Diverse dance in the West Midlands
BBX Fitness Managing Director and Principal Instructor Bally Bhogal discusses how she made the jump to the sport and physical activity sector
We interviewed Bally to find out about her relationship with CIMSPA and how her Bhangra dance fitness classes are bringing her community together.
Growth of BBX Fitness
“I delivered my first class in February 2016, so, it’s been exactly 10 years since I started out. But I never planned anything like this. I think I was too busy having a good time.
I was born into Bhangra. We’ve always been into music as a family, but it was never in the plan that I would do dance fitness, have a company or have a training programme and my own team of instructors. I’d like to think that before I leave this earth, I’ll have given Bhangra fitness to the world.
I think COVID was the turning point when my husband and I thought we ought to register this as a proper business and then look to see where we could go from there. Coming out of COVID, there were a couple of people from my classes who were super keen to become instructors. They’d already been coming for a few years, so it made sense to train them.
We partnered with CIMSPA to design a programme that could be endorsed, then we started to deliver that, and the rest is history. So, for the first part of this journey, there was never a plan, but since then, there’s been a deliberate strategy to put some foundations in place.
Professional CIMSPA member
CIMSPA is all about education, about professional standards, about quality, setting expectations, looking at best practice and improving your practice as a professional – but it also helps us as a company to gain insights into what’s happening in the sector and future trends in the industry and make improvements based on that as well.
So, for us being members of CIMSPA – personally as fitness instructors and also as an employer – is really important for maintaining our standards and improving the quality of what we do and how we deliver.
Skills needed as an instructor
To be a great dance fitness instructor, you obviously need to be able to dance. So you need rhythm. You need some kind of movement in sequence, coordination skills, physical skills. You definitely need to be a people person – someone who is happy around people.
I feed off the vibes of my class members! The more people are in my class, the more I exhaust myself. The more crazy I go, the more of a better time I’m able to provide as well, because I just feed and thrive off the energy. So, it just becomes a little bit addictive from that perspective.
You definitely also need to be able to listen to people, to understand them, be intuitive, know when something’s wrong, know when to ask, but equally know when to back off as well.
So, just being good with people, being responsive, coming back and answering people’s queries quickly and delivering high quality service and feedback.
Flexibility of being an instructor
I was never, ever thinking about becoming a dance fitness instructor. It was never on my radar. To be honest, I was working in a full-time job and I was bored. There were some dance classes that started up down the road and I went along and became inspired.
The great thing about dance fitness instruction, is that you can do it in the evenings, so you may well have a full-time job and can still do it part-time, in the evenings and also on the weekends.
Diversity in dance instructors
Dance fitness instructors come in all shapes, sizes, guises, backgrounds and ethnicities. We’ve certainly found some great instructors from within our classes. Some have been doing Bhangra for years with us, and they’re not necessarily born into the Indian or South Asian culture, but they’re very, very good at Bhangra.
So provided you’ve got the beat, if you like the dance style, there’s no reason why anybody who’s not from a South Asian background can’t become a BBX Bhangra dance fitness instructor. In fact a third of our instructor team are from non-South-Asian backgrounds.
Diversity of members
Our classes bring out different people from various communities. Certainly, from the South Asian communities, but we do see a lot of diversity in our classes. The classes attract a lot of white people, black people, the Gujarati community, Hindus, Muslims, all sorts of people. You wouldn’t see that level of diversity in your average group exercise class.
Connections with members
It’s really multilayered because outside in the world, there’s so much going on at the minute and also work and life are quite stressful nowadays. People need respite and I do find that classes can be your one lifeline. Me time. Having the option of somewhere to go is really valuable.
I even remember when I was going through challenges in my life; once a week I used to go to classes, and perhaps my instructor at that time never knew how much she was benefitting me – physically, but mostly mentally.
You can tell straight away when somebody’s down, you can tell when they’ve had a bad day. That happened last week when I had a chat with someone after class and we didn’t leave until probably about half an hour later. It was quite significant for me asking that person to stay back for five minutes, knowing that it could be big thing in that person’s life.
