From debt to deadlifts: Fitness instructors build careers and second chances based on science

His mother remarried and the presence of a stepfather who denied him his abilities made an already difficult time even more difficult to bear.

“I was only 19 years old, but instead of starting from scratch, I started with debt.” Overnight, his life changed and he was forced to adapt. He voluntarily applied for a year off from university, enrolled in a fitness science course and began training clients.

When Omkar returned to academia in 2015, he structured his days around an 18-hour schedule: early morning training sessions, daytime lectures, and evening and night client work. Sunday was my day to write my nutrition and training plan. The days became a blur. The years between 2015 and 2019 were, by his own account, the toughest. It was both professionally demanding and personally tumultuous in a way that tested him far beyond the gym floor.

The phone never went silent between one training session and the next. Missed calls from the bank and news from home were rarely good. Those years were professionally unforgiving and personally painful. Yet, in front of his clients, he gave his full energy and encouragement. “As soon as I left personal training, I got a missed call from my bank, and then something went wrong at home,” he recalls. The mental switch was the hardest part, he says.

“I remember sleeping in the gym many times, because the gym started at 5:30 in the morning and work ended at 2:00 in the morning.”

With nothing to fall back on, the road ahead was always clear. “There was no plan B. There was nothing in my head. I just wanted to get through this phase,” he says.

What sets Omkar apart is his application of engineering thinking to fitness. He has built a coaching philosophy based on science, not shortcuts, based on the biomechanics and physics he has studied. “Slow results are fine, but they have to be sustained and they have to be based on lifestyle changes.”

By 2018, his personal training studio had grown from three to 80 members in three months. When the pandemic shut down stores, he and his wife (a co-founder and an IIM trained in management and entrepreneurship) pivoted online. By 2023, OmFit will have a team of 30 members and have impacted over 10,000 lifestyles.

But numbers alone could not define change. It was a story. Today, when Chincholkar sees an older woman deadlift beyond her wildest dreams or a man who once couldn’t get up from a chair laces up his shoes for a trek, he’s not just witnessing a change in fitness. He’s looking at answers to the questions that have been plaguing the 19-year-old who was sleeping on the floor of a gym with three missed calls from his bank on his cell phone. The question was never whether he would succeed.

In his own binary logic, zero was not an option at all. Omkar built something out of years of 18-hour days and a grief he rarely named, and now he’s giving hundreds of people the one thing he’s worked hardest to hold on to: the ability to keep moving forward on their own terms.

The author is an intern at The Indian Express.