The Better India · 9 hours ago

How 73-YO Dv Shankar Rao Became a National Powerlifting Champion After Bypass Surgery

Six months before winning four national powerlifting gold medals, D V Shankar Rao was a 73-year-old retired banker who had refused, repeatedly, to set foot inside a gym - because he'd had bypass surgery, and what was the point? That question, once a wall, became a doorway when he finally walked into a fitness center in Bhadrachalam in February 2025, guided by a coach who consulted his doctors and started him on stretches before ever asking him to lift. What followed wasn't just physical transformation but something rarer: the discovery, more than a decade after open-heart surgery, that the body can still surprise you. "I never felt unhappy after the surgery," Shankar Rao says. "In fact, I felt regenerated. I felt like I had been given a new life" - and it turns out he meant that more literally than he knew.