#38 Aditi Shah, Peloton Instructor & Puma Ambassador
On Practice, Peloton, and Puma
Welcome! I’m Simi Shah, and every other week, I dive deep into the journey of a South Asian trailblazer. Find us on socials (Instagram, LinkedIn) and your podcasts apps (Apple, Spotify)!
Hot off the Pod 📣 Aditi Shah, Peloton Instructor & PUMA Ambassador
In our latest episode, I welcomed our first-ever trailblazer in fitness, Aditi Shah, Instructor at Peloton and Global Ambassador for PUMA.
Aditi joined Peloton in 2018, having been recruited to spearhead their Yoga and Meditation practice. She first discovered her love of yoga while living in Mumbai after graduating from Rutgers University, where she studied math. While in India, she pursued modeling, appearing in campaigns for Garnier, Revlon, and BareMinerals.
Some years later, she moved to New York, where she pursued a career in acting, making appearances on hit shows like Elementary and Inside Amy Schumer. In recent years, she’s spent time as an entrepreneur and founder, and as as a digital marketing consultant for startups like Parsley Health. Today, she is Peloton’s only South Asian instructor and one of its most renowned. Recently, she also became a global brand ambassador for PUMA.
Excerpts from the episode below:
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Can you speak about how you got recruited to lead Peloton’s yoga and meditation practice?
Peloton actually slid into my DMs! Basically I got a DM sharing that Peloton was looking to begin exploring yoga, and ‘Could I sign an NDA?' And so I auditioned — I did two classes.
It's funny because I had been reached out to by other platforms, but I came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn't worth it for a lot of different reasons. And it was because of what I’d learned from my background in modeling. When you have a modeling contract, you get paid for a certain amount of usage. And then if they want to continue to use your photo, video, etc., they have to pay you again, right? If you're an actor, you get residuals. And I thought it was unfair because a lot of contracts that I saw in this field said, ‘We’ll give you your class rate for this class that you're going to fill, but then we own it forever.’ And that didn’t seem right to me. So I never really entertained the idea of this digital platform because I was not interested in what I had seen.
But I remember my Peloton audition well because I knew how much people loved the bike. I remember what I wore. I remember a little bit of my playlist. And I also was really comfortable in front of the camera because I had spent so many auditions talking to the camera and doing my thing. It took pretty much the whole summer before I got an offer.
And then I was onboard and spent a few months with Anna, Kristen, and the production team. We did a lot of experimenting — asking thins like, ‘What would it be like to adjust somebody in a class? Is that possible on camera?’ We tried out a lot of