Rishi Solanki’s morning is largely built the night before. The chia seeds go in to soak in anticipation of breakfast, along with several other little preemptive plans. By the time he sits down to work, the first coffee is poured (a Blue Tokai light roast, with a second already planned). He takes his calls at a standing desk so that it’s easy to move and pace, walking around the house while he talks. Rishi coaches founders and executives across the whole on how they live, on mindset, movement and nutrition together, and the life he has built on this terrace in Mandrem is the most visible representation of the things he teaches: that living well is mostly arranged upstream, in the hours and small decisions that happen before any willpower needs summoning.

His starting point is simple. ‘We are humans, we are not plants,’ he says. ‘We are quite literally meant to move.’ Sit still in one position all day, and you lose function. Most of the complications people pile onto movement, that it has to mean running as fast as possible or lifting as heavy as possible, get in the way of the question he actually cares about, which is what your particular body needs. He is an ectomorph, tall and lanky, with a femur he describes as ‘absurdly long’, and he uses himself as an example: everyone is built differently, so the real job is first to understand your own body and arrange your practices around it.

He calls this framework the unique code. There are things you love that work for you and things you love that do not, and the skill is in learning the difference. Finding it means asking questions most people have stopped asking somewhere in their twenties. ‘What gave you joy when you were younger? What kind of games were you playing? How did you lose that pattern?’ Usually, the answer is the hustle years, the long stretch when work took up the whole of someone’s attention, and play fell away. The aim is to land on the few things that fit well enough to last, the practices a person will still be doing in forty years, chosen for balance and continuity. Push hard in a direction that doesn’t suit you, and you might get two good years before the shoulder goes. ‘What are you benching now?’ he says of the type who peaked at eighteen.

Food works the same way, by accumulation. ‘You are what you eat,’ he says, ‘you are what you eat consistently.’ He coaches in proportions rather than calories, the idea that the body wants a similar weight of food day to day but not a similar density, so a 450 gram bowl might be mostly raw and cooked vegetables when output is low, then tilt towards carbohydrate and protein as training load climbs. His own protein runs between one and a half and two and a half times his bodyweight, depending on the season, and it is monsoon now, so he is home, training heavy, chasing strength while the beach is unusable and little else pulls him out of the gym. Strength built in these months holds for the rest of the year, and what it buys is readiness. ‘It’s like you can do anything anytime you want,’ he says, ‘to have that confidence in your body and your mind.’ Most people, asked to move suddenly, freeze, and that is where the injuries come from: the ACL that goes in an office corridor because the body has forgotten how to respond.

None of this is delivered in an evangelistic way. He has more or less stopped posting his work online, worn down by an industry where everyone insists their way is the only way and the next person’s is wrong, and he is wary of the fear that tends to get sold alongside wellness.’Not an extremist,’ is how he puts the alternative. ‘Just a holistic view on everything. It’s relaxed; it’s real.’

He arrived at all of this the long way round. A school athlete in Bombay, sprinter and javelin thrower, gold medals, even as a child, Rish says he had no patience for sitting behind a desk. So he went looking for something nobody around him had done and trained as a commercial deep-sea diver, completing a three-month course in South Africa, where he scored full marks and ended up coaching the other divers (Nigerians, Angolans, and Malayalis who shared no common language) through the physical tests. A year of offshore work in India followed, until a day he nearly died saving someone else, at eighteen or nineteen, made him ask what any of it was for.

CrossFit came next and took the better part of a decade, at a box in Bombay running two or three hundred people through it a day, a place in the country’s top twenty for five or six years, and then the same pattern he would later build his whole method against, people arriving, improving, travelling, falling away. ‘Fitness is not the answer to everything,’ he realised. ‘What does your lifestyle look like for the next forty years? Why are you dead after work? Do you think about why you feel like you need to drink six coffees a day?’ He knew the questions because he had lived them. A line from the diving years stayed with him through all of it: that a smooth sea never built a skilled sailor, and he still reaches for it.

So he started travelling to Bali and Thailand, watching how people who were always on the move lived, and the idea that would become On The Move took shape there. He came back in 2019, Covid arrived behind him, and when the world reopened, he rebuilt the life he had found abroad in a place he had been visiting for a decade, landing in Mandrem and staying. He lives there now with his partner Caro, a furniture and interior designer he met while travelling in Sri Lanka and then ran into again six months later, by accident, at an airport.

