← Introduction to Dance-Fitness · Module 2 of 13 · 9 minutes
Why Pungra sees dance this way: a founder's story
By Ravi Sandhu, founder of Pungra
Before you learn about dance-fitness, it helps to know the lens I look through. I have spent my working life in technology and change management, and that has shaped how I see the world of bhangra. This is the story of how.
The question I kept asking: what keeps people exercising?
As a teenager I was overweight. By 17, in 1997 and 1998, I had lost the weight and become enthusiastic about exercise. I tried football, martial arts, badminton, swimming and more. What I wanted was something I would keep doing and keep showing up for, without being distracted by my computer, my friends and parties.
Two things stood out. I liked running, but only with good music on, and I got bored quickly without it. And I liked martial arts because it was a class and a group, which kept me motivated, although I did not enjoy being hit in the face. Music and a group: the thing that combined both was dance. In 1999 I decided dancing must be the way to keep exercising. A few months later I started running my own classes, dancing to Punjabi music, first once a week and eventually four or five times a week. None of us was professionally trained. We just knew we loved the music.
What people actually wanted
By 2004, hundreds of people had come through the classes, but many were not coming back. By then I was working professionally in customer-focused jobs, where success comes from asking what the customer wants. So I tried it on my classes. I interviewed people, especially the ones who had not returned.
In my own informal interviews, at least 95% of the people who came wanted exercise, first and foremost. We were spending our time on choreography, shows and costumes, and almost nobody cared about those. Learning a few moves for a cousin’s party was a nice bonus, not the reason they came. Those who left said the class did not feel structured, felt more like a social club, and had too much waiting around.
Three lessons from my day job
1. Match the promise to the service. In 2006 I worked at Consumer Direct, which gave advice on consumer rights and taught me a lot about trading standards. The lesson was simple: if you advertise one thing and deliver another, people feel let down. I was promoting a “fitness class” that did not feel like one. That was my mistake, not theirs.
2. Be willing to be wrong about your own expertise. In 2007 I began Exercise To Music Level 2, the qualification that fitness centres expect. After seven or eight years of teaching dance, I was confident. I failed it, and not narrowly. I was given pages of “don’t do this”. It was humbling, and it made me ask how many dance classes are being taught with the same blind spots. I retook it and passed.
3. Things that look the same on the surface can be very different underneath. In 2008 I worked at Barclays Bank. Customers struggled to see the difference between a debit card and a credit card. To them both were just plastic cards that made payments happen. Underneath, a debit card spends your own money and a credit card spends a lender’s, which changes the protection you have and the relationship you are in. In 2013 I worked at Google and saw the same pattern. Google and Apple both make phones, but Google’s business is digital advertising and Apple’s is hardware. Once you see that, you understand why each one behaves the way it does.
| Looks the same | What is really different |
|---|---|
| Debit card and credit card | Your own money, or a lender’s money |
| Google phone and Apple phone | A business built on advertising, or on hardware |
| Dance-performing and dance-fitness | The customer is the audience, or the person taking part |
How that lens changes how I see bhangra
The word “bhangra” is used for many things that look alike on the surface. Bhangra performing aims to promote a culture, to be seen in traditional clothing, to earn views and likes, and to perform on stage, in music videos and behind artists. The customer is ultimately the audience, and the business is entertainment. Classes in that world often recruit people for performances. That is a legitimate business, and it is a different business from ours.
Pungra aims at something else: you come to class, you do the class, you go home. The customer is the person exercising, the goal is their physical health, and the class should meet the insurance, music-licence and quality standards that a genuine fitness centre expects of a genuine fitness instructor. Neither is better as a culture or an art. They are different things, and calling them by the same name makes people choose the wrong one.
How the name and the work grew
In 2012, around the London Olympics, I was thinking about how to help people learn to exercise to Punjabi music. I watched a video of an instructor on a beach promising a “bangra workout”. It was a performance and not a workout, and the word was pronounced the way it is spelled in English, not the way it is said in Punjabi. Spelling the word the way it sounds gave me the name Pungra.
In 2020, during lockdown, thousands of people used our workout videos and asked for more. Many asked for live classes on Zoom, but the picture quality was poor, you had to join at a fixed time, and broadcasting copyrighted music that way raised licensing problems. It reinforced how much education about group exercise and Punjabi music is still needed. That is the reason for the certification programme you will meet in Course 3, which I plan to launch in 2027, and for the “activators” who encourage others in their community to teach. Being a fitness instructor is not well paid for the effort it takes, but it brings real benefits to your community, to society and to you.
Why this matters to you
You do not need a career in technology to use the same lens. Whenever a class, a product or a trend appeals to you, ask: who is this really for, and what does it promise me? The rest of this course gives you the tools to ask that about exercise.