A Gym in a Car? Bengaluru Duo Packs a Van With Weights, Drives to Apartment Doorsteps

Usha Sekhar was doing push-ups on the floor of her apartment clubhouse when her trainer, Rithwik Radhakrishnan, looked over and called out to the room: “She’s doing push-ups!”

Usha, 70, looked up, unsure why this was worth announcing. She had simply been told to do them, so she went at it. “I looked and said, okay, is this anything important?” she recalls, still faintly amused by her own surprise.

Nine months earlier, even lifting a pressure cooker off the stove had begun to worry her.

“I would suddenly feel something weak in my arm, which had never happened before,” she says. “So, then, it struck me.”

Around the same time, her niece, a doctor, her yoga trainer and an old schoolmate had all separately told her the same thing: women her age needed to lift weights. Usha had never really considered strength training before. The closest she had come to regular exercise was walking around the block.

Then, in her Bengaluru apartment complex, she came across an unusual way to begin: ‘Unleash 45’, a mobile gym started by trainers Rithwik Radhakrishnan, 26, and Bhoomika Jayanna, 25. 

Instead of expecting members to travel to a gym or buy their own equipment, the two arrive at apartment communities in a Maruti Eeco packed with dumbbells, kettlebells, slam balls, resistance bands and other workout equipment. The sessions then take place in the community’s common spaces.

That is how Usha found herself at her clubhouse one Sunday morning, watching Rithwik and Bhoomika unload an entire workout from the back of a small silver van. That morning became her introduction to strength training.

She started with 2.5-kg weights. Today, she can lift up to 7.5 kg, do push-ups and get through the workout finisher she cheerfully calls “a killer”.

Why put an entire gym inside a car?

Ask Usha what she thought the first time she saw Rithwik and Bhoomika arrive with their van full of equipment, and she does not dress it up.

“It is initially strange. Youngsters today come up with such innovative solutions that it takes time for people to adjust. But we loved the concept, and it has become integral to our workouts,” she says.

By “we”, she means the group of residents in her apartment complex who now train together when Unleash 45 arrives for its sessions. For Usha, the appeal was simple: the trainers and equipment came to a familiar space inside her own community.

But the mobile gym had actually grown out of a problem Rithwik and Bhoomika encountered while working as freelance fitness trainers.

Rithwik spent over a decade wrestling competitively before training as a physical education teacher — a job that left him cold. “My job was to take care of discipline, ensure kids did their drills but that was it. I couldn’t teach them any sport,” he says, adding that Indian schools rarely take sports seriously. Coaching was always where he wanted to be.

Bhoomika had been dancing since she was five and later joined a popular fitness chain in Bengaluru as a dance instructor, where she began to understand the mechanics of the body she had spent years moving. “I didn’t know the detailing needed to make my body move that way, but I learnt it. That drew me to fitness,” she says.

The two met while coaching there, and by 2024 had left to freelance, running group classes in apartment complexes across the city.

That arrangement worked until the equipment became a problem. Residents started objecting to outside trainers using the building’s own gym equipment. 

“In an apartment complex or community, there’s this whole thing about not being able to use the community equipment. There are lots of fights over it,” Rithwik says. Usha had watched exactly this play out in her own building. “Other people started complaining, saying, ‘These people are using our equipment, and we don’t get a turn,’” she says.

Instead of depending on equipment belonging to each apartment complex, Rithwik and Bhoomika began wondering whether they could simply carry everything they needed with them. 

“Why don’t we bring our own equipment to our members?” was how Rithwik put the thinking that followed, inspired by mobile gym trucks he had read about operating in Europe. “We wanted to create a miniature version of that, which would be more economical for us and more accessible to our members,” he says.

That question would eventually put an entire gym into the back of a second-hand Maruti Eeco. 

‘Ours is not the traditional gym’

The duo bought a second-hand Maruti Eeco, ripped out every seat, and built plywood boxes where the back row used to be, boxes that store dumbbells during the drive and double up as plyometric jump boxes once parked. 

Kettlebells, slam balls, medicine balls, battle ropes and resistance bands went in wherever there was space left. 

Buying the second-hand van, retrofitting it, and stocking it with all the equipment came to Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh in total. It was entirely self-funded, with no investors involved. The trainers drive the van themselves to each session, packing up and moving on to the next apartment within the hour.

