Healthier lifestyles powered by Punjabi music
a.k.a bhangra (about this)
Exercise At Home
Involve your entire household using your TV to exercise with us. We publish these to be freely available on YouTube, which you can Apple AirPlay or Google ChromeCast to your TV. Who needs a gym membership, or even to pay £15 or some other ridiclous amount per month? If you appreciate our videos, tell us, we'll make more.
Group exercise to Punjabi music, built to genuine fitness standards
Pungra is a voluntary organisation that facilitates group exercise built around Punjabi music. We believe in growing fitness classes, designed and delivered the same way any other credible fitness format is: by qualified instructors, structured around participant health rather than audiences.
The Pungra Story, so far
Every fitness format started somewhere unexpected. Pungra started with a mistaken pronuncation — and a user-focused technology professional, who can't let it go until he's fixed it properly. Listen as a podcast episode (on the go) on your favourite platform.
Why the name Pungra, and not "bhangra fitness"?
In 2012, founder Ravi Sandhu came across a video of an instructor teaching a [supposedly] "bhangra workout" using the wrong music entirely, with movement that didn't match it — an honest mistake, born of nobody ever explaining the basics properly.
Ravi imagined what he'd teach that instructor first, if he ever got the chance: not a dance move, but how to say the word, bhangra, correctly.
That became the whole reason Pungra exists as its own name — a fitness format inspired by Punjabi-style movement, designed to the standard expected in fitness centres.
Our principles
- Exercise is at our core, not performing. Instructors coach for effort, not artistry — "push to the highest energy you can hold," not "you can make that look better."
- Non-stop and easy to follow, no choreography, taught on-the-fly to adapt to the class. Constant music, repeatable moves anyone can pick up, no need to "catch up" if you miss a week.
- Everybody participates, no spectators or audiences. No shows, no performing on a stage, no using social media to show-off. Our promotion is about participate with us, not "look how great we are"
- Turn up, exercise, go home. No costumes, instruments, apparatus, or dance divas. Not a conventional bhangra or performing-arts class — no need for any of the trappings of performance.
- Certified and insured, no cutting corners. Instructors working toward Exercise to Music Level 2 or equivalent, properly licensed and insured — no informal shortcuts (what the text calls desi kam). Classes are where future instructors are inspired, so we support people to become instructors.
What you can expect from a class:
- A structured warm-up, main session, and cool-down, led by a certified instructor
- No expectation that you become a good dancer — the class exists for your health, not a performance. We're not preparing for Punjab's Got Talent with Simondeep Cowell
- All fitness levels can join, as modifications are demonstrated
- No costume, no special footwear beyond supportive trainers, no experience needed, and beards and turbans are optional
