We find ourselves repeating what we hear in a bid to ascertain that we weren’t mistaken while digging up details about Kartik Aaryan’s fitness parameters. His trainer repeats himself. “That’s right. It was 39,” says Tridev Pandey of Aaryan’s fat percentage. In a bid to comprehend the commendable physical transformation that Aaryan brought about, those unfamiliar with the science of fitness would benefit from knowing that typically, this value would be classified as obese. 
“When we started training, he had only concluded filming Freddy, and was 90 kilos. We did our fitness analysis on day one, and he couldn’t perform a single full-range push-up. He couldn’t execute a pull-up either,” says Pandey, a national-level boxer who had been roped in to help Aryan learn the art of boxing for Chandu Champion, the actor’s next based on India’s first Paralympic gold medalist, Murlikant Petkar. 

Pandey was told that his task for Kabir Khan’s film was two-fold. “I was told that this would be the first time that he would flaunt his body on the big screen, so we had to deliver accordingly. Apart from altering his body composition to look fit, I had to also train him to look like a boxer. This isn’t a film in which there are 10-second boxing bouts; here, there were six proper fight sequences. So, he had to learn the sport from scratch.”