Deconstructing the Fitness Industrial Complex with Justice Williams of Fitness for All Bodies

The Good Gym Guide Podcast • Series 2, Episode 2

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.

Our crowdfunder launched on Monday and, as I record on Tuesday, we're already past £3,000. We had fantastic news the other day that we've qualified for £12,500 in match funding from Sport England and Power to Change but we need to raise £7,000 to "unlock" this. We hope to do this within the first week of the campaign and will have two more days from this episode being released to do so, so please donate if you can and help to share our campaign.

As far as we know, this sort of gym designed through the collaboration of its users, in consultation with architects and experts in accessibility, has never been built before, so it feels important. We want to demonstrate how well it can work.

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.

After chatting with Justice I felt like running through a wall! It was extremely inspiring and life-affirming.

It's hard to pull out any particular thing to talk about but, as I said at the start, I think for me it's so powerful to not just identify, with real clarity and specificity, the problems in the current dominant model, but also to demonstrate just how much better an alternative could be. How much more opportunity there would be for connection, for exposure to other ways and experiences, for learning, for community-building, for pleasure...

It's worth saying too, if a little besides the point, that there is evidence for the power of this approach in sports psychology literature - the model of motivation called Self-Determination Theory shows how we're more likely to stick to something if we feel autonomy, belonging and competency - all of which are far more likely in the approach Justice describes than what is currently the case.

The final thing I wanted to say is that we're currently working with Justice and Becca Kirkpatrick from Take the Big Bag and We Got to Move in Birmingham to bring Justice to the UK in the summer. This will be first time he's presented his work outside of the USA, so it's very exciting indeed.

Justice’s work

Credits

podcastGuy LochheadSeries 2, Episode 2