Bombay Connect lured us to try out their Beach Boot Camp sessions, an initiative by fitness consultant and personal trainer Nupur Shikhare to reclaim the once-scenic seafronts of the city
Lucrative as much as it may sound, getting out of bed to soak in the sea wasn’t our idea of a Saturday morning. Imagery of empty cartons, used tetrapaks and other litter strewn across Mumbai’s shoreline acted as further deterrent. Still, we picked up our fitness bags and accepted Bombay Connect’s invite to work out with Nupur Shikhare who had toned Sushmita Sen, Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan’s envious bodies. We met up with the affable fitness consultant at Juhu Beach for what was to be a two-hour high voltage workout.
The warm up included a series of body postures including lunges. Pics/Pradeep Dhivar
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Weekend wake-up call
Shikhare admitted to enthusiastic faces that an overall body workout including “different aspects of fitness like strength, cardio vascular endurance, stamina, agility, flexibility and balance,” is what is needed and also, gets him going. Opening up our muscles, we breathed in a mouthful of blue sky and basked in the natural light, what experts have often advised us to partake. Gradually, we moved on to a circuit session, which started with push-ups, moved to jump squats and then included crawling on our palms and ball of the feet forward backwards. After this, we tried burpees for the first time; this is great for strength training and gets the heart racing at the same time. So as we say this, the last leg of the circuit was to literally break into a sprint, a moment, we confess, where the heart had popped right out of one’s body.
Cart wheels were a definite high point in our two-hour session
Ani-motion
Initially, we kept on brushing the beach debris aside during push-ups and lunges, but once the ground was clear, the positive zeal of the group took us out of our worry zones. Mustering up strength, we slid into our locomotive selves imitating animals like the bear, spiders, frogs, lizards, horses and ducks. The lastpart of the boot camp was exhilarating as we pushed the body to do headstands and cartwheels.
As the sun shone into our eyes and we panted red with the salty air, the sight of drifting clouds and an expansive horizon brought a positive note to the day like no other. Shikhare admitted that this is his way of getting people to come out, reclaim spaces and in fact, bring about awareness that might get our granular beaches a sigh of relief.
Sign up
On: Every weekend, 8 am to 10 am
At: Silver Beach -- the strip of extended Juhu beach behind Novotel Hotel, Juhu.
Call: 9820401592
Cost Rs 600 per sessionu00a0
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