'Fitness is no longer just about aesthetics': Rishabh Telang on how India moves

In 2016, the Indian commercial fitness landscape was a fragmented ecosystem.

On one end stood the neighbourhood iron-shops — sweat-drenched, heavy-metal sanctuaries built exclusively for bodybuilding.

On the other end were premium, hospitality-driven health clubs catering to an ultra-niche elite. For the average urban Indian working professional, entering a gym felt less like a step toward health and more like an intimidating plunge into an alien subculture.

Ten years later, in 2026, that landscape has fundamentally transformed. Fitness is no longer an insular hobby, it is a foundational pillar of the urban Indian lifestyle economy.

At the epicentre of this mass behavioral shifts sits Cult.fit, India’s largest group fitness network, which celebrates its milestone 10th anniversary this year. What began as a single counter-cultural studio in Bengaluru has ballooned into an omnipresent infrastructure network spanning more than 750 locations across the country.

More from Health

Gordon Ramsay's love for Jharkhand's red ant chutney brings focus back on India's indigenous food traditions: Top 5 delicacies worth trying

FSSAI cracks down on rusted knives: Why India's food regulator wants restaurants and food businesses to replace damaged cutting tools

To understand the mechanics behind this decade-long evolution, Firstpost sat down with Cult.fit co-founder Rishabh Telang.

From his early days trading a corporate career in Europe for a gym floor to navigating India’s post-pandemic participative fitness boom — and the rapid emergence of high-end endurance formats like HYROX — Telang unpacks the friction points, psychological shifts, and systemic changes that are defining how India moves.

The lakeside spark that built an empire

Rishabh Telang’s trajectory from corporate executive to fitness pioneer reads like a textbook masterclass in entrepreneurial serendipity. While traveling extensively across Europe for his corporate role, Telang discovered CrossFit and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ).

These formats were entirely distinct from the traditional machine-isolated training models popular in India at the time. They focused functional movement, raw human performance, and — most importantly — unifying community dynamics.

Driven by a desire to democratise these formats at home, Telang took a massive leap of faith, trading the safety of corporate corridors for a gym floor. In May 2015, he opened the first-ever Cult centre in Bengaluru.

The breakthrough moment for the business came shortly after, sparked by a chance encounter with one of India's most prolific tech entrepreneurs, Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal.

When asked how Cult managed to scale from that single room to an astronomical 750 plus locations, Telang recalls the origin story.

"I happened to meet Mukesh Bansal very early in the Cult journey. He was one of our first few members. The first location that I had opened was on Sarjapur Road, and just opposite was this beautiful lake. Mukesh used to come there for a run. He saw a logo about martial arts, a mention of strength and conditioning, and he got interested. He walked in. I took a trial for him, and he joined me. I ended up spending a lot of time with him as his coach initially. And he loved the idea."

Fast forward ahead, Telang added, "For me, I looked at this as an opportunity to just work with Mukesh, but the amazing thing was that he already had a number which was in hundreds [Cult.fit centres across India] in his mind. I was thinking of sixty, sixty-five, seventy gyms at best that I can open at some point. His number was five hundred, six hundred."

"Currently we are at 750 plus locations, and we are just getting started," he told Firstpost.

This duopoly of Telang’s domain expertise in functional fitness and Bansal’s hyper-scale tech ecosystem fundamentally rewrote the unit economics of the Indian gym industry.

By shifting the focus away from expensive, space-consuming machine lines toward agile, coach-led group classes, Cult bypassed the traditional real estate inefficiencies that had historically crushed independent gym operators.

Dismantling India’s fitness entry barriers

Despite the massive corporate growth and high visibility of fitness brands in tier-1 metro cities, the industry faces an unyielding macroeconomic reality with gym-going penetration in India is still anchored at roughly 1 per cent of the total population.

For comparison, developed western markets like the United States sit between 16 per cent to 20 per cent penetration.

The primary sticking point has long been a mix of cultural conditioning, structural friction, and deep-seated intimidation. To solve this, Cult.fit chose to target lifestyle integration rather than chasing extreme athletic optimisation.

"The fitness percent in India, it's actually some one percent," Telang points out, evaluating the massive addressable market that remains untapped.

