“Please don’t ask me who my favourite celebrity clients are,” Yasmin Karachiwala, fitness trainer to Bollywood stars, laughingly pleaded, as we settled down at the Gulf News office, to talk about A-Tone, her fitness studio, opening in Dubai on May 25.
“What is worse is now the stars have started asking me this question too! And I said, ‘Seriously? You guys are so insecure?’”, laughed Karachiwala.
Yet she concedes, saying, “Preity [Zinta] is one of my favourite clients. I know she talks about me to trainers in Los Angeles — I feel very good when she tells me these stories — but when she comes to Mumbai she’ll call and say ‘Babe, I’m back. When can I come?’”.
The just married 41-year-old Bollywood actress recently posted a picture on Instagram last month with Karachiwala, when she visited Mumbai soon after her wedding, confirming what the trainer said.
A-Tone, which opens in Business Bay, is a collaboration between Karachiwala and Dubai-based fashion designer-turned-fitness enthusiast, Anjali Chandiramani. It was on an airline that the idea to launch A-Tone in Dubai took birth, Karachiwala told tabloid!.
“Anjali and I have been friends for a few years. It was a mutual friend’s and my husband’s birthday and we were to celebrate it in Goa. Four of us — she, me and two other friends — were going to prepare for it. Anjali and I just happened to sit next to each other and started chatting and things kept taking shape. At that time I was just starting out on my first franchise in south Mumbai and I told her whenever you are ready, I’ll come. So she came back [to Dubai] and did the math,” said Karachiwala, who launched her book Sculpt and Shape: The Pilates Way (with co-author Zeena Dhalla) in Mumbai on April 20, with Katrina Kaif and Alia Bhatt.
“And that’s it,” said Chandiramani. “I did a bit of research on her and when I threw out a couple of teasers to people I know to learn what they thought of her, I received tremendous response. And we just had to do it”.
Karachiwala has been in the fitness industry for 25 years, but she became a pilates trainer about 10 years ago after training at Balanced Body in California, US. Today her client list not just includes Kaif and Bhatt but several A-list actresses such as Deepika Padukone who recently spoke about her training with Karachiwala for her Hollywood debut XXX.
Ahead of the studio opening, Karachiwala spoke of pressures of working in Bollywood, how to be fit and her passion — pilates.
You’ve been in the fitness industry for so long. Would you say pilates is better than other forms of exercise?
I never say pilates is better than other exercises. Every exercise system has its own science and if followed correctly, then every exercise system is great. My first question to my clients is what they enjoy doing. If you enjoy running and I put you in a pilates class, you may just end up hating it.
Having said that, I haven’t quite met anyone who doesn’t really enjoy pilates. 10 years ago I was looking for something that was revolutionary for the abdominals because everyone manages to have everything else working but when it came to abs, they struggle. We try five hundred sit-ups and reverse crunches and [all sorts of] abdominal exercises — I even reached a thousand and it didn’t help. It was then during my research, I found a studio in California which was highly spoken of. I emailed them that I wanted to be an instructor. That’s how my journey began.
I wanted to do only mat pilates because the equipment is very expensive and the cost of bringing it to India would have been twice as much. Once I started, I loved it and watched others use the equipment. That’s when I went up to the instructor and said I wanted it all. I’d been in the fitness industry for 15 years but pilates was completely different from what I had experienced before, and I’ve done everything from crossfit to functional training to yoga. It seemed to merge everything.
So I returned with one reformer and one wunda chair because they were the cheapest. But how much ever I spoke to people about pilates, I couldn’t explain correctly. I started trial classes and let them experience it themselves. And of course, once you have the celebrities doing it and enjoying it, everyone wants to try it. It’s not something that will fade away. Also in the kind of dances the actresses do, some parts of the body are more exercised than others and cause an imbalance. And pilates balances you.
Who can do it?
You, me, a 10-year-old, a 100-year-old — everyone from the age of 10-100.
Then, who can’t do it?
A newborn baby maybe? [laughs]
But to answer your question, pilates is great for sportspersons who are in rehab after an injury, if you are an obese person or a skinny one, if you are a super fit person or a completely unfit one. When we train to be instructors, our training is very intense. We don’t just exercise, we have a 100 hours of observation and self training, assistant teacher’s training… before we actually touch bodies and train them. This teaches us how do deal with each person and the one thing we try to accomplish after every class is to make the client feel they have done a great workout when they walk out. They should be able to feel like they can do anything.
Celebrities, especially Bollywood actors, have erratic work schedules. How do you deal with that?
That’s a difficult task. But these actors and actresses are very committed and conscious of what they wish to look like and how they want to project themselves. This makes my job easy because they know what they want, which they put [across] to me and we figure out a work process. For example if you see Alia in her new movie Udta Punjab, she had to be really skinny and look anorexic. So we had to work on losing a lot of weight. We worked a lot on weight training and just did pilates to keep her core strong. If you see Katrina in Dhoom 3, she’s muscular but at the same time she didn’t want to look like the next Ms Arnold Schwarzenegger. Whatever we do to pump up the muscles in the gym, I wean them off with pilates. Deepika [Padukone] was working on XXX and had to be very fit and active, and do stunts. So before she left, for a month we really trained on plyometrics, gym and combined all that with pilates. Whatever you misalign in the gym or any other field in life, pilates balances it.
