The subedar who ran PT for twenty years and never taught the eating

Twenty years of making other men fit, and feeding them as well

A subedar's morning starts before the sun does, and for most of Ravi Rana's twenty years it started on a maidan with a company behind him. Physical training is not a suggestion in a unit. It is on the training programme, attendance is taken, and once a year it is measured: the run in boots, the rope, the ditch, the sprint, the tests every arm knows by their initials. A man who falls short is not left alone. He goes on remedial PT and somebody watches him do it. An instructor who has supervised that for two decades can look at a soldier on the second lap and say which part of his preparation has been neglected.

The other half of the job is quieter and nobody in the unit calls it nutrition. A junior commissioned officer sits on the messing committee. He signs for what the unit draws, he hears the men when the dal comes thin, he knows which cook is careless with the oil and which one is not, he decides whether the meat day moves because of an exercise, and he answers for what a company of young men is actually putting inside itself. On a field posting the ration scale changes and appetites change with it. At altitude men stop wanting food in the first week and the tinned items come back untouched. During an exercise the cookhouse serves at hours nobody planned for. Ravi has fed soldiers through all of it.

Then there is the sports platoon. Boxing, kabaddi and athletics at the formation meet, and with them the thing units do worst: making weight. A boy told on Tuesday that he is two kilos over for Friday will find a way, and the way is usually a plastic sheet, a room with the fan switched off, and no water for a day. Nobody had taught him anything better, and the man supervising him had nothing better to offer.

Where the PT knowledge ran out

Ravi could build a running block for a slow man and a strength block for a weak one. What he could not do was the sentence that came next. A recruit who needs to add bulk for the chest and weight standard wants to know what to eat and in what quantity, not to be told to drink milk. A havildar back from his annual medical examination with a blood pressure reading and a categorisation that frightens him wants to know what to stop doing. A young soldier whose father injects insulin wants to know whether the same thing is waiting for him. Those are diet questions wearing fitness clothes, and the honest position was that he answered them from what an instructor had told him twenty years earlier.

The town after the uniform comes off

A soldier leaves service at an age when a civilian is halfway through a career. Ravi took his pension in his early forties, came back to Jalandhar, and found that the district is full of men in exactly his position, which is both the difficulty and the opening. In Doaba every second street has a veteran on it. The pension covers the household. What it does not cover is forty more years of having nothing to do.

What the town wanted from him was immediate. Boys of seventeen and nineteen preparing for recruitment rallies and for the state police physical, who arrive at a ground at five in the morning because a retired fauji is running it and their fathers trust a retired fauji. Their questions are never only about running. One wants to put on six kilos before a rally in March. One wants to strip his waist without losing his sprint. One has been sold a tub of something by a shop on the bypass because the man behind the counter said it was what the army boys take.

Then the older callers. Old comrades from the unit, now sitting in the queue at the polyclinic with tablets for pressure and sugar, asking the man who used to run their PT what they should be eating at fifty. Neighbours with a fatty liver report they cannot read. His own household, where the cooking is generous by habit, the milk is full cream, the ghee is not measured, and the winter brings saag with a spoon of white butter melting into it.

The advice he had for all of that came from the parade ground: run more, eat less roti, take a glass of milk. It was not wrong. It was twenty years old, it was the same answer for a nineteen-year-old and a fifty-two-year-old, and it had no arithmetic in it at all.

There is a further reason a veteran gets asked rather than a gym instructor in the market. A man who has done twenty years is assumed to know, and he is assumed not to be selling anything, which in the fitness trade is a rarer quality than knowledge. Boys take instruction from him that they would argue about with a teacher, and their mothers send food to the ground for him. That standing is the most valuable thing an ex-serviceman brings to this work, and it is also the reason a wrong answer given confidently does more damage from him than from anybody else in the district.

