Goddess on loop

Trainer Cindy Jourdain makes SMD writer Anju Maskeri do lunges and push-ups as part of the workout. Pics/Snehaâu00c2u0080u00c2u0088Kharabe

On a Wednesday morning, we're at Cindy Jourdain's bootcamp at a plush Juhu studio. With us, there are about 15 women - some, like actor Nimrat Kaur and Sarah Khan, actor Saif Ali Khan's daughter - more familiar than the rest. We're all here for a fitness training camp that hopes to bring out our inner goddess. "Well, you could say that. Everyone's got their own take on this, but the essence is empowerment and using fitness as a medium to become better version of ourselves," says Jourdain, a former ballerina, and a past member of London's Royal Ballet Company, who has also trained Katrina Kaif in the past. "When I retired from the ballet company, the journey that ensued became an interesting aspect of who I am today. It was about finding the woman outside of the stage, the woman who is stepping away from the light," she explains. The bootcamp takes over from there, the idea being to help women find their inner goddess, or god for male participants, and feel "safe, happy and comfortable."

Anju Maskeri

At this class, the former athlete uses military style drills that include techniques from martial arts, yoga and ballet with an assortment of modern training aids from kettle bells to battle ropes. Called CNS (Central Nervous System) activation, it uses explosive movements to ignite your CNS in the right pattern. "I do simple and gentle exercises that don't require you to pressurise your brain. It's about squeezing and contracting a particular body part," she says.

While the exercises look fairly easy, it's only when you get down to doing it, that you realise it's not for the faint-hearted. We start with "mobilising with a stick" that she uses to open up the joints, warm up the entire kinetic chain. We are then divided into groups of three with rotational exercises right from pull ups at the bar, push-ups and jumps.

Trainer Cindy Jourdain

Roughly half an hour into the workout, we are feeling the heat. The full body workout is on building shoulder strength and the idea is to take the reps from low rep number to high number and slowly fatiguing the shoulders and working on endurance. The props with kettlebells are fun and lend a peppy feel to the workout.

We were jelly kneed when we began with the Hindu squats, a multijoint, or compound, exercise where you begin to squat down with your weight on the balls of your heels, allowing your knees to pass over your toes.

Sweating profusely, we are feel sufficiently energized. "It usually takes three months for results to show," she says. But if this is how we feel on day one, the journey looks promising.