From the outside, the van does not look much like a gym, which has occasionally landed them in trouble. The van is covered on the outside, and traffic police have stopped it more than once just to ask what is going on inside.

“Our car looks very different, and it’s fully covered. They ask what is going on inside?” Rithwik says. But once he opens the van and shows them the equipment, curiosity usually takes over. “They are also excited when they see this.”

What happens once the van is parked is, by design, nothing like a conventional gym. There are no machines, no isolated bicep curls. 

Every session moves through a warm-up, a mobility set, and a block of weighted, whole-body exercises that Rithwik and Bhoomika adjust for whoever is in the room. Usha flagged her bad knees early on, and the trainers adjusted her exercises around them. 

Then comes the “finisher”. “The finisher is a killer,” she says. She started with 2.5-kilogram weights and now lifts up to 7.5 kg. “For the rest of the day, I’m kind of patting myself on the back and saying, ‘You did gym today. Good job, good job.’ I feel that I’ve really put in my innings,” she says.

Seven months, without missing a class

Usha was not the only member surprised by what her body could do. Nirupa, a software professional who had stopped running after the pandemic, found Unleash 45 through her apartment’s WhatsApp group and signed up after a single trial session. Seven months on, she has not missed a class. “There has not been a single day,” she says.

She used to keep her distance from kettlebells entirely. Her first one in class weighed 4 kilograms. Within three months, she was swinging 20 kg. “I could not have imagined that I would be swinging a 20 kg kettlebell. No way,” she says. 

During one session, her trainer placed a 10-kilogram plate on her back mid-plank. She held the position for seven minutes while friends who had already finished their own sets stayed behind, calling out encouragement. “I did not even know I had that kind of stamina,” she says.

What she values most is having the equipment brought to her. On the days she trains online from her hometown, she has to order weights on Amazon herself. Offline, none of that is her problem. “How much easier can it be for anyone? The equipment comes to your door. You just have to make the effort to work out consistently,” she says. 

Four months in, Nirupa says her blood work results came with every reading in the centre of the normal range for the first time. “I can tell you, it’s definitely these sessions that have given me these results,” she says.

‘Make fitness simple, not complicated’

Getting new members past their first hesitation, Rithwik and Bhoomika say, is harder than any of the physical training. Rithwik says many people arrive expecting to get hurt. “They can do so much, but they’re still afraid of trying any activity because they think it will injure them,” Rithwik says. 

He has seen that fear both at home and in class. It took Rithwik six months to convince a 62-year-old family member to try a session. “She had these wrong myths and all that,” he says.

The same concern often comes up when parents watch their children try something unfamiliar. He remembers one mother reacting when her teenager picked up a kettlebell for the first time. “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anyone do this. Will my kid get injured?” she asked. 

For Bhoomika, the way past that fear is to make the first step feel manageable. “Make fitness simpler, not complicated. That’s really all we’re trying to do,” she says. “If a beginner walks into our class, they should feel safe. They should feel like this is a doable exercise.”

From five members to a hundred

Slowly, the fence-sitters have been coming round. Unleash 45 started in January 2026 with five members in a single apartment complex. Less than a year later, it has 80 to 100 active members across group and personal training, run by a current team of eight to nine trainers who each go through the same in-house curriculum before they are allowed to run a session on their own.

The group’s oldest member, at 73, can now do 10 push-ups back to back. “She’s one of the most energetic people in the group,” Bhoomika says. 

Rithwik and Bhoomika are already eyeing a second, bigger vehicle, along with expansion to Kerala and Kolkata. They say areas with more individual houses than apartment complexes would pose a different challenge for the model. “It’s challenging, but we’re also having fun, because this is what we love doing,” Rithwik says.

Nirupa hopes more people will begin making space for fitness in their own lives. “I really hope that many more people take fitness seriously. As people in India, we don’t give too much attention to fitness,” she says. 

Unleash 45 also runs weekend sessions for children at Usha’s apartment’s tennis court, and she already has someone in mind for them.

“I’m planning on willing my grandchild to join in there,” she smiles.

Nine months after that moment in the kitchen first made her think about her strength, Usha now ends most sessions sweaty, sore and pleased with what she has managed to do. “I tell myself, Good job!’ And that’s probably the best learning I have had from this experience.”

You can reach Unleash 45, India’s first mobile gym based in Bengaluru, via WhatsApp at +91 9745745005 or +91 7892268079. You can also email them at [email protected] or call +91 8792965261.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com