Maintaining our Gym’s Unique Culture with Darren Faulkner of Primal Gym
The Good Gym Guide Podcast • Series 1, Episode 6
For this, the last episode of the series, I spoke with Darren Faulkner, one of the founders of Primal Gym in Leeds.
When I asked Darren to imagine his ideal training environment, he paused for a while, looked around, and then said that he felt that Primal Gym was pretty much it. He is in the rare and enviable position of having made his dream gym a reality.
In this interview, he talks us through the systems he has put in place to bring people into this vision and help them achieve what they want from their training. Everything has been thought through, from the design of the entrance and waiting area, to the initial tour, consultation, and ongoing training.
Primal Gym was named by The Telegraph in 2017 as the best facility in the UK for “those who hate the gym”, so where better to learn about alternative gym design?!
When Darren and I sat down and recorded the interview, we spoke for about 40 minutes, which included a lot of me waffling. In editing, it was hard to cut our much of what he said because so much of it felt important.
Maybe let’s start by talking about values. If you watch any of the introductory videos on Primal Gym’s YouTube channel, every coach that’s interviewed refers to their three values of fun, community and results. It’s clear that this isn’t just a marketing slogan but that the staff really embody those ideals.
Holding those values at heart like that seems to have meant that the culture of the environment has stayed true without the need for formal rules.
Similarly, I think the amount of opportunities for feedback and contact with members, both individually and in a community or group setting, keeps everybody involved on-task and prevents that culture from drifting. It also acts as a form of accountability that helps people stay on course to their goals and reasons for training.
There is an idea of “functionality” at Primal Gym that extends beyond just the training philosophy to influence many of the other systems and processes. Everything is measurable, trackable, with the end-point of improved function and performance.
For example, the use of the InBody scanner and Functional Movement Screening in the initial consultation rather than more wooly, feelings-based self-assessment of our current state.
We know that tracking progress makes us more likely to stick to the habits that affect it, so there are huge benefits to this, if you are a goal-oriented person.
Perhaps surprisingly, there may also be benefits in terms of body image. Drs. Jessica Alleva and Phillippa Diedrichs, at UWE’s world-leading Centre for Appearance Research, have developed a “functionality appreciation scale”. They say that “body functionality has been identified as an important dimension of body image that has the potential to be useful in the prevention and treatment of negative body image and in the enhancement of positive body image. Specifically, cultivating appreciation of body functionality may offset appearance concerns”. I hope to do a podcast interview with them at some point.
So perhaps one way of getting away from bullshit diet culture might be to reframe quantities of fat and muscle mass in terms of how they serve certain functional or performance goals, if someone has them, or to reject the whole quantitative approach if someone just wants to train because it feels good and improves their health. Those are separate interests to both how our body is seen by society and how our body performs in competitive situations, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with body composition.
We also know, however, that that approach doesn’t work for everyone, and Darren says as much, in how Primal Gym knows its audience and redirects other people to yoga studios and other training spaces. This is what excites me though - the idea of a pluricultural range of places that serve their particular audience very well, rather than a monoculture that serves a very small percentage of the audience they attract, simply because nothing else is available. Darren made similar observations when he was talking about niches and Personal Training.
Reaching the end of this series, I am struck by how many times common themes have emerged across the different interviews. I think everyone has mentioned wanting to train outside, many people have mentioned play, community, belonging, natural light, water... I am going to start creating a sort of Pattern Language, informed by the visionary architect Christopher Alexander, to keep a track of these recurrent ideas, and then one day we can hopefully make a place that fulfils them all.
Darren’s work
The Telegraph article naming them as the best facility in the UK for “those who hate the gym”
Episode links
The Leisure Database Company put out the UK fitness industry’s end-of-year reports
Industry heads that Darren referred to: Paul Chek, Mike Boyle, Eric Cressey, Gray Cook
UWE’s Centre for Appearance Research (which has a great podcast), where Dr. Jessica Alleva and Dr. Philippa Diedrichs developed their Functionality Appreciation Scale
My hero Christopher Alexander, the architect whose Pattern Language I mentioned at the end
Credits
The above photos come from Primal Gym
Most other photographs on this website were taken by Paul Samuel White
Production support by Yas Clarke
Graphic design by Steph Weise