Thanura, the computer engineer who created an integrated gym
Both the epics of yesteryear and the management books of today are full of stories of adversity that make – and sometimes break – the protagonist of the parable. In Thanura Abeywardena’s case, a painful injury in his final year in school set the course of his future career. Playing rugby for his school S. Thomas College, Mount Lavinia against Wesley College, he tore a ligament in his knee. He was taken to a government hospital, which did an x-ray.
Thanura Abeywardena
“I know now that ligament injuries can’t be seen on an x-ray. They said there’s nothing wrong. It was definitely a ligament tear, but it was never investigated,” Thanura says.
Although Thanura did a degree in computer science and then worked for a major global apparel retailer in Colombo for a few years, his heart was set on studying sports science because of that injury, traumatic for a keen sportsman.
At the age of 28, Thanura quit his job, sold his car and used his savings to study in Australia, which has some of the world’s best colleges and practitioners of sports rehab and physiotherapy. To finance his studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth, he worked at everything from managing a bar to working the graveyard shift cleaning and cooking at a local McDonald’s, where he was frequently targeted with racial abuse by drunks.
“I would laugh and say at least I didn’t come in a boat,” he recalls.
His sometimes back-to-back part-time jobs left him scarcely enough time to sleep and study, let alone exercise.
“I was 120kg then and very unfit. But you learn perseverance. My sporting background obviously helped. Finishing the degree was an obvious win.”
Fast forward to 2025, and more wins have come in the past 12 months for TASS, an integrated gym and physiotherapy centre that Thanura has owned and managed for more than a decade. This year amounted to new dawn for a career preordained by that ligament tear: TASS opened a sports lab, complete with machines to test oxygen intake and lung function, another to evaluate hamstring and quadricep strength, which is critical to ward off future injuries by athletes. To the uninitiated, the equipment looks as if it might be used ahead of a NASA expedition for astronauts but athletes and regular gym habitues often suffer from imbalances between, say, a right quadricep and a left quadricep. These imbalances not only affect performance but end up being a shaky foundation that get in the way of excelling at sport – or even just enjoying it.
This hi-tech sports lab tucked away on the first floor of TASS is a far cry from the firm’s humble nomadic beginnings when Thanura started the company in 2014 by teaching group exercise classes in the area around Independence Square. The novelty of people doing high intensity fitness training in a public space attracted the wrong kind of attention. “No one was doing bootcamps outdoors. The security used to say this is not a place to exercise. ‘Get out of here’. We would get chased out. The Air Force said we are going to arrest you.”
An injury during a school rugby match, changed Thanura's future as a qualified physiotherapist
Perseverance paid off; a vehicle from TASS loaded with yoga mats, kettle bells and two training instructors uses the square a few times a week. But, today the area around Independence Square is dotted in the early morning with other trainers and their clients. On a recent Friday, from a distance, the assortment of yoga mats looked like magic carpets.
The range of options at TASS’s own gym, which by coincidence is in a building between a gene therapy firm and SLIM (not a weight loss outfit, but the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing) make the place seem anarchic at first glance, but it hums with ordered activity. Any given early morning there might be a young athlete doing band work and other rehab exercises in one corner of the gym under the watchful eye of a physiotherapist or sports scientist.
There will usually be a class of circuit training where middle-aged men and women are defying their age by leaping off stationary bikes or rowing machines one moment and swinging kettle bells and lifting weights the next while others are doing plyometrics and jumping on and off boxes in rapid-fire circuit training. In the area with weight machines, Thanura and other trainers might be working one-on-one with private clients.
Amid this whirlwind, Thanura exhibits an uncanny 360-degree vision. Even as he trains a client, he will spot someone in the group exercise class doing squats wrong or another getting set up on the rowing machine with straps not laced up as tight as they should be. He will call out to one of the trainers leading the class to help correct the squat while darting across the room to tighten the ankle straps of the rowing machine.
“I have OCD for sure. My staff is young. It’s something they need to correct then and there.”
His expansive smile and easy-going banter are the alter ego of how seriously he takes training. Setting himself up for a career that now melds sports science with sports coaching assignments such as being the coach for the national women’s water polo team prompted Thanura to do a second degree, which he completed in late 2018.
He has a MSc in Sports and Exercise Science and Medicine from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. The in-house sports lab’s complementary testing equipment has set a solid foundation for TASS’s functional movement screening and training. This concentrates on looking at movement patterns and diagnosing asymmetries that most people, including athletes, have in order to improve an individual’s mobility and stability.
TASS today has grown to almost 20 people, evenly spread across training, sports science, physiotherapy and management.
Thanura, who turned 40 in November 2024, credits his ability to juggle so much to the seminal experience of working his way through college in Australia. Years later, the benefits of those difficult years continue to guide his career.