Celebrity Yoga and Holistic Wellness Expert Anshuka Parwani and founder of Anshuka Yoga studio is the reason behind several Bollywood celebrities taking a keen interest in yoga today. Anshuka’s students include popular names like Kareena Kapoor Khan, Alia Bhatt, Rakul Preet Singh, and Ananya Panday. Anshuka, who was a trained commercial pilot met with a near-fatal accident a decade ago which changed the course of her life. The accident left her immobile for eight months and deemed her temporarily medically unfit to fly. Yoga was a huge part of her healing process. “That's when I really realized the power of yoga. When I was fit again, I could go back to the airline, but I decided that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. And to be honest, I just wanted to spread the knowledge of the practice, and the skill because I truly believe that yoga is magical,” she said in an exclusive conversation with Bollywood Hungama.
TRAINING CELEBRITIES:
Talking about how she started her journey of teaching Yoga to some of the most well-known names of the Hindi film industry, Anshuka shared, “As soon as I got my teacher's training, I was a certified teacher and I started observing a lot of other teachers’ classes. One day, there was a class that was meant to happen at 6 am in the morning and none of the teachers were going to be able to make it. I was asked to take the class so I went and it was for none other than Kareena Kapoor. My first student turned out to be Kareena Kapoor and it was so beautiful. Because after that, I don't think we ever stopped yoga and it's been a decade”.
Apart from Kareena, Anshuka has been regularly training actors Alia Bhatt, Ananya Panday, and Rakul Preet Singh. She also trained Deepika Padukone to prepare her for her role of a yoga teacher in the film Gehraiyaan. “I truly believe that every person's body is different, and nobody is the same, and you cannot approach teaching yoga as a one-size-fits-all. And that's why I believe in curating programs for the individual. Everybody has their own weaknesses and strengths. Celebrities, especially, have different goals at different times that they want to achieve,” she said.
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Anshuka further spoke in detail about her experience training each celebrity:
KAREENA KAPOOR KHAN:
“Kareena loves the suryanamaskar. She likes the 108 suryanamaskar. It is something that a lot of people follow because that's called the Yoga Mala and Bebo (Kareena) has achieved that. Even after being a mother of two children, especially pre and postnatal yoga is something that is different. With Kareena, the postnatal yoga, just starting from scratch, building that core again, reaching that has been a journey. Experiences with Bebo have been the most varied from all my celebrity students because I have seen Bebo in so many phases. I started training her from We Are Family when she was finishing Jab We Met. She's gone from a size zero to prenatal, postnatal two times, and then post COVID. So there's just been so much, so the experience with her has been very varied.”
DEEPIKA PADUKONE:
"She's very in tune with her body, especially because we were training her to also be like a yoga teacher (for Gehraiyaan). We weren’t just doing Yoga, there was a lot of theory also involved in the sense that there was a lot of imparting knowledge and why we are doing what. So that was really beautiful. In one of her interviews, Deepika said that she fell in love with yoga after practicing with me. So that is definitely rewarding."
ALIA BHATT, ANANYA PANDAY, and RAKUL PREET SINGH :
"Alia and Ananya being so young, I think it’s very cool that they are also endorsing yoga. These are all people from different age groups. Kareena being a mom of two and doing yoga, Ananya being much younger doing it. So I think that that whole spectrum is very cool, because we do have a lot of people who are influenced by what Bollywood celebrities endorse because they are always on top of their fitness. As for Rakul, she was never a yoga person. She was always a gym girl. To be honest, every time when people have stepped onto the yoga mat, luckily for me, they never stepped off."
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