never ask the right question. Start with the outcome and work your way up.
The nice things always ran out
A 90s childhood of imported chocolates and toys that always ran out. Why I would rather make things than wait for them.
A reluctant entrepreneur
From a terrified salaried man to a twelve-year-old gym, via one prototype pull-up bar and a well-timed nudge.
Statistically probable advice for most Indians
A blunt list of what most of us over- and underestimate about our eating, our training, and our health.
Make in India, not mimic in India
A real reason for a subcontinent equipment brand: design for the bodies it actually serves, not the ones it copies.
Bodyweight is not trivial
"Just do bodyweight" sounds gentle until you do the math. What you are actually lifting in a push-up, a pull-up, a squat.
Portfolio theory of eating
Manage carbs, fiber, fats, protein, multivitamins and water like you manage your portfolio to get an optimal ROI on what you eat.
Longevity is mostly genetics
You don't train and eat well to reach a ripe old age. You do it to live better once you are there.
Lifting in the gym vs. lifting in the real world
There is a glaring difference between objects designed for lifting in the gym and those found in the real world which makes "functional training" inside a gym a bit of a farce.
Pay for experiences. Not for spaces.
It’s an exciting time to be a gym-goer with coaches around the country opening small, boutique spaces. Find a coach and style that works for you.
Visiting cards
A coach who walks the talk, trains and eats as they ask you to, will be a more empathetic coach who will be able to put themselves in your shoes more comfortably.
Things you don't control
At some point, the economic advantages of living in a dense, commercially vibrant urban environment will be far outweighed by how much harm it inflicts on our health and need for quiet and space.
What’s happening to your muscles
As our understanding of how muscles work grows, fundamental questions and their nuanced answers can become the key to making sound coaching choices.
Kids and strength training
Kids need to play, run and climb. Some systematic training can enhance their ability to do the first three things.
World protein day
Celebrate World Protein Day by asking three crucial questions about your protein intake.
Let's wait for a study to try something?
Working with clients in the real world sometimes means embracing cues, exercises and protocols that might not be dogmatic, yet. As long as clients respond positively, this is fine.
The margins for getting it right are tiny
Grip thickness, bar width, plate diameter. The details mass-market gym gear quietly decides don't matter.
The baggage people carry
Five things clients believe that hold them back, from inherited diabetes to the fear of deep squats.
Seven years of the t-bell
How our hand-built t-bell evolved from V1 to V2.2, and why it makes loading a deadlift so accessible.
The infinite monkey bar, start to finish
A long, honest build log of one machine. 'Made in India' is never quite made in India. Everything is made on Earth.
Accidental hypertrophy
A transformation interview with a chimp. On figs, termites, throwing faeces for shoulder strength, and ten hours of sleep.
The most unlikely advantages for a gym
Punctuality, maintenance, pride, no quick bucks. The boring things that quietly turn into a moat.
The pandering coach
The single most counter-productive figure in the fitness industry — the coach who tells clients only what they want to hear.
Sucker comfort in strength
Via Lee Kuan Yew: we all find comfort in something. Mine is trying to get stronger, at 4am, every single day.
Mistakes
Sixteen ways I've been conned or screwed up in twelve years of building a gym. We powered through anyway.
What’s the deal with makhana?
Makhana isn't high-protein, isn't especially low-calorie, and isn't the health food it's sold as. A look past the hype.
What does ghee have to do with it?
"Ghee lubricates your joints" is a vivid folk metaphor and nothing more. What actually keeps joints healthy.
There is no natural movement
Training is a substitute for all the movement our environment used to demand of us, and no longer does.
Literal product-market fit
Copy-pasting equipment dimensions builds uncomfortable tools. The safety squat bar, resized for Indian frames.
Nine inch fails
A client's safe miss on the lever squat, and why a loaded barbell sits exactly nine inches off the floor.
Coaching is the only moat
Gyms are fungible — equipment, space and price can all be copied. The one thing that can't be: the coaching relationship.
The idiot index, applied to barbells
Musk's cost lesson, borrowed for a gym: why I make a stainless barbell for ₹7,500 instead of buying one.
Interview with Moo Jackman
A jacked bull explains myostatin, genetics and steroids, and why his muscle is far less useful than yours.
Don't want your kids to lift? Don't let them be astronauts
Astronauts lose bone mass in zero gravity. Kids need loading, not protecting from it, to build strong bones.
The recreational strength athlete
Not a bodybuilder, powerlifter or crossfitter. Just someone strong enough to make everyday life a little simpler.
An ode to knurling
An appreciation of knurling — the obscure, unglamorous craft that decides whether a bar actually grips.
A personal story
I move terribly and was never good at any sport. But I love solving the problem of getting stronger.
Venkatesh, the lathe artist
In a 120-square-foot workshop by the canal, a lathe operator turns my crudest drawings into working parts. As much artist as worksmith.
The necessary, unnecessary and counterproductive
You can judge your consumption of food and exercise on three simple parameters: the necessary, the unnecessary and the counterproductive.
Do you want to be healthy, fit or a sports whiz? Its not all the same.
Health, fitness and sports skill are three distinct capabilities. Be crystal clear about why you are undertaking a certain regimen.