Sportskeeda recently interviewed Mr. Sujit Panigrahi – Founder and CEO, Fitness365 - India’s first Fitness and Sports Assessment, Intervention and Monitoring (AIM) Program for school children. Mr. Panigrahi was heading the technology department in 2010 Commonwealth Games when he realized his instinct to work in the sports field. He says, It’s necessary to inculcate fitness as a habit in kids so they can pursue it throughout their lifetime. There are layers of daily regimes in fitness which are required to make a kid healthy and also furnishes his/her sporting skills during the procedure.
Some excerpts of the conversation with Mr. Sujit Panigrahi have been shared here:
What was the vision behind starting this venture Fitness 365?
When commonwealth games ended I wanted to work in the area of sports. So one of the things I looked at was basically the Chinese model. In China, you get about 12 years before you start Olympics. So what China did was they did not invest on the older athletes but invested on the younger athletes between 3 to 6 years of age. So within 12 years time, all these athletes from different schools are trained (roughly about 25 lakh athletes). So when China invested on fitness and sports of these young athletes, they went on to become the number one in Olympics, so that was one data point which was there. A second data point which was there was that when I was looking at cricket, which is very popular in India, there are no statistics around fielding but there are only statistics around batsman and bowlers and wicket keepers. When you look at football also you have statistics around the goalkeeper and the number of goals that you score. So, I was trying to figure out how do you find out who is the best fielder in the world or who is the best footballer when it comes to midfield? There are only statistics around the players who score. These two data point, i.e. Chinese model as well as cricket, wicket or football and statistics around players. When you dig deep down you figure out that there’s a lot of investment that you need to do around fitness and you can actually identify with different fitness components like speed, agility, balance, coordination and all that you can find out how good is a player. Different positions within sports need different fitness components. So this was the trigger for starting this thing. So what we did was we designed a program which specifically for school children and defined a curriculum from nursery up to class 12th age wise and gender wise. For every age and gender, we created a curriculum that actually helps one in improving the fitness level of the school. The second thing is the children who have sports fit children or athletic children they are the ones who can excel in sports. But between sports and fitness, we saw that need for fitness is higher than the need for sports. If we have a number of fit children they can anyway play sports. So instead of focusing on the top 10 percent children or top 5 percent children who would excel in sports it was important to improve the fitness level of children in the entire school. So that’s why we launched the pan India program in Fitness365. Fitness for all, one sport for life and delight sports are the three core objectives of Fitness365.
Complete coverage of the Interview