Executive Health Without the Quick Fix: Pav Dharwarkar's Routine

You built the career. Somewhere along the way the body that carried you there started sending invoices: the afternoon crash, the joint that aches on the stairs, the sleep that never quite lands. You have the income to fix it, which is exactly why the fixes keep finding you.

Executive health is a market now, and most of what gets sold into it is a pill, a powder, or a program built for speed. Episode 14 of Live Well and Thrive is a 25-minute argument against all three. Mike Torchia’s guest is Pav Dharwarkar, a friend of at least five or six years who, as the episode introduces him, is an entrepreneur doing deals Mike describes as worth hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. He still trains, eats sensibly, and raised children who do the same. What follows is how he does it, in his words and Mike’s.

Why executive health gets sold the wrong way

Pav’s friends are mostly men in their mid-forties with, in his phrase, all the disposable income in the world. That makes them a target. Mike recalls a conversation at Craig’s where Pav described young men following health podcasts and taking as many as 32 different supplements: one for sleep, one for energy, one for focus, one for digestion, one for joint pain.

Pav’s diagnosis is the cleanest line in the episode.

The difference between a marketer and a doctor is a doctor will give you the upside and the downside of everything. A marketer will only pitch you the upside.

The cocktail creates the problem it claims to solve. Pav describes friends who start having sleep issues, cannot tell which substance is doing what, then add another product to fix the side effect of the last one. None of it is FDA regulated, and nobody in the chain is explaining how the pieces interact. Meanwhile, he says, they are searching for a quick fix, and there is no such thing.

He also names the window where the pitch lands hardest: “Especially when you’re between 45 to 55, you’re trying to beat the clock at that point, and that’s when they get you.” The storytelling is good, he concedes. The facts are real but dislocated, stitched into a story that may be backed by science without being fully backed by it. Your body may not need any of it.

Put the workout on the calendar before the meetings

The first thing Pav does is not a workout. It is a plan. His day is blocked around markets, family dinners, and meetings that run into the evening, so the only reliable hour is the one nobody else wants.

Wake up at 5:00 a.m. when no one bugs you. Plan your day out, plan your week out, and when you do that you feel less stressed.

Mike has run his own weeks the same way for more than twelve years. His case against the to-do list is an efficiency case: write ten things down and you will feel fine finishing six of them. Give each task a fixed block and it gets done because the time exists for nothing else. For a busy person that means the workout, the meal, and the investor call sit on the same calendar with the same status.

Executive health, in this version, is a scheduling discipline before it is anything else. Notice what neither man says. Nobody mentions motivation. The structure carries the days when the mood does not.

Executive fitness on two or three sessions a week

Pav is not training for a stage. His routine, as he describes it: two or three sessions a week, a mix of cardio and weights, and sensible eating the rest of the time, without the cheat days that, in his words, catch up to you. The dose is modest. The consistency is not. Mike’s read, looking at him across the table, is that the posture and the health show, and they show because Pav never defers a workout to some time on Monday.

Mike adds his own version of executive fitness, which is about extracting more from the same hour rather than finding a shorter one. He parks on the top level of the gym’s garage and walks down. He sprints the stairs after cardio. “I don’t look for shortcuts. I look for more.” His comparison is the one a financier understands.

When you look at investment, if you look at your health that way, you’ll be smart. You’ll get the results.

Then the line that closes the loop: “It has to be an active process, not passive.”

Test first, then add only what the numbers call for

If the episode has a method, this is it. Most executive health programs start with a product. Mike’s starts with a panel. His rule for supplements is short: “Get a blood test. That’s your road map.” A comprehensive panel tells you where you are actually deficient, and from there a physician or a nutritionist who understands supplementation can fill the specific gap.

Mike is candid that he follows this himself. The only supplements he takes are the ones his own blood work says he is low in, and he adds what he needs rather than medicating over the top of a body that was fine. Vitamins, in his phrase, are over-the-counter drugs. Treat them with that level of respect.

He raises the question the sleep-stack marketers never answer. If you take six things every night to sleep, when do you stop? And if you stop, and your body has adapted, what then? Pav’s answer for himself is that he is at a point where he takes none of it. He eats real food, as close to the ground as he can get it, and he reads the label on anything packaged with an eye on why it lasts so long.

The shortcut math, in Mike’s numbers

The second half of the episode turns to weight loss, because that is the other thing sold hard to men in their forties. Mike’s position on the GLP-1 drugs is blunt and it is his opinion, stated as such: he calls them a death sentence for the physique, citing medical journals he reads weekly for a figure of 40 percent of the weight lost coming from muscle. He describes people he has seen after the drugs with loose skin and lost shape, and he puts extended fasting in the same category, since both work by caloric restriction and both, in his view, cost you muscle.

His alternative is arithmetic. Cut 500 calories a day and by the end of the week you are 3,500 calories down, which he puts at one pound. Burn another 500 a day in cardio and other training and you are at two pounds a week. Three months of that is roughly 30 pounds, then a maintenance program. Simple, safe, and effective, in that order, and you still get to enjoy dinner. Mike is Italian. He started training as a heavy kid so he could eat, and he is not trading that for a drug.

This section is Mike’s reasoning, not a prescription. Whether any of it applies to you is a conversation for your physician.

Health is a household system, and a company one

Pav’s most practical observation is about environment. He raised children who exercise and eat well, and the payoff runs both directions. Once the ecosystem is in place, he says, even the days you do not feel like doing it, you do it, because the people around you force you to.

Mike’s own story backs it from the other end. At 14 he felt heavy and it showed in his grades. When he started training, the grades rose with the body. That link between how he felt and how he performed is one of his oldest convictions, and this is where it came from.

A company is an ecosystem too, and it works the same way. A leadership team that blocks its training and eats like adults gives the rest of the building permission to do the same. This is the ground Operation Fitness works on. Mike designs every program; a specialist from his team delivers it, to one executive or to a floor of them. The starting point is the one he argued for in this episode: a health history, blood work with your physician, and a plan built from the results rather than from a podcast. Tested, not guessed. If you buy wellness for a company, the corporate page sets out how a corporate wellness program is scoped, from the first assessment to the specialist on site.

Where to go from here

Watch the full conversation with Pav Dharwarkar on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3X4ivUwlNI.

If you are responsible for a team’s health as well as your own, see how Operation Fitness works with companies and institutions.

If you want to start with your own blood work and a program designed around it, request a consultation. Mike replies to everybody.