Sahana, giving iron women a better grip
This stem-cell scientist and S&C coach for British diving at two Olympics now makes women-specific lifting gear
Ever wondered why those powder-puff Women’s Day-Week adverts always wrapped their ‘fitness’/ health programmes in a sort of gently-gently-salmon-fuschia-low impact/intensity, slow cardio, self-defence, protection narrative? Sahana Gopal is having none of it.
Sahana, 34, is stem-cell scientist, recreational weightlifter (“intermediate”, not novice), former gym rat, strength and conditioning (s&c) coach for British diving across the Tokyo and Paris Olympics – and also CEO of Unrack, which is where that tired gently-gently narrative is being shredded.
Unrack is a Bengaluru-based company which manufactures weightlifting bars made of aviation grade stainless steel as well as other products across the weightlifting spectrum – plates, platforms, stands and racks. “I’m trying to break down the intimidation of what weightlifting is.” The r&d around Unrack’s products began in 2021, the company launched in 2023, Sahana’s father, Gopal Mahadevan as its founding director and Sahana as CEO.
The aim is to design and manufacture Indian weightlifting equipment to compete with the world’s best, find its way into elite sport and gyms countrywide. With modifications and adaptations built into the equipment to factor in previously ignored differences between male and female athlete. (No, pink dumbells don’t cut it.) Sahana says most gym equipment – across the world – “are all designed for men, everything you hold touch and feel… it’s not that we are different species but small things that make a big difference.”
The women’s bar in Olympic weightlifting is smaller than the men’s by only 3mm, which may seem tiny but it caters to the smaller grip from smaller hands.
Sahana says, “how many times have you walked into a gym and seen a pull-up bar on a rack which is really thick, slippery.” Where it’s hard for women to get their fingers or thumbs around to correctly manage a pull-up. Lying front down on a gym bench is not, she points out, comfortable for women’s upper bodies to the female chest physiology.
Unrack, she says, “design from scratch… we work at how do we navigate around ensuring we have adjustments for all, small details that translate to the product.” To build a power rack, “that can be used by a young teenage girl or a sixty-year-old woman, who comes and says I can use this because this is actually a great thing for me.”
This approach challenges the market’s calculated steering away from strength, power, intensity in conversations around women’s fitness. Lifting weights, Sahana is convinced, “is where the biggest strength gains are made… where you can lift the highest amount of load you’ve ever lifted.” A perfectly designed weightlifting platform gives women “the power to do that.”
As a fully trained s&c coach and committed lifter, Sahana believes that weightlifting, aside from its place amongst Olympic disciplines, has a space in strength and conditioning (s&c). Its value lies in its capacity to increase power in any sport. The two Olympic weightlifting categories – snatch and clean and jerk contain, she says, a multitude (maybe 70 or 80) derivates/movements – that can be used across sport. “Any kind of squat with a bar comes from a weightlifting derivative.”
A junior national badminton player who wanted to be a doctor, she graduated in genetics from University College, London (UCL), playing university badminton. She found herself going down the s&c rabbit-hole after she had snapped her ACL during a badminton game when on a break in Bengaluru. She was trying to build her own recover programme. “My science was strong, so learning about physiology, anatomy, how the body functions in different environments was easy.”
The required s&c certifications duly completed, she first worked with a fellow UCL student Gina Bland, a badminton pro for whom she devised s&c routines. The list of clients grew filling her hours even as she worked towards her PhD at Imperial College, London. Title: “New strategies for detailed visualisation and analysis of stem cell-material interactions.”
Sahana did explain this to me simply and clearly. All that has stayed however is the concept of nano needles trying to enter a stem-cell membrane and electronic beams from the microscope slicing images of the cell to see it in its cross-sectioned glory. All this on the nano needle/s. Okay. Oh, and working with ‘osmium tetraoxide’ and ‘uranyl acetate’ – “Open them, your lungs are fixed and you’re dead.”
Her days, she says, involved rapid “context-switching”: double masked and double-gloved under a hood in the microscope room, conducting experiments with DNA material, stem cell membranes and that ‘you’re dead’ stuff. Before rushing off to push athletes over shuttle runs and squats, and then writing up her thesis findings. “It was crazy.” You don’t say.
One day in 2018, she received a message from the head physio of British Diving, Gareth Ziyambi, who watched her train clients in her London gym, asking if she would like to work with him. Ziyambi, Olympic diving gold medallist Tom Daley’s physio for 18 years, had a clutch of young elite divers coming through into the funding programme and he had noticed Sahana’s methods and manner. She said yes. “I knew I didn’t want to be in a lab all my life.”
Over seven years, she has worked with the current generation of British divers. After medalling at the worlds and Olympics was made a specific strategy target for the British women divers, Sahana devised and delivered programmes for the women. At the Qatar worlds, British women medalled for the first time, winning three medals. In Paris, the women divers not only won two medals for the first time at an Olympics, their medal came after 64 years. Sahana was also on the team behind the Daley-Matty Lee 10m synchro Paris gold.
Today Ziyambi is lifelong friend and mentor, the native Zimbabwean an outlier who negotiated his way through the British Acquatics high performance system before bringing in an even rarer kind – an Indian woman. Ziyambi has left British Acquatics and works on his own while Sahana is transitioning away and focusing more on Unrack and India.
Many elite teams here (think elite of the elite) have tried Unrack and liked its products. Sahana however finds herself regularly knocking heads in explaining that an Indian-made lifting product (nickel-plating on some, no chrome in any steel) that costs 60% less than the imported equipment surely cannot translate into expensive.
She was surprised that the Indian s&c community, again largely male, attended her workshop at the National Strength & Conditioning Association conference in March. “I came in with these preconceived notions about being a woman in the space.” When they saw all of 5ft 2inches lift (47kg is her best in snatch while clean and jerk is above her body weight, around 60kg) apart from “woh kaisa utha sakti hai?” (how can she lift?), the men responded with interest and curiosity. Sahana was, surprise, surprise, not being looked down at being female and is getting used to the intricacies of a system. Just like how she explains her company’s name. Unrack, not so much as to undo but the flipside – unwrap, uncover, unpack. To find what lies beneath and ahead.