"So there is a lot of room for us to grow. I think what India needs is an overall lifestyle change. And we also believe as an organisation that as long as people are active, as long as they are doing anything that is connected to their health and fitness — it could just be walking, and walking is powerful — as long as they are doing that, it's great."

"When I speak to Cult users, a lot of them are first-time gym-goers, people who've never played a sport in their life, people who would never enter a gym. That's because our group class format is extremely, extremely accessible. It makes the entry barrier very, very low. So the decision to start working out is easier, and that is what we aim to do — not just in the top cities, but in the next hundred cities and beyond," added Telang.

Speaking about the realities of life in urban cities, he averred, "I generally tell people that it's a lot about your social circle. You hang out with two people who drink, you will be the third one. You hang out with two people who exercise, you will be the third one. So there are more and more people getting into working out, and I think there will be that downstream effect. That's what we are waiting to open to."

By framing fitness as a social loop rather than an individual chore, the network has tapped into a core component of behavioural psychology. The group class format acts as a shield against the intense self-consciousness that first-time gym-goers often experience.

When everyone in a room is moving together to the same beat under a coach's direct guidance, the individual's fear of judgement drops significantly, reducing the psychological friction required to build a consistent habit.

From six-packs to lifespans, a shift to metabolic health

Historically, India's relationship with exercise has been entirely transactional. For decades, the motivation to step into a fitness facility was almost entirely external, driven either by immediate social milestones or urgent medical scares.

The Covid-19 pandemic served as a massive structural catalyst, exposing the extreme vulnerabilities of poor underlying metabolic health across demographic lines.

Post-pandemic, a major shift occurred as consumers began prioritising chronic illness prevention, baseline physiological resilience, and long-term healthspan over superficial vanity metrics.

Telang stresses that while wanting to look good remains a powerful human driver, the vocabulary used by everyday urban Indians has undergone a dramatic upgrade.

"Things on an overall level are generally changing. But it is not just India — when you have to attend a wedding, you start working out to lose certain kilos in the next two or three months. Or when someone falls sick and there is a health issue, they start working out because their doctor told them to. But it's the exact same behaviour in the US. It's the exact same behaviour pretty much everywhere — it's human psychology."

Telang admitted that " in India as a whole, the awareness was increasing."

"In the past, people were talking about aesthetics, about six-packs and losing a certain amount of weight. I'm not saying that's gone — 'looking good' still happens to be an important goal for a lot of people out there, and there is nothing wrong with it."

"But then people are also talking about terms like metabolic health. People are saying, 'I want to lift weights because I've seen my grandmother at 70 — she's so independent, she does all her work on her own. I want to be like that.' The awareness of someone using a term like 'metabolic health,' and muscle being the topmost flavour of metabolic health — that being the flavour of longevity — people are having those kinds of discussions right now," he added.

India is a big country. It's going to take a lot of time, but things are moving in the right direction.

"When we do something like a Cult Fitness Carnival, people show up with their families. It's like two or three different generations coming together — grandparents, kids, and parents — all of them coming together and just trying to do something connected to fitness. People, as families, are now seeing fitness as something they can go and hang out doing together. So I think the change is happening in the right direction," said Telang.

This shift to viewing skeletal muscle mass as an active endocrine organ and a foundational driver of metabolic health is monumental. It marks the transition of gym-going from a youthful luxury to a lifelong, multi-generational necessity.

Deconstructing the HYROX phenomenon

Perhaps the most visible and dynamic trend sweeping through India's fitness ecosystem in 2026 is the explosive growth of participative fitness competitions. Leading this global wave is HYROX, a standardised indoor fitness race that has taken the urban Indian fitness community by storm.

To understand why HYROX has captured such a massive market share so quickly, it is necessary to look at its structural differences compared to CrossFit, which dominated the functional fitness conversation over the previous decade.

Telang, an active competitor who has personally navigated multiple HYROX courses, provides a grounded, highly analytical perspective on whether this phenomenon is a permanent fitness movement or a premium, social-media-fueled trend.

"HYROX is a competition, an endurance event. It gives people an opportunity to push themselves, be able to finish it, and feel great about themselves. I've done a couple of HYROX myself, and I will do a few more. I like to compete and, at the end of it, it's a good workout."

