No time to workout? Yasmin Karachiwala says only 10 minutes are enough

Each of Yasmin Karachiwala has to be done for 45 seconds with a 15-second break

When it comes to exercising, we never run out of excuses. On top of the list is "time", or the lack of it. But a just-released book, The Perfect 10 (Ebury Press, Penguin Random House; R299), by celebrity fitness instructor Yasmin Karachiwala, proves why "10 minutes a day" is all you need to stay fit.

Karachiwala who has trained everyone from Alia Bhatt to Bipasha Basu and Hrithik Roshan, believes that there's a need to "normalise" fitness. "Fitness looks hard. Weight maintenance looks difficult." None of it, she says, is true. The 300-page book takes you through a wide stack of 10-minute-long abdominal, full body, upper body and lower body stacks, which make fitness fun. Not to mention, they require minimal investment of time.

Over the last one week, we decided to discipline ourselves, and follow Karachiwala's simple workout routine. While the book comes with written instructions, and photographs for every workout, it also has a QR code for every stack, so that you can enjoy a virtual one-on-one training session with Karachiwala. This came in handy, because sometimes it's important to "see" a posture, before attempting one, or you could suffer an injury.

We started with the upper body stack. She offers five variations, each lasting 10 minutes. We began with the first variation, which is also the easiest. Before any exercise, Karachiwala insists on a warm-up, as "it dilates blood vessels, produces exercise-friendly hormones, increases muscle temperature, and facilitates a better range of motion". While the warm-up instructions in the book were easy to follow, the QR code didn't lead to her video session; that was disappointing. We did the warm-up routine anyway, and that took about eight minutes. For the upper body stack, we scanned the QR code and trained with Karachiwala. Each stack has five exercises, which have to be done for 45 second, with a 15-second-long break, before you repeat it again. This is followed by the cool down that takes you another six to seven minutes.

The toughest of the strength-training workout routines were the lower body exercises, which we tried next - we experienced muscle soreness for an entire day. Overall, while she does claim that you need "10 minutes", the truth is that, when following these exercises, you have to spare at least half-an-hour daily. Karachiwala suggests combining each stack with another, for true benefit, and a good diet of course. We tried our stack before a walk, and it did help lift our mood. Now, only if we can make it part of our daily routine.

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