Perfect divorce cure? Counselling in your boxing gym
OVER the course of 95 minutes, I laugh, get angry, punch things, jump, lift, sweat, meditate, stretch and cry. I’m at a new studio in Manchester called Hero Training, which claims to be ‘Britain’s first truly integrated health club’. We kick off with a 35-minute circuit class involving slam balls, kettlebells, jump training, battle ropes and boxing drills. We wear heartrate monitors and see our training zone and recovery times on a screen. I am at the end of an acrimonious divorce, and going to boxing classes has helped me release my pentup anger and aggression. But I have always left processing my emotions to weekly therapy sessions that take place on a different day, and definitely in a different place, to my workouts. But at Hero I’m told a counselling session is available straight after my fitness class. It jars with me at first — how can I switch into talking mode after working out? Easily, it turns out. Hero Training features a therapy room between the boxing area and yoga studio. ‘This helps to normalise the idea of talking therapies as a key part of health,’ says co-founder Stephen Waterman. Moreover, Hero’s founders left mirrors out of all the studios — they’re only found in the ladies’ changing rooms. I hate mirrors in gyms — they reinforce my low self-esteem issues. I stare at my wrinkles or bad hair, and that makes me feel miserable. Once I got over the shock of having therapy straight after a boxing session, I find it easy to open up about the changes going on in my life. The endorphins released in workouts can act like morphine, diminishing the perception of pain. I wonder if that could be why, after exercise, I felt less tense and less likely to maintain my brave face. I’ve been dealing with a lot. My mum died 18 months ago. Then there’s the divorce, plus a tricky time with my business. My coping strategy involves putting everything into little compartments, I proudly tell Ashleigh Turner, Hero’s head therapist. But where do I put my feelings of hurt and sadness, she asks? I burst into tears. The answer, I blurt out, is that I don’t feel those things. I go to a boxing class, or work harder, or obsessively plan all my meals, or lose my temper with a poor, unsuspecting friend.
Ashleigh tells me that our feelings have to go somewhere, and if we do not process them, they can come out as angry outbursts or control-freakery or (in my case) over-exercise or being pedantic about eating plans. We do a mindfulness exercise in which Ashleigh shows me how to lean into the pain of losing my mum when it hits, or the anger I sometimes feel towards my ex-husband, then to look at it curiously and let it float away like a balloon. The short 30-minute session doesn’t by any means cure my problems — in fact, it highlights them. But that helps me feel their impact. Ashleigh’s gentle but persistent prodding of my emotions, experienced without the pressure of being in a formal therapy setting, helps me open up. When I do a 30-minute yoga session afterwards, I feel as though I’ve been through a physical and emotional washing machine. It’s like my body and mind have been cleansed and renewed, in just 95 minutes.
COST: Membership starts at £99 a month. Pay-as-you-go classes cost from £20, and counselling sessions from £40 ( herotraining clubs.com).