Benefits of attending BBX
I’d say there’s four benefits of attending Bhangra fitness dance fitness classes.
The first one is obvious. It’s the physical fitness – developing your strength or losing weight, for example. Dance fitness can help to fix lots of ailments, and we have some really great case studies to prove it.
There’s also the mental health aspect of it, which really came to fruition for us during COVID, when our members were telling us how much they wanted to get back to class because of their mental health. They needed to be part of the class and feel that fun again. They wanted to feel the joy. They want to feel the spirit.
There’s also the social network – just being part of another group and also subgroups within the group. Our class members enjoy each other’s company and are very supportive of each other. They even go out for meals together and arrange other social events.
And then the last one for us is a big one – that community aspect and the charitable activities that we get involved in.
Physical and mental health benefits
We’ve had our attendees telling us that they’ve reduced their cholesterol, reduced their blood pressure and improved their situation around diabetes and pre-diabetes. We’ve had an individual who reported that they improved their bone density from doing Bhangra dance fitness. And somebody who came in with issues from a frozen shoulder said that because Bhangra involves a lot of shoulder work their symptoms have improved.
But equally, there is that mental health side of things. Even our instructors say they feel great for having done a class.
The vibe of BBX Fitness classes
It’s really hard to describe in words the spirit of our classes, the liveliness, the energy. You literally have to be there to understand and to pick that vibe up.
But if I had to try to explain it, it’s dynamic, it’s energetic, it’s infectious. It’s that happiness and the joy that people feel being around each other. And that’s really facilitated by movement.
We’re so lucky we have such great music to exercise to. As soon as that Bhangra dance music goes on, your shoulders start to twitch automatically and that is the signature move.
Getting attention
We’ve been involved in the National Day of Dance, which is Angela Rippon’s campaign. Angela is a massive advocate of dance, and she’s been able to bring all sorts of dance teachers across the country together to open their doors for that one day and provide some free taster sessions or do anything that they can potentially do to encourage people to move more.
As part of the National Day of Dance, we created a mega-class for 250 people, called The Big Brummie Bhangrathon. We did it last year and this year and they both sold out. Last year we featured on The One Show and we’ve been on the radio and have been included in the campaign’s press releases.
We’ve also done some brilliant work with Dr Amir Khan where we were featured in an episode of the Channel 5 TV programme ‘You are What You Eat’. And, back in 2022, we got a call from the Commonwealth Games’ casting department asking for Bhangra artists and dance performers for their opening and closing ceremonies and many of our class members were lucky enough to take part.
Future plans for BBX
We currently have classes in Birmingham, Sutton Coldfield, Wolverhampton, Solihull, Walsall, Oldbury and our Harborne class is about to launch again. In February, in Mere Green, we did a Bhangra Blowout, which is our free taster class. So that’s another new venue for us. We had about 40 people there and more on the waiting list.
We’ve just trained new instructors through our CIMSPA-endorsed programme and they’ve come from other parts of England and also Wales and Ireland. The word is getting out there and we definitely want to expand our operations and grow the business nationwide.
We’re currently working with the University of Wolverhampton on two studies looking at how Bhangra dance fitness impacts the body, including its effects on cholesterol, glucose levels, BMI, fat content, all of that. We’ve already completed one study and we’re doing a second at the minute, so, in May, we will have some statistics and scientific data around the impacts of Bhangra fitness on the body. We will then use the data to hopefully expand and diversify our audience and as leverage to talk to other partners around where else can we take this.
Healthcare referrals is an important area we’re starting to explore further. Angela Rippon recently introduced us to Dr Hussain Al-Zubaidi, a well-known TV doctor and expert in lifestyle medicine. We were delighted to discover that, unbeknown to us, he has been social prescribing to our class in Leamington Spa! He wants to now chat to us about how to expand that across our network of classes. I’d love to see exercise become one of the first ports of call for GPs and the wider NHS, instead of a last resort.”