What a diploma changed in the way he coaches

Assessment comes before the programme

The first change was that nothing gets written until something is measured. Weight, waist, a rough idea of the day's eating taken item by item, and the questions a coach used not to ask: what time is the first meal, what happens between the ground and the shop, what is drunk with it, how many teaspoons of sugar. A boy who says he eats nothing all day turns out to be taking three sweet teas and a pastry. Until that is on paper, any training plan is guesswork with a stopwatch attached.

The plate is built beside the training, not instead of it

A Punjabi kitchen is not short of food and it is rarely short of energy. What it is short of is distribution. Protein arrives in one heavy push at dinner and the rest of the day runs on tea, roti and sugar. Ravi's plans now move some of it forward into breakfast, put a number on the curd and the dal rather than describing them as good, and treat the gurdwara langar and the wedding season as fixed features of the calendar rather than lapses to be scolded about. For a boy trying to add weight before a rally, that means a schedule of ordinary food he can afford, not a tub of powder his father cannot.

Some men need a doctor, not a harder session

The most useful habit the course installed was recognising the trainee who should not be pushed at all this week. Chest discomfort on exertion, a blood pressure reading nobody has followed up, a diabetic on medication who wants to start fasting workouts, swelling that has not been explained, a man losing weight without trying. Those go to the polyclinic or the family physician first, and the training waits. A veteran who says that plainly is trusted more, not less, by families who have been sold fitness by people who never say it at all.

The week the coaching settled into

The shape of it is recognisably military and that is deliberate. The ground runs six mornings, and Sunday morning is kept for assessment: tape, scale, and a fifteen minute sitting with each boy in rotation so that everyone is reviewed once a month rather than nobody being reviewed at all. Diet plans are written on Sunday afternoon because that is when the market prices for the coming week are known. The evening gym hours belong to the older clients, who need less shouting and more explaining. Once a month there is a talk at a veterans' gathering, where the audience is men over fifty with medicine boxes, and where the public health portion of the course does more work than the sports portion ever will.

Studying in a resettlement year

The year after a soldier hands in his identity card is the one year of his life with unstructured time in it, and it is usually spent on forms, a house, a school admission and a search for what comes next. Formal study fits that year better than it fits any other, provided it does not demand a fixed classroom in a fixed town.

The Diploma in Nutrition, Dietetics and Public Health runs six months at twenty nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine rupees, as a six hundred hour qualification at Level 4 on the national skills framework, awarded together with Medhavi Skills University, Sikkim, so a learner who finishes holds the university's Certificate for Skill Competency alongside the academy's own. Teaching is online in English and Hindi and the sessions are kept for later viewing, which matters for a man whose morning belongs to a ground and whose evening belongs to a gym floor. Ravi added Sports Nutrition afterwards for the trainees and the Advanced Diploma in Personal Training for the gym work, and kept the public health portion for the talks he gives at veterans' gatherings.

Serving soldiers study the same way, with one difference worth stating: a field posting can take the network away for weeks, so the sensible plan is to treat every live class as optional and the recordings as the real course.

What the certificate does not do

It does not change anything inside the services. Medical categorisation is a medical decision taken by the Armed Forces Medical Services, and no civilian certificate influences it. A serving man does not become his unit's dietitian by holding one, and there is no departmental credit attached to it. The salaried posts that do exist for dietitians in service hospitals follow a separate degree route entirely, and it is better to hear that from an academy than to discover it after paying a fee.

It also does not create work by itself. A coaching ground in Punjab is built on reputation over two or three recruitment seasons, and a qualification shortens the argument rather than replacing the work. Nobody can promise an institutional contract, and any academy that hints at one should be treated the way a unit treats an unverified report.

The third limit is the one Ravi takes most seriously, because it concerns boys. Supplements sold in small-town shops are not always what the label says, and a young man heading for a sports quota trial can be tested. Contamination is a real risk and ignorance of it is not a defence for the athlete. The safer teaching, and the one the course argues for, is that a seventeen-year-old adding weight for a rally needs eggs, dal, milk and a schedule, rather than anything bought in a plastic tub on the strength of a shopkeeper's word.