The Third Attempt

Every national record in 93kg is in play at Senior Nationals next week. Bogam Harishkumar, 11-year veteran and 2x champion at 83, is moving up. Parth Mehta, 24, pulled 329 at Junior Nationals on an attempt he didn't choose. Both sit down one week before they compete against each other.

Pradeep Kumar quit a 25K bank job at HDFC to become a trainer at Talvarkar's for 7K a month. His family stopped talking to him. He trained clients morning and evening, worked out at Balanjaneya Gymnasium during the day, and kept getting eliminated from nationals for five years straight.Now he's a 6x Strongman of Karnataka, Commonwealth gold medalist, and the guy organizing India's biggest powerlifting nationals in Mangalore this March.Shreyas, the event's PR lead, talks about the IPL model for growing powerlifting and why the first year of anything is the hardest sell. Hanuman Chalisa as a hype song. A 240kg squat you never attempted in training. Why Pradeep wants every lifter's parents watching on livestream.

Varun went from state-level cricket to a 630kg total. Prashanth lost 50kg, bounced through endurance sports and calisthenics, and landed on a platform pulling 280. Both train at Minimum Strength. Both stopped program-hopping. In our first episode, Azeez and Suvojit sit down with two lifters who took very different roads to the same squat rack. They talk coaching under Kaushal and Pankaj, what districts-to-states in two weeks actually feels like, brown noise before big lifts, and why the 93kg class is where everyone wants to be.