That long view is partly why he reads the way he does. He’s been working through Peter Attia’s ‘Outlive’, a book he called ‘fairly clinical’ but illuminating because, for all the science, it comes back to the daily basics and to your own genetics, the centenarian research, the people who make it past a hundred and what they have in common. The answer is never a single dramatic intervention. It’s the unglamorous stuff held steady over time. The crux of a life On The Move and the conviction he keeps returning to is that the quality of a life comes down to the quality of its ordinary days, the coffee already measured, the chia already soaked, the movement already folded into the hour, the small things held steadily for long enough that the body and the mind both come to feel them.

Find Rishi online here and reach out to On The Move Life here.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

Something is happening on the streets of India’s cities, and it happens early, before the rest of the city is awake, when the light is still low, and the roads are briefly, blessedly yours. Groups of people in matching socks and mismatched energy levels set off from a street corner, a temple gate, a coffee cart, and nobody particularly cares how fast you go. This is the run club, circa now, and it has very little to do with running.

That might sound like a contradiction, but spend any time around one and it becomes obvious. Strava’s most recent Year in Sport report recorded a 59 per cent rise in run clubs and group activities globally, with making social connections cited as the primary motivator for exercise by 58 per cent of respondents. The run, it turns out, is often just the excuse. What people are actually showing up for is something harder to name and more necessary: the experience of being somewhere together, doing something real, in a body, in the world, with other people who showed up too.

The global picture is telling. Run clubs in Lagos are taking over entire highways. Groups threading through forest trails in Bali, making pit stops at coffee shops in Seoul. Different cities, different streets, different runners, but the same through line: community built in motion, friendships that outlast the finish line. India has not just caught on, it has caught fire. Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Goa, Ahmedabad: groups gathering on Sunday mornings at parks and promenades, some numbering in the hundreds, some pulling 500-plus members to city streets every single weekend.

What makes this particularly significant in India is the subtext that does not always make it into the global conversation. For a long time, and in many cities still, women running alone on Indian streets has carried a weight that has nothing to do with fitness. Safety, visibility, the low-grade negotiation of occupying public space for no transactional reason: all of it has made a simple morning run something that requires calculation. The run club changes the terms. You are not alone; you are a group, you are expected, and you have a thread full of people who will notice if you do not show up. There is something worth pausing on in that, even if from the outside it just looks like a bunch of people in good shoes jogging past a chai stall at 6am.

There is also the matter of what happens when you run with someone. Unlike almost every other social setting, run clubs see you at your least composed: exhausted, struggling, sweaty, unable to perform any version of yourself that you have thought through in advance. Runners and club founders consistently point to this as what makes the connections formed in these groups different from those at a networking event or a dinner party. Vulnerability, it turns out, is a surprisingly effective social lubricant. Neuroscience backs this up: social connection helps buffer stress, and communities built around shared physical effort offer something urban life rarely does, co-regulation, repetition, familiarity, and embodied presence. A ritual structure that feels both stabilising and alive.

At the heart of all of this is something sociologists have been saying for years: we need third spaces, the places that are neither home nor work, where community actually forms. The run club is making one of the more compelling cases for that territory, doing it outdoors, doing it for free, and including endorphins in the price of admission. What is powering this particular boom is a generation that socialises differently, looks for experiences differently, and has decided, with some collective wisdom, that the perfect storm of free, accessible, communal, and genuinely good for you is worth getting out of bed for. The WHO’s recent work on social connection gives this real weight, linking connection to better health, reduced inflammation, stronger mental wellbeing, and a lower risk of early death. The run club, it turns out, is not a fitness trend. It is a public health intervention that nobody had to mandate.

There is almost certainly a club near you. The worst that happens is you show up slightly out of breath to a group of strangers who are also slightly out of breath, and someone suggests chai after. The best that happens is you find your people and end up accidentally becoming a morning person.

Find a run club near you: we’ve rounded up some of our favourites across India, over on our Instagram.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

The Italians have a word for the stroll after dinner: passeggiata. The Japanese have a concept, satoyama, built around the restorative value of moving slowly through a landscape. Closer to home, Ayurveda has long recommended a post-meal walk for digestion. Three completely different cultures, all of which arrived at the same conclusion independently: get up after you eat and walk around a bit.

We have somehow made wellness enormously complicated, and the post-meal walk is a useful reminder that it does not have to be. No equipment, no app, no gym membership, no particular outfit, no playlist curated for optimal motivation. Just the decision to get up and go, which is either the most liberating instruction you have read all week or the most annoying, depending on how many supplements you are currently taking.

