We’re in the village of Eastburn, in between Keighley and Skipton. We’re set in an old weaving mill and then I took it over and converted it into a boxing gym, and sort of like a community hub as well. It runs solely by volunteers, been operating now for 26 years, and our ethos is to help people of all ages, genders, shapes and sizes to come in and enjoy boxing. Have a go at it. There’s no sort of pressure for them to compete. So we get a lot of people who come in here for mental health issues, weight loss and weight gain, getting fit and building muscle mass, it’s a confidence thing on both sides of the spectrum.

I’ve been really interested in boxing a lot of years. It’s a sport you can do by yourself. You do a lot of training by yourself, but it’s also a sport that has got a lot of people around you as well, should you choose it.

It’s a total body workout, so you work every muscle group in your body. So on the physical side of it, you get very fit. It’s very demanding, but also healthy body, healthy mind. So this is what we try to promote. We try to give people confidence in themselves and their abilities. We show people that anybody can box or do boxing training.

We were the first club in England to have female boxing, the first female Asian boxer. And then that opened doors for a lot of girls. Now there’s quite a lot of Muslim girls boxing, which is a fantastic thing because it shows that regardless of your gender or your background everybody can box and everybody is looked upon as equal. So I can take any of these boys and girls to any club anywhere in country and they have respect from people who don’t even know them because of what they do. It turns people’s lives around as well, does boxing. We’ve helped a lot of people who have been on a little bit of a slippery slope. We’ve helped them get back on track and turn their lives around and become good people.

We help and guide them through all them obstacles of life that teenagers go through, where they think they can’t talk to the parents, they can’t talk to the teachers. With us, they can talk to us about anything and everything and we’ll help and guide them throughout.

You walk through that door, everybody’s treated the same. There’s no hierarchy. There’s no “Look at me, I’m a brilliant boxer”. Or “Look at me, I’ve got this fantastic job”. You come in here and you treat everybody with respect, and you get respected yourselves. So that’s the way that we’ve run the place for years and it’s been successful because we’re not just building a boxing club, we’re building a community, we’re building characters and helping shape people’s lives.

Eastburn Boxing Club is a local amateur boxing gym. We take in kids and basically teach them how to box. There’s been loads of people that have come into the gym from a struggling background, myself being a prime example. It’s unbelievable how much it changes people, and what it does for you as a person, for your future. They’ll take a lad in that struggled before and they’ll develop him into a proper man. Does that make any sense?

I’m from a rough background. I used to drink a lot and I used to do other things that I shouldn’t be proud of. And as soon as I’ve met this club, it sort of sorted my head out. Whereas before on Friday night, you’d finish work and you’d go to the pub and see the lads, and all of a sudden you’re out till Sunday night. Now, you can’t do that, now it’s your boxing on Monday night. So you stay nice and healthy on a weekend, you eat well. Your mental health stays very, very high. It doesn’t drop. The people around you all support you.

So outside of here, something really bad might happen and I come in here and I forget everything for an hour and a half and it sort of refreshes my mind to go back out into the real world, but in a whole different mindset.

I’m 21 now. When I first started coming I were carried in a cot with my dad when I were probably no older than two. My dad boxed way before I were born so I’ve been in this gym forever, as long as I can remember. My dad’s the coach. He’s been my boxing coach since forever. He’s cornered pretty much every one of my fights. Yeah, he loves it. So do I.

I love the training. I always had this competitive mindset. I wanted to be better than whoever else were in gym, and as I’ve got older it’s also a bit of an escape from everything else. The stress of work or college or whatever I’ve been doing. The second I walk through that door, everything’s gone out of my head, and all I care about is training. For that hour and a half it’s the most chilled out enjoyment ever, without the stress of anything else outside. It’s the best feeling in the world, and as long as I’ve been coming, every session, it’s the exact same feeling without fail.

I’ve been coming for almost five years now. I first started coming just for a bit of self defence, but after a year or two I just fell in love with the sport. So I kept coming down to compete. Now I’ve got a few sponsorships and in January I’m fighting the Yorkshire Champion. So quite big progress so far.

It’s the way it makes you feel. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just something you’ve got to do to understand what I’m talking about really.

I train three days a week, and then there’s work you’ve got to do outside, like running and strength and conditioning. Other parts of it, like your stamina, it’s all down to you. It’s got to be done, and it’s helped a lot. It’s made me a lot more disciplined and calm in like, you know, bad situations and stuff. It just helps a lot, especially if I’m having a bad day or something. It helps just to come down here, punch a bag for an hour, do some fitness, it helps to get it all out your system in a good way.