"If you think about it, the concept is not really new. CrossFit had done it back in the day and CrossFit did it really, really well. It was a revolution in fitness worldwide. And the CrossFit Games became the thing."

But CrossFit has been on a decline in the country. "For whatever reason — CrossFit was a little complex in terms of execution. You've got to learn Olympic weightlifting, gymnastics, metabolic conditioning and everything. So it was slightly niched out, and for whatever issues, CrossFit is not as popular as it used to be," opined Telang.

That's where HYROX came in — as something that is very accessible. The movements in HYROX seem like something that you can complete.

"If you're someone who goes to a gym, who's working out, who's running a little bit, someone who can do a 5K, it seems like, I can complete this. And hence, it has a bit of mass appeal," added Telang.

"But that said, I also feel that fitness is something in which people should do what works for them — not just do it out of FOMO. Because in that scenario, too far too soon can happen, and that is the problem with fitness for many, many years. When people go too far too soon, they end up hurting themselves and they drop off. So I see that risk." he pointed out.

Telang adviced, "People should do fitness for the rest of their life, not just for one event, one weekend. Whenever they're ready, they could go for events like HYROX or the Cult Fitness Carnival. There's something called the ATHX Games, which is just growing significantly in Europe. Competition in general is picking up, but it will still be a little niched out. And at the price point that it sells, not everybody will have access to it."

The mention of the European trend, the ATHX Games, highlights the next iteration of this competitive wave. Operating as a hybrid 2.5-hour continuous fitness test divided into strict Strength, Endurance, and MetCon X zones, formats like ATHX and HYROX are successfully bridging the gap between hardcore sports and casual exercise.

However, as Telang correctly identified, the premium pricing of these international events — where tickets and regional travel can cost substantial amounts — means the foundational layer of Indian fitness must still rely on affordable, highly structured daily ecosystems.

The mass athletic shift is also highly evident on the streets, with mass endurance road races seeing historic participation numbers. For example, the recent TCS World 10K showcased this massive scale perfectly.

"Things are changing from a purely aesthetic standpoint to a more functional one," Telang noted.

"Endurance events are good. Even run events are very, very popular. The TCS 10K I participated in recently was about 35,000–36,000 runners at the venue, and it was electric — managed really well and had solid energy out there. People put on some amazing performances. So good things are happening in fitness overall."

The inclusivity continuum

As a fitness network scales to serve hundreds of thousands of active members daily, it inevitably moves past the demographic of twenty-something fitness enthusiasts.

The incoming user base includes older adults, corporate professionals managing chronic postural issues, and individuals returning from severe orthopedic injuries.

To prevent high dropout rates and keep members moving safely, a multi-tiered system is required. Telang outlined how Cult's structural programming actively moves between high-intensity training, joint protection, and specialised recovery.

"At Cult, we've got something for pretty much everybody. For someone who wants easy, fun ways of working out, Cult group class is an amazing product. We've got dance fitness and we've got yoga. In yoga, we've made it very accessible in Cult group classes through the usage of props."

"Someone who's playing a sport outside, like a racquet sport or anything, needs deeper stretches but doesn't want to become a serious yoga practitioner. We've tailored our yoga practice to that everyday athlete. Through the usage of props, we make sure that they are able to get into deeper stretches that they, on their own, will not be able to do."

Speaking on the recent Pilates surge in high-end urban sociteies, Telang said, "We also opened something called Pilates Circle last year. Pilates is a very popular format worldwide, started in the 1920s by Dr. Joseph Pilates — he started it to rehab injured soldiers in war. We've taken the exact same methodology, this is called classic Pilates. So again, that is a very, very injury-safe format, whether it's for prevention or even rehab."

The horizon for India’s health economy

As Cult.fit enters its second decade in 2026, the company’s core operational focus is to move deep into the next 100 cities across India while continually building out specialised, low-barrier lifestyle formats like Pilates Circle and Yoga Circle.

The initial challenge of convincing the urban Indian consumer to value regular exercise is also being fought along the way.

The next step is a long-term project of cultural adaptation — transforming fitness from an elitist, aesthetic pursuit into an essential, preventative medical baseline.

The roadmap for the next decade is no longer about chasing six-packs, it is about building a country that can move smoothly, confidently, and independently for a lifetime.