Listen to the episode here: Here

Guest: Rupesh Choudhury – CSCS-NSCA, Sports nutrition-ISSA, Strength and conditioning coach (8 Years).

• WHAT MADE RUPESH PURSUE A CAREER IN FITNESS INDUSTRY?

-Fitness was a part of his personality, he was an athlete back in his school days, he started with banking industry, he’s from Jamshedpur, there used to be this culture in his town, where his father will wake him up early in the morning and they’d go for jogging together.

-He got bored from a corporate job, and then went to college to get a degree in physical education, he knew it was his calling and he went for it.

-Rupesh likes to take clients who are more challenging for him and make him a better coach, he likes to do olympic lifts for his own performance and well being.

-When a person has injury, he gets recovered, he’s ready for strength training but there are very few number of coaches who are ready to work with such clients, for obvious reasons. But Rupesh like to take such clients.

-Just like you need a surgery and bed rest after an injury, strength training is as important as surgery and rest.

• What is applied athletics?

-It is Rupesh’s brain child, a coaching education academy, an initiative to provide better education and understanding to the coaches in the industry.

-As we see in the fitness industry there’s lack of education related to fitness, regular practice, professionalism etc.

-This initiative was more out of compulsion than out of choice.

• Where are we lacking in the fitness industry?

-Suppose you are in your mid 50s, male and you go to the gym, and there’s no reason for someone to come to you and pay attention, the unfortunate thing is nobody would come, nobody would see but on the other side if you’re a female in your early 20s, you’ll probably have trouble keeping the coaches away.

-The coaches here aren’t to blame, not everyone does this.

-When you join a gym as a coach, the gym manager asks you to gives you a certain amount of target that you have to achieve within a period of time.

-When you take someone who is a technical person and you’re giving him a target, what you’re doing is you’re taking away his technical skillset and turning him into a salesman.

• What efforts are you putting in your start-up?

-Firstly, the nature of the programme is more holistic in a sense that fitness has to be comprehensive and that it has to incorporate a lot of different training methods, there is equal emphasis on different aspects of fitness.

-We also focus on cardiovascular endurance and stretching.

-They are being taught on how to make people strong, how to make their bodies flexible, how to work on cardiovascular endurance.

-Coaches are trained both offline and online.

• What plans do you have to eradicate drug and steroid use in fitness industry?

-You can only educate, you can’t eradicate.

-Performance enhancing drugs are used for multiple purposes, the truth is today from ageing celebrities to businessman and politicians, everyone is using it, it has become the new recreational drug. The objective is simply to look good, to stay young and so on and so forth.

-In athletic settings its used for different purposes, to increase muscle growth, to cut out on fats and things of that nature. You cannot seriously hope to eradicate it completely, because its in people’s psychology.