The science, when it arrived, turned out to be on the grandmothers’ side. Researchers in Japan found that a ten-minute walk undertaken immediately after eating reduced peak blood glucose levels more effectively than a thirty-minute walk taken half an hour later. The pace was 3.8 kilometres an hour, which is an amble at best and definitely not a workout, which means timing matters considerably more than effort, and getting up straight after the meal beats waiting until you feel like it every single time.

Blood glucose is the headline benefit but not the only one. Walking after eating stimulates the muscles of the digestive tract and moves things along faster, which is why the instinct to move after a large meal is your body being wiser than you are giving it credit for. Over time, consistently managing post-meal glucose spikes matters for cardiovascular health, for appetite regulation, and for sleep quality, because blood sugar fluctuations at night disrupt the restorative stages of sleep in ways that accumulate quietly and then all at once. Five benefits, ten minutes, no gear.

There is also the Stanford creativity finding, too good to leave out: walking increased creative output in participants by 60 per cent compared to sitting. Not strictly a post-meal result, but useful information for anyone who has ever stared at a problem on a screen for an hour and solved it approximately thirty seconds into a walk to get water. The walk is not a break from thinking, it actually is the thinking.

Karuna Parikh, whose feature you will find elsewhere in this edition, mentioned her post-meal walking ritual in passing, describing it as something she just does now, barely thinks about it. Up and out and back again, no particular agenda. That is the whole aspiration, really, the point at which the thing you know is good for you stops requiring a decision and becomes just what you do.

Start after lunch or dinner tonight. Outside if possible, in the corridor if not. Leave your phone or don’t, but try. Ten minutes, comfortable pace, no agenda. You will come back in a better mood than you left, your digestion will thank you, and your glucose levels will be doing something a lot more chill instead of spiking and crashing and sending you to the biscuit tin at 4pm.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com

A few years ago, I was training for something, and I cannot even remember what now (which tells you how well that went) and I decided that six days a week was good, but seven was obviously better. I was lifting, doing circuits, and running every day of the week because rest felt like weakness, and I was extremely committed to not being weak. What actually happened is that I got slower, weaker, perpetually sore, and then injured my shoulder in a way that required actual physiotherapy and took me out for three months. The upside? I had a lot of time to lie very still and think about what I had done.

The thing is, I thought I was being disciplined. I thought the discomfort was progress. I had completely misunderstood how the whole system works: training isn’t what makes you stronger. It is what creates the conditions for getting stronger. The actual getting stronger happens afterwards, while you are doing nothing, and if you do nothing, you never actually get there. You just accumulate damage until your body takes the decision out of your hands entirely, which is what my shoulder did, and I resented it for months before I understood it was correct.

Here is the biology of it, briefly. When you lift weights or run or do any kind of resistance training, you create tiny tears in your muscle fibres. This is the point, not the side effect. Your body responds to that stress by repairing those fibres slightly stronger and more resilient than before, so that next time the same load feels easier. But the repair does not happen while you are training. It happens while you are still. Rest is not passive recovery from the interesting work. It is an interesting work, just wearing different clothes.

Train hard every day without recovery, and you are not being dedicated, you are just accumulating damage with great consistency. The body does not get stronger; it gets tired and flat and eventually injured in ways that will take the rest day question entirely out of your hands. This is the thing fitness culture does not say loudly enough, possibly because “do less, more strategically” is a harder sell than “no days off.”

The other thing fitness culture does not say loudly enough is that a rest day is not the same as a horizontal day, though a horizontal day is sometimes exactly what the body needs and should be taken without guilt. A rest day means not doing intense, muscle-damaging exercise. It does not mean not moving. Walking, gentle stretching, an easy swim, a slow yoga class, all of this counts as active recovery, keeps blood moving through the muscles you worked, and supports the repair process without adding to the load. You can move every day. You should not train hard every day. These are different things, and confusing them is what leads to the grinding, joyless fatigue that eventually convinces people that exercise simply does not work for them, when actually they just never gave it the space to.

Some people skip rest because they are afraid of losing progress. They will not. A body that is perpetually broken down has nothing to adapt from. Some skip it because the rest feels like a small moral failure, a slippage in commitment. It is not. It is a strategy, and arguably the most important one in the whole programme. And some people, genuinely, feel better moving every day, which is fine, as long as some days are deliberately and unapologetically easy, and they are not confusing movement with training.

I now take rest days with the same intention I bring to training sessions, which is to say I protect them, I do not feel bad about them, and I do not fill them with something intense just because I feel restless. My shoulder has not given me any trouble since. Coincidence, right?

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com