Before & After: How The Right Kind Of Fitness Training & Diet Helped This Guy Shed The Kilos

Nikunj Aggarwal was another regular guy who rolled around with ease in his sedentary life. Office to home, home to office and some greasy eating — life was good, but flab was piling on, making him weigh around 80 kilos. His son started calling him ‘Thulthul Pandey’ {fat cousin of Chulbul Pandey!}, so Nikunj took it up upon himself to lose weight and get fit.

Now, meet Nikunj Agarwal 2.0 — he weighs just 63 kilos now and balances a passion for adventure sports and business, and has made fitness his mantra for good living.

He says he owes the transformation to his trainer Vineet Goyal, the head coach at Endorphins, a gym that focuses on corrective fitness, who started him on a fitness regime. He spends one hour at the gym {he started with five days a week, but now does four days}. Trainer Vineet takes him through seven sets of exercises of squats, lunges, pull, push, bend, twist and gait to ensure Nikunj maintains a proportionate body weight. He also enjoys ‘free weeks’ {week with no training} and ‘deloading weeks’ {week with little training}.

One of the things that helped 36-year-old Nikunj a lot is ‘animal pattern’ training that Endorphins does — where you are made to crawl and walk, much like animals. Interestingly, this activates both our left and the right brain and enhances coordination and core strength. Besides this, Vineet also prescribed abundant sleep to maintain body weight and fitness.

Nikunj hasn’t made too many major changes to his diet — he keeps it simple and has plenty of fruits and dry fruits. His love for chocolate has not diminished because he still enjoys having it twice or thrice a week. And there are of course cheat days when he eats out.

Flab had started getting the better of Nikunj so much that he recollects panting like a dog after climbing a flight of stairs. It was not until someone in his family suffered a heart attack that Nikunj decided to lose weight. With weight loss becoming Nikunj’s sole focus, he started with the most common trick in the book — running. But after a month he noticed he had lost hardly anything, but his body was ridden with aches and pain. Turns out, as his trainer Vineet says, Nikunj suffered from bad posture and aching joints beings exposed to repetitive body stress, and had to be put into a rehab programme after joining Endorphins. Reality check: The old tricks for weight loss are not the sure-shot methods always!

Incidentally the Endorphins Corrective Exercise Studio is all about fitness and changing your lifestyle. It is one of the few gyms in the city that encourages a machine-free exercise routine. They give you real and practical exercises which you can do even when they aren’t around. ‘Corrective exercise’ is their mantra. Form, posture, lifestyle, diet – they focus on all aspects of the body which will improve the over-all quality of your life. Check out our recommendation on them here.