Nagpur has seen an explosion of gyms and personal trainers over the past few years. What the city still sees far less of is serious practical education for the trainers. Knowing how to demonstrate an exercise is one thing. Knowing how to assess the person standing in front of you, understand why they are struggling and decide what to change is something else entirely.
That is the gap Ganesh Sharma wants to address.
Ganesh spent more than two decades building his career in Nagpur before moving to Dubai in 2023.
In the UAE, his work expanded from training clients to working alongside fitness educators and training professionals. His clientele came to include prominent members of the Indian community such as the late businessman and philanthropist Mr. Vashu Shroff, celebrity radio personality Lokesh Dharmani and Special Needs Future (SNF) Foundation founder Mrs. Safia Bari.
Based on his collective experience across Nagpur & UAE, he is trying to bring together everything he learnt on local gym floors, through traditional Indian training systems and in Dubai’s more developed culture of continuing fitness education.
For Sharma, the journey started long before fitness became a career. Growing up in a middle-class family in Nagpur, he was known at home for something rather different. He loved food. Family visits apparently required a gentle warning from his mother because Ganesh had a habit of finishing whatever was served to him and then happily waiting for more.
That appetite eventually turned into curiosity. As a teenager, Ganesh was introduced to weightlifting and powerlifting under Satish Paradkar, an Asian gold medallist and national champion.
Fitness eventually became his profession. Sharma spent 12 years working as a floor manager with Fitness India in Nagpur and also worked with Gold’s Gym. Those years put him in front of people with completely different goals and physical abilities. Some wanted to lose weight, some wanted to become stronger, and others were preparing for demanding careers in the police and armed forces. His work also included NDA cadets, sports-specific conditioning and self-defence training.
It was on those gym floors that he began noticing something that would later shape his entire approach to fitness.
The more people he trained, the less interested he became in simply collecting exercises. He became more interested in understanding why a particular exercise should be used, when it should be changed and whether the person was ready for it in the first place.
When he was not on the gym floor, he would be found in the clinics of some of the leading doctors and surgeons of the city(some of whom were also his clients at the gym), he would take special appointments with them to get more information about human anatomy, physiology, hormone regulation etc.
He pursued fitness education through the American College of Sports Medicine and completed diplomas in Naturopathy and Yogic Science and Herbs and Natural Diet from the Indian Institute of Skill Development Training.
Instead of choosing between modern fitness science and traditional systems, Ganesh became interested in what could be learnt from both.
That thinking became more visible in 2013 when he and his brother started ROME Fitness Centre in Nagpur. The centre was partly inspired by the traditional Indian akhada and deliberately moved away from the idea that fitness had to revolve entirely around machines and modern gym equipment. This caused a revolution in Nagpur. Before this, no other gym in the city provided such training. Suddenly, people started looking at fitness differently, and it was all because Ganesh challenged the conventional. Old-school training methods, boxing and traditional exercise patterns became part of the approach, along with Sharma’s growing interest in naturopathy and nutrition.
The goal was no longer simply to make someone sweat more or lift heavier. It was to understand the individual well enough to know what kind of training made sense for them.
For over a decade, Nagpur remained the centre of his professional life. Then, in November 2023, Sharma moved to the UAE.
He entered a much more international fitness environment and earned a globally recognised Level 3 Physical IQ qualification authorised through REPS.
He began working as an independent wellness consultant and received mentoring and guidance from experienced fitness professionals including Nathan Brown and Venancio D’Souza. He also collaborated with The Finished Work Academy, a UAE-based fitness education institution led by Venancio D’Souza and Michelle D’Souza.
That made an impression on him.
“One of the biggest things Dubai taught me was that being experienced and being finished with learning are two completely different things. I was surrounded by professionals who had already achieved a lot and were still studying, attending workshops and improving. That stayed with me,” Sharma says.
In India, and particularly in cities outside the largest metros, a trainer often completes a course, earns a certification and begins working. Sharma believes that is where the real education should actually start.
A certificate can teach anatomy. It can teach movement patterns. It can explain what a technically correct exercise should look like. The harder part begins when the real person standing in front of the trainer does not behave like the example in the textbook.
That is where he believes trainers need deeper practical education.
Ganesh Sharma’s own work in Dubai has been impressive. He began training prominent members of the Indian community, including the late Mr. Vashu Shroff, a well-known businessman and philanthropist associated with Dubai’s textile industry. His clientele also included celebrity RJ Lokesh Dharmani and Mrs. Safia Bari, founder of the SNF Foundation.
Through Shroff’s support and introduction, Sharma also began conducting interactive sessions at the India Club in Dubai, speaking on fitness, wellness and naturopathy. The setting was far removed from the Nagpur gym floors where his career had begun, but he says the basic challenge remained the same. Every client still had to be understood as an individual.
That belief now forms the foundation of the training approach he has brought back to Nagpur.
He describes it as human fundamental primary movement-based training. Behind the technical name is a relatively simple idea. Understand how a person moves before deciding how that person should train.
For Sharma, this does not mean rejecting strength training, weightlifting, boxing or other established forms of exercise. His own career has been built across all of them. It simply means using the right method for the right person instead of assuming that everyone needs the same thing.
His approach today carries pieces of almost every phase of his journey. There is the discipline of powerlifting and weightlifting, the movement and conditioning of boxing, the demands of sports-specific training, the body awareness of yoga, the simplicity of old-school and akhada-inspired training, the wider wellness perspective of naturopathy and nutrition, and the culture of continuing trainer education he encountered in Dubai.
It is this combination that he now wants to bring more strongly into Nagpur.
Nagpur already has plenty of people interested in fitness and no shortage of trainers entering the profession. What remains relatively uncommon is advanced practical learning that continues after the first qualification and helps trainers apply what they know more effectively.
Today, Sharma and his wife run Y&G FZC, a multidisciplinary consultancy that creates and curates fitness and wellness programmes across India and the Middle East. His clients now extend to India, the Middle East, Canada and Ireland through both virtual and in-person training.
But Nagpur is again becoming an important part of his work.
He says, “I had to leave Nagpur to experience some of these things, but the trainers coming after me should not necessarily have to do the same. If I can bring some of that exposure, learning and experience back here and help someone become a better coach earlier in their career, then coming back has a real purpose for me.”
More than two decades ago, Ganesh Sharma began his career trying to become a better trainer.
Today, after a journey that took him from Nagpur to Dubai and into the world of trainer education, he is back home trying to help others do the same, mainly because he has a strong inclination to give back to the city that built his foundational years in fitness.
Only this time, the people he wants to train are not just the ones lifting the weights.
They are the ones standing beside them.
