You Beauty! Karine Bedrossian Tabata training - review

Annabel Rivkin tries interval training
Annabel Rivkin25 August 2016

I get fatter in summer. And an annoying thing happens when you haven’t worked out for a while: you need to get fit enough to get fit again. Muscle memory will get you only so far. When your bones feel like dead weights and your heart explodes after milliseconds of exertion, it’s easy just to chuck in the towel and have a cocktail.

So how to get moving when the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak? The answer, I am finding, is interval training with really, really short intervals. Enter Karine Bedrossian and her Tabata programme.

So I had one week to get vaguely presentable and things were not looking good. From any angle. But Karine does a £250 package of five high-intensity sessions spread over a week or so which — believe me — will get you into a frock or your swimmers with far less panic and self-loathing. She pitches up with a stop-watch and can-do attitude that is neither oppressively cheerful nor repellently military.

The principle of Tabata is 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, eight times. And then a drink of water. And then go again, keeping the heart rate up all the time. For about 45 minutes. You can do almost anything for 20 seconds, so even a neglected old cardio system is likely to respond, perk up and give your metabolism a massive wake-up call.

And the thing is, after a five-session week (Karine is beady as anything about injury), you are exponentially more able to do better and more, and maybe even manage a workout by yourself because YouTube exercise classes are fab these days. Karine is a one-woman kick-start. Cheerful. Professional. Evil. Do it...

Karine Bedrossian Tabata training, £250, karinept.com

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter: @EsMagOfficial

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in