Schedule-wise, yes it’s erratic but I have a mantra that if they are committed enough to come at midnight — after full 12 hours of shooting — to train, there’s no excuse for me.
Which of them have been toughest and easiest to deal with?
They are all tough because they all have expectations about how they look. Plus, they have time frames that they work in. When Katrina was doing Chikni Chameli she told me “Even if one thing jiggles, you are dead” — and she really moved in that song. So that’s a lot of stress for me. But lucky for them I don’t take stress so easily.
Also they are tough on themselves. So I can’t complain that they are tough on me because it’s just part of their process. When they look good on screen and get appreciated, I feel very good as well, so it’s all worth it.
At the same time, they are all easy too. Because I train so many of them, sometimes I can’t give them the time they want because someone else has already booked it, and they don’t throw tantrums. None of them have an attitude with me, they adjust as far as they can. Luckily, there’s no animosity or competition between them. All the actors I train are very secure so that truly helps.
Plus they adjust to my travelling. I’m constantly updating my schedule between training them and trainers — I’m a master trainer. Last year I travelled a lot. So Katrina called my husband and said ‘I don’t think your wife is going for training. I think she’s having an affair’.
And how about the non-celebrities that you train?
All the time! (laughs) That’s the challenge right? How do you convince them?
MANTRA TO GET FIT
Yasmin Karachiwala and Anjali Chandiramani give us tips to keep fit.
Don’t compare, just improve yourself
“I think people tend to compare themselves to someone else more than try to improve themselves. So it’s always like [I want] Katrina’s abs and Alia has lost a lot of weight so how does she do it? Instead of wanting to look like someone else, why don’t you be a better version of you? Be fit which you deserve,” said Chandiramani.
Sleep is very important
“You can work out as much as you like but if you don’t rest or sleep, it’s not going to do the good it’s meant to do to your body,” said Chandiramani.
Diets don’t last
“One of the funniest things people ask for is a diet and I always ask them, ‘What’s your age?’, and they’d say 20, 30, 40… And I ask, ‘You don’t know how to eat for your body? Seriously?’,” said Karachiwala. “And my next question is ‘Are you smart?’ And we all know the answer to that! So why can’t you be smart about choices in life? You know good food and you know bad food. If you are going to eat sugar and say ‘it does nothing for me’ wake up and smell the coffee. You know if you eat carbs after a certain time it is not going to be digested easily because you are going to sleep right after that. I just make them realise which foods are good and bad, which foods work for them by trying them out and then make their own food plan because that’s what will help them sustain for a longer time”.
Drink water
You can’t possibly ‘forget’ to drink water!
Move!
“Movement is very important. I met someone recently who said she didn’t move at all,” said Karachiwala. “We are animals, we can’t not move — we are meant to find food, hunt. Earlier people walked from one place to another. Now you step into an air-conditioned car the moment you step out of the house. I tell all the corporate people who are my clients who complain they don’t get time to walk around. But you may have conference calls, there are hands free headsets, then walk in the office, don’t sit in a chair. A ‘mobile phone’ is called that for a reason. It makes a big difference”.
Strength train
Another important thing is strength training, says Karachiwala. As you grow older you lose bone density and muscle mass.
“So after a certain age, it’s very important to strength train, and I don’t mean like Sylvester Stallone pick up weights. Use your own body weight. You can do squats, tricep dips, walk push ups, knee push ups — so many things”.
Keep a positive attitude
“If you have a positive attitude you can conquer anything. It just comes. I think it like ‘Oh my God, it’s just another day, what can I accomplish today?’ and I feel it’s the work outs that get your spirits high and make you feel good about yourself,” said Karachiwala. “You need to do it for your own self and nobody else. You also need to realise how important fitness itself. Along with looking good, you need to feel good. I try to make people realise how good [exercise] is making them feel and as a result they are looking good”.
Maintain a balance
“Don’t exercise to imbalance your body. We need to modify the exercise sometimes. Like I know that doing more than 10 burpees can cause an imbalance. But people take [exercise] to such levels, that they have a throw up wall. It’s an achievement. For me it doesn’t work as I want people to feel great after a workout. But there are people who do feel great after throwing up. It depends on what you are looking for at that point in time” said Karachiwala.
WHAT TO EXPECT AT A-TONE?
Along with Yasmin Karachiwala’s pilates, the centre will also offer sessions for yoga, including aerial yoga, Bodhi suspension training, and all equipment from the Wunda chair to Motr.
Anjali Chandiramani has adapted a new training session she calls Crosscuit — a combination of CrossFit and circuit training.
“I’ve been doing CrossFit for a while and as much as I really enjoy it, it has a lot of negative publicity going on about it as they try to make people do similar kind of exercises at different levels. I can never forget my first CrossFit class where the trainer said do 80 burpees,” said Chandiramani. “It’s a beginner’s class. I was the last person to finish it but they all waited for me to finish. Can you imagine the pressure? It was insane. Even though I can now say I can achieve them pretty easily but I don’t want people to come to my studio and feel intimidated. So we came up with Crosscuit which is a circuit-based training and is time-based, whereby we say 10 minutes of burpees where we do the repeats according to our levels. So it’s CrossFit equipment — we have the ropes, kettle bells, barbells — but put a twist to it so that everybody can adjust to it at their level”.
