This is a collection of ten things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.

They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.

At home, we have been designing a new bathroom. We have been thinking a lot about the shift from communal bathing to individual washrooms, and what’s lost (and gained, I suppose) with that. Here are a couple of films exploring that.

Firstly, Yumna Al-Arashi’s stunning film ‘Shedding Skin’:

"This beautifully intimate portrayal of the hammam captures the richness and universality of womanhood, an identity that is unabashed by difference in religion or culture. Al-Arashi strips away stigma and peels back layers of deeply engrained prejudice against Muslim women as the unknown other.

I stumbled across this short film by Rebecca Coley about the Docklands Sauna and Steam Room in East London by accident and it’s an absolute gem. For some reason it’s not letting me embed it but do click the link!

I often return to this archival footage of Catch-as-Catch-Can wrestling at the Snake Pit in Wigan and I was excited to read a bit of back story on the Scientific Wrestling Facebook page the other day:

Billy Riley's old gym was a modest wooden shack (built in 1947 by the wrestlers themselves) that produced some of the greatest catch exponents of the mid 20th century (e.g., Billy Joyce, Karl Gotch, and Billy Robinson). Born in 1896, Riley was a successful middleweight champion, coach, and promoter that learned from feared legends like Waino Ketonen and Billy "Pop" Charnock.

Karl Gotch (aka "Kamisama" or "The God of Wrestling" in Japan) first called Riley's gym a "snake pit" in a Japanese press junket and the name stuck (Karl even helped dig the ditch that would later become the gym shower).

Gotch (then Karel Istaz) was invited to Riley's by Billy Robinson's uncle Alf after placing at the 1948 Olympics in London. Karl was known as "chesty" for the prideful way he carried himself and credited Joe "Robby" Robinson (Billy Joyce's brother and one of Riley's best friends) for taking him under his wing and showing him the catch-as-catch-can style (Karl later learned more with Ben Sherman and Frank Wolfe in America).

Since then many have carried on the name Snake Pit as an homage to Riley's influence, including Yukio Miyato's gym in Japan, Roy Wood's gym in Wigan, and Joel Bane's organization in America.

Riley's gym eventually collapsed under the weight of heavy snowfall back in the early 1970s and Billy Riley would pass away a few year later in the Fall of 1977. Riley was a crucial link in the long chain of successful athletes and coaches that passed the torch of catch-as-catch-can during the 20th century.

There is a rich tradition of stone-lifting in the Basque Country. It’s called Harri-jasotze. Rogue Fitness actually made a wonderful documentary about it:

There is also a stone-lifting culture in Scotland. Martin Jancsics is an inspired custodian of this, and his website (building on the work of Peter Martin) has a directory of all known Scottish lifting stones. As much as anything else, the names are wonderful.

I’m still reading Christopher Alexander’s book ‘The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth’ and so many things are jumping out to me about gym design.

Inspired by his approach, I am going to begin an interview project with the most frequent users of Bristol Co-operative Gym to make sure we’re doing the right thing at our new venue…

In the passage below, I have replaced the words “school” and “campus” with “gym” and “learn” with “exercise”:

We asked people about their longings, and their practical needs. We asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking about in the most wonderful gym they could imagine.
This was not easy to do. It required much of both the interviewer and the person being interviewed. From the interviewer, it required love, compassion, and joyful acceptance of every person interviewed. Each question had to be steered by affection, or by a strong wish to see the person’s desires (no matter whether idiosyncratic, brilliant, or boring) materialize in the gym. Our efforts in these conversations were to try to help each person reach the deepest place in their own hearts and to help them bring this material out into the open. We were looking for the spark of ideas that would generate a better place to exercise than they were accustomed to. By loving and respecting each person as a collaborator, we supported the search.

Megan Nolan writes deeply moving, truthful, profoundly honest pieces about our internal lives (among other things). I have loved all her articles in the New Statesman.

This article on health was brilliant at laying out some of the complexities of our relationships with our bodies and our wellbeing:

It isn’t a given that one always desires health. In fact, there have been years of my life where the drinking and drug-taking and furious smoking have felt totally appropriate. Back then, I really didn’t care what happened to my body, and it felt only right to treat it like a rag. But miracles happen, and now I no longer feel that way.
Now, I am acutely aware that I want to live for a long, long time, I want every day I can have, and an instinct towards self-preservation is waking up in me.
This, though, is where I falter, where logic fails, where I am left red-faced and mute in the doctor’s office. I really do want to move my body, I really do want to breathe better, I really do want to make myself stronger for all that’s left to come in my life, and I know that the way to get those things is uncomplicated. But I am also afraid – afraid to turn back towards my body. In order to live, I had to sever it from myself. In order to learn how to enjoy food again, without constantly anticipating what each bite would do to me, I had to stop considering my body at all.

New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #7