Ashutosh Banerjee

The problem he arrived with

Ten to twelve hours a day at a laptop is not unusual for people running their own business, and neither is what it does to a neck and a back. Sitting for that long loads the same structures in the same position without a break, and the muscles that are supposed to hold the spine upright stop being asked to do anything.

This is one of the most common reasons people walk into a gym in Surat, and it is rarely the reason they say out loud. They ask about weight first and mention the back later.

What he reports has changed

On 1 September 2026, roughly six and a half months after starting, he told the gym that he had been free of neck and back pain for about three months. He also described feeling more energetic and more focused through the working day, and having gained muscle.

Those are his words about his own experience rather than a clinical assessment, and we publish them as such. What can be said more generally is that progressive strengthening work is standard, well-evidenced care for ongoing non-specific back pain of the kind desk work produces, and that building the muscles which hold the spine in position is the mechanism by which it helps. What no gym can tell you is what is causing your particular pain, which is why anything persistent belongs with a doctor or physiotherapist first.

What the training actually involved

He trains under the personal mentorship programme with Brijesh Joshi, which means a programme written for his circumstances and adjusted as he goes rather than a standard plan. He trains in the 8am to 9am slot at Adajan, before the working day starts, which is the part most desk workers find decides whether it happens at all.

The session opens the way every session at this gym opens. Before he touches a weight, Ashutosh does yoga and the twelve positions of Surya Namaskar, which is the routineBrijesh teaches every member in their first fortnight. Ashutosh puts a good part of the change down to it, and says the flexibility he has built through practising it daily is what he noticed first, before anything showed in the mirror. That is his reading of his own experience, and it is worth saying that the research on yoga for back pain describes a modest effect rather than a cure. Thefull sequence, and an honest account of what the evidence supports, is set out separately.

After that it is ordinary strength work. Nothing about the lifting is specific to back pain, and that is rather the point: building the muscles that hold a posture, and interrupting a ten-hour sit with an hour of loading, is the whole intervention.