The Good Gym Guide

The Good Gym Guide Podcast • Series 1, Episode 2

This episode is with Devaki, the founder of Curvy Girl Yoga. In her classes, Devaki creates a dedicated, celebratory space for women sized 16 or more to practice yoga. She describes how she builds this environment with openness and humour, nurturing the relationships between those who’ve been attending for a while and welcoming any newcomers into that culture.

In the second part of our interview, she describes her ideal training space, taking influence from vastu shastra - a traditional Hindu system of architecture - and Scandinavian design. She talks about the relationship between the outside and inside, both in terms of buildings - softening the boundaries between indoors and outdoors - and bodies - in making sure we attend to both our physical and mental health.

When we did the interview, Devaki arrived with a handwritten map of all the ideas she’d had about this dream gym, and I just sat there and completely blissed out as she described it. It sounds good, doesn’t it?

I had a very clear mental image of the rowing boats on the lake on this parkland, in the city. A sort of wellbeing centre, where we can be supported in all of the interwoven aspects of our health. So many of the reasons for why we, with all our good intentions, don’t always manage to stay active, originate outside of the gym.

Most of us are balancing that responsibility to ourselves and our own health with other responsibilities to our loved ones, or work, or any of the other complicating factors that influence how we feel in our bodies. The idea of being mindful of that, and bringing professionals working in mental health and those working in physical health together, in the same environment, makes a lot of sense to me. What could come out of that collaboration? What sort of knowledge is there in that overlap?

Devaki also made me think about the small ways we can bring that into our practice as coaches, with movement practices based around gratitude and celebration rather than punishment, shame or guilt. Of course, there is a lot to unpick, socially, in order to allow that, but, through the existence of projects like Curvy Girl Yoga, we can see that it’s not impossible.

• Curvy Girl Yoga’s website and Facebook page

• A recent interview with Mel Ciavucco

• There was an article all about CGY in the September issue of Om Yoga & Lifestyle Magazine

• The Wikipedia page on Vastu Shastra is a great introduction to those ideas

• The Story of Scandinavian Design, from Smashing Magazine

• Fight Club!

• The photographs above come from Devaki

• Most other photographs on this website were taken by Paul Samuel White

• Production support by Yas Clarke

• Graphic design by Steph Weise

The Good Gym Guide Podcast • Series 1, Episode 1

This first episode of The Good Gym Guide is with Peter Hodkinson of Body Mind Fitness. Peter produces beautiful wooden training equipment, as used in movement traditions from all across the world - clubs from India, meels, maces and sang shields from Persia, tai-chi balls from China... He has travelled widely to experience some of these methods in their place of origin, and he talks about how this has affected his approach to his own training, and to the classes and workshops he leads at home in Bradford-on-Avon.

We spent a lot of time talking about the mental side of training too, drawing on his experience studying and teaching qigong in China and with a sul ki do master in London.

Our conversation made me think a lot of things - about the ritual aspects of entering and preparing training spaces, about how many conventional gym spaces really separate mind and body - and this is something that has popped up in lots of other interviews too - and also about lineage and heritage and indigenous movement traditions… Like, what would the English or British equivalents be? Bring back cudgel play, I reckon. Backswording, not Body Pump… Catch as catch can wrestling… The Haxey Hood.... There are lots of options, ripe for rediscovery! It also made me think about training for longevity, cultural attitudes towards age, and about how important our relationships with our coaches and mentors can be, but how we tend to have to pay a premium for that over here.

• See the Body Mind Fitness website for all his beautiful training tools.

• Learn indian clubs, gada mace and meels skills with Peter at his classes.

• He will be hosting a weekend-long workshop with fellow clubs experts Paul Wolkowinski and Kelly Manzone of Indian Clubs International on 28/29th March 2020 near Bath (venue tbc).

• There is great training advice and cultural context on the blog.

• Clubs UK Facebook page

• Instagram

• History of club use for exercise

• Tom Crudgington’s fantastic Body Development gym in Bath

• The Esmaeli wrestling dynasty is currently continued by Saeed and his “infused wrestling” approach

• The UNESCO page on pahlevani as protected “intangible cultural heritage of humanity”

• The book The Last Wrestlers (reviewed by Can from Artemis BJJ in Bristol!) by Marcus Trower explores some of the traditions discussed in the episode

• Trailer for Dangal!

• Sul ki do in the U.K.

• There are some great clips on YouTube of training at the ankharas in Varanasi

• What is qigong?

• Pretty much all the ambient sound came from Peter’s own recordings

• The photographs are from Peter too

• Most other photographs on this website were taken by Paul Samuel White

• Production support by Yas Clarke

• Graphic design by Steph Weise