What a high-performance coach tells founders who are already training hard
Rishi Solanki isn't interested in the six-week programme. He coaches founders and executives on the small daily habits that decide how well a body, and a life, holds up over decades.
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