When he rejoined college in 2015, Omkar structured his days around an 18-hour schedule: early morning training sessions, daytime lectures, and evening and night clients. (Special Arrangement Photo)Written by Dhaani SarwateAt 19, most young men are figuring out college. Omkar Chincholkar was figuring out how to keep his family from losing everything. With no safety net, the Pune-born engineering student made a decision that would unexpectedly become the foundation of the city’s most purpose-driven fitness platforms.A decade later the company the 29-year-old built from that crisis serves thousands of clients, from young professionals pushing personal bests to senior citizens rediscovering what their bodies can do. The science behind it comes from biomechanics and physics. The grit behind it comes from somewhere harder to measure.The story began in 2014, fuelled by necessity. Chincholkar had just entered a prestigious engineering college when his family faced a sudden financial collapse, leaving them without their savings and their only home. With a huge debt of Rs 85 lakh and a monthly EMI of ₹35,000 to service, Chincholkar, who had lost his father as a young child and been raised by his grandparents, found himself responsible for keeping the family afloat at 19.His mother had remarried, and the presence of a stepfather, who was dismissive of his capabilities, made an already difficult period harder to bear.“I was just 19 years old, and it did not start from zero; it actually started from debt.” Overnight, his life changed, and he was forced to adapt. He requested a voluntary year-long break from his college, enrolled in fitness science courses, and began training clients.When he rejoined college in 2015, Omkar structured his days around an 18-hour schedule: early morning training sessions, daytime lectures, and evening and night clients. Sundays were for writing nutrition and training plans. The days blurred into each other. Those years between 2015 and 2019 were, by his own account, the toughest—professionally demanding and personally turbulent in ways that tested him far beyond the gym floor.Story continues below this adBetween one training session and the next, the phone was never quiet — missed calls from the bank, news from home that was rarely good. Those years were professionally relentless and personally distressing. Yet in front of clients, he was all energy and encouragement. “As soon as I would leave that personal training,” he recalls, “I would see missed calls from the bank, then something wrong at home.” The mental switching, he says, was the hardest part.“I remember sleeping in the gym so many times, because the gym would start at 5:30 in the morning and my work would end at two in the night.”With nothing to fall back upon, the way ahead was always clear. “There was no plan B. There was nothing in my head—I just wanted to get through the phase,” he says.What set Omkar apart was his engineering mind applied to fitness. Drawing from biomechanics and the physics he had studied, he built a coaching philosophy grounded in science rather than shortcuts. “It is okay if people get slow results, but they have to be sustained and they have to be based on lifestyle change.”Story continues below this adBy 2018, a personal training studio he opened grew from three to 80 members in three months. When the pandemic caused it to close down, he and his wife—co-founder and IIM-trained in management and entrepreneurship—pivoted online. By 2023, OmFit had a 30-member team and had impacted over 10,000 lifestyles.But numbers alone didn’t define the shift. It was the stories. Today, when Chincholkar watches an elderly woman deadlift more than her own doubts ever allowed, or sees a man who once couldn’t rise from a chair lace up his boots for a trek, he isn’t just witnessing fitness transformations—he is seeing the answer to a question that haunted a 19-year-old sleeping on a gym floor with three missed calls from the bank on his phone. The question was never whether he would make it.In his own binary logic, zero was simply never an option. From years of 18-hour days and a grief he rarely named, Omkar built something that now gives hundreds of others the one thing he fought hardest to hold onto: the ability to keep going, on their own terms.The writer is an intern with The Indian Express.