The Good Gym Guide Guy Lochhead

This conversation is with Sabrina Moore of Donut Barbell in Cardiff. Sabrina is a 3x British champion powerlifter in the 63kg weight category, and a women's powerlifting coach who focuses particularly on the impact strength training can have on our mental health.

We spoke about her journey to strength training, the role of training and potentially competing in supporting our mental health, and how to make a welcoming and inclusive yet appropriately-challenging lifting environment.

This conversation is with Professor Geraint Harvey. Harvey is the DanCap Private Equity Chair in Human Organization at Western University in Ontario. His research focuses on the employment relationship and the changing nature of work. Back in 2016 he published a paper titled 'Neo-villeiny and the service sector: The case of hyper flexible and precarious work in fitness centres' about the parallels between modern working arrangements of gyms and personal trainers and medieval serfdom.

I was keen to talk with Harvey about this and to ask for his help in imagining alternatives.

Today I am speaking with Abi Nolan, the founder of Supply Yoga. Supply is a social enterprise changing the culture of access to wellbeing services through an innovative cyclical business model - paid subscriptions for their online classes subsidise wellbeing services for marginalised communities in east London.

It's an extremely well thought-through way of doing things that has run successfully since 2015 and is an inspirational example of putting some of the ideas discussed in the last episode with Laura McCafferty into practice.

I was keen to ask Abi about the specifics of how Supply works, and especially about the behind-the-scenes running-a-business stuff and developing healthy, trusting relationships with their partners.

This interview is with Laura McAfferty, the founder of Inclusive Wellness, a social enterprise and community committed to increasing accessibility, diversity and inclusivity in the private health & wellness industry.

We spoke about the need for continuing personal development on these subjects and the potential role of standards in improving practice and giving marginalised people better access to health and wellness services. We also spoke about the potential pitfalls that any fixed approach might have, like one-off certifications or directories that aren't regularly updated.

I'm so excited to share this conversation with Justice Williams and to reflect on how his world-leading work at Fitness for All Bodies can inform our renovation of Bristol Co-operative Gym as we make it more welcoming and adaptable to more people commonly excluded from gyms.

I found this conversation with Justice enormously moving and inspiring. His conception of fitness offers a completely different paradigm from what is commonly presented. He views gyms as one of many potential spaces for community building, and fitness as a tool for self-knowledge and reconnection to ourselves and each other.

Above all, it is a philosophy rooted in love, and in how much there is to gain from dismantling the Fitness Industrial Complex and opening it up to more bodies. By reproducing larger societal power dynamics, the conventional fitness industry robs diminishes us all by making us want, as Justice says, "something that is not a part of who we are". His vision of an alternative encourages us to acknowledge and recognise what has been taken, and work collectively to strengthen ourselves and our communities. The implications of this go far beyond getting fitter.

The first episode of this special series of the Good Gym Guide is with Conor Heffernan, a historian of strength currently based at Ulster University whose blog Physical Culture Study is the best resource I know of for learning about the origins of many of the characteristics of gyms nowadays, as well as some of the fascinating things that have been lost to history.

Learning about the history of these common gym features can help us see how recently they occurred, and this in turn can hopefully help us feel more confident in challenging them and imagining alternatives.

Similarly, knowing that there have been many co-operative gyms in the past, and that this was in fact the dominant form of governance for a while, can give us confidence that what we're doing is not impossible.