Interview Of The Week with Adell Bridges: Clicked with yoga

She is funny, lovely and very popular. She has built her wellness world and now she is here to share her knowledge and teach. Adell Bridges yoga teacher & fitness trainer talks about how she's gained trust from hundred thousands of people. 

Where are you from and what you do?

I am from planet earth and I human :-) Okay, more specifically, I grew up in Petal, Mississippi and moved to the UK 15 years ago. I now live in London and I do a long long long list of things for my boss (my boss = me) that fall under the umbrella of "teaching".

Why yoga?

I've always been active and athletic. I was a gymnast as a child, and did some kind of sport or another throughout school. But in my early adulthood I fell out of sports and fitness activities just due to scrambling to make ends meet with three part-time jobs. By the time I was 28 I was in a lot of pain. I didn't know it then, but now I know it was because I had become very weak and my hypermobile joints were unsupported. I went to see a physiotherapist and although he didn't help my pain, he did suggest me to take up yoga or pilates. The one pilates teacher in my town was always posting racist things on social media so I didn't want to support her, so instead I went to yoga! At the same time I discovered the yogis on Instagram and was hugely inspired by what I saw from them. I learned so much about yoga from the Instagram yogis! Within a couple of months I was totally hooked.

How did you become a professional yogi? 

My story of how I got to where I am today didn't begin at the same point as the beginning of my yoga journey. I look at all the ingredients that combine to make "Adell Bridges Yoga" and I see things that go back to my childhood, adolescence, and the tough years leading up to the beginning of my yoga journey. Maybe I'll write a book about it one day; but for now I'll abridge it and say that I just feel that it was my calling. Everything I did in the first three decades of my life seems to have all been laying the foundation. So that when I became a yoga teacher everything just clicked. I had a personal background of various styles of movement, an educational training in psychology, a job history in health, wellness, and community development, and an innate passion to teach.

So sharing what I've learned with others on social media has always been more than just an endorphin boost; it's been my creative outlet, and my way of feeding this hunger to teach.

Real life experience and passion is the key to be a successful wellness person...

I think you have to want to share your own journey. You have to have a solid fitness lifestyle yourself and have found what really works for you, what makes you feel amazing. It's just about sharing that. You can't gain the trust of others if you're just regurgitating what others have said, if you're trying to emulate someone else. You have to walk the walk, or... perhaps run the run! Or squat the squat, asana the asana…

There are a lot of people on social media who share a personal diary, which is fine. But we humans are really only interested in ourselves. So in order to be interested in something we have to see ourselves in that person; we have to resonate with the story they are telling or want to be in that story. I think the people who build large audiences (that are true followers; not the big accounts that build followings of gawkers) are people who are sharing things that others feel a personal connection to in some way or another. But also algorithms are unfair factors, and some people gather huge followings with no understandable reason for it.

Wellness is the trendiest thing these days, it seems people getting more health conscious than ever. What do you think why healthy lifestyle is becoming so popular?

Social media definitely plays a part in this but I think it's part of the natural swinging of this historical pendulum between extremes. If you look at any part of history, you'll see that trends, cultures, movements, etc. all stem from a need of change because some resource or perception has reached an extreme state. And that's how I see what's happening with our habits towards health. We have been on a trend of growing convenience and comfort with increasing ease for living a totally sedentary lifestyle wrapped in plastic and injected with preservatives and it is taking its toll. People are sick, unhappy, and in pain. And so the fitness industry is growing with people ready to change their behaviors to benefit a healthy body and mind.

What is your daily routine?

The only thing I do daily is to try to do the best with what I've got that day.

How much do you practice yoga?

I practice as much as I can within the realms of what I feel like practicing.

Your last two answers sound like the true way of living well. Pearls of wisdom by Adell for the week.