Pilate princess

Yasmin Karachiwala, celebrity fitness trainer, talks about her journey of becoming becoming India’s finest fitness trainer and how fitness has changed over the years in India.

Yasmin Karachiwala, a fitness guru many Bollywood divas like Deepika Padukone, Kareena Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, and Kriti Sanon swear by, is the person behind Alia Bhatt’s chiselled body and Katrina Kaif's sculpted physique.

In a recent conversation with us, Yasmin candidly spoke about her journey of becoming India’s finest trainer and how fitness has changed over the years in India.

Yasmin stumbled into fitness not by choice but out of sheer peer pressure, she shares, “a friend of mine wanted to join the gym and forced me to join in with her, we were 18 years old, I had no interest in working out or getting fit, I was a lazy person, who love to eat.”

“I was terrible when I joined, I didn’t know any moves, how to follow instructions, I did so badly I could see people making fun of me. That was the thing that made me determined to keep going back to the class, to perform and to learning better,” she adds.

It was all of a sudden when one day Yasmin’s instructor asked her to teach the class, and that’s when she realised that fitness is something wants to work on, she further continues, “I went to the class and I did it and to my surprise I knew every single sequence, not only that, I could speak while doing the exercises and tell people how to do them. I really enjoyed it because it gave me the feeling of high because I realised that I love telling people what to do and this is a perfect platform for me to do it, so yeah, that how my journey as the instructor started.”  

Yasmin was enjoying what she was doing, and It was in 2000 when fitness become her fulltime career, “The more I studied I realised that I wanted to know more about how the body worked, how different people’s body requires different kind of workouts. Initially, I used to teach little kids in school in the morning and in evenings, I used to do my workout trainings. I think it was after my second son, I actually came as a full time instructor,” she explains.  

She is considered to be one the pioneers of Pilates. On asking what interests her about this form, she replies, “Pilates is something that I feel has changed my life since when I first learned pilates, It is a very interesting form of workout. I wanted to work on my core and I was always trying to get that extra layer of fat from my stomach. It works on your breath, awareness, balance, control, and concentration. It has so much to offer that I just feel that it is a perfect form of exercise one can do.”

Yasmin has also co-authored a book- Sculpt and Shape: The Pilates Way with Zaeena Dhalla. The book focuses on how to change the shape of your body by learning more about your posture and how to improve it. “It was not very easy to write a book and I was very fortunate that Zaeena was my co-author because she loves to write and I love to talk. I used to tell her what I wanted in the book and then together we used to put ideas together in words,”she explains.

On asking where she sees India in next ten years in terms of fitness, she replies, “I think last decade has really changed people’s perception on fitness and I think next decade is going to be more of it. Being thin doesn’t mean fitness. Fitness is not just going out to the gym and working out it is about how much energy you have throughout the day, it is a holistic approach. People are realising that fitness is more of a journey rather than a destination and that’s is the message we are trying to get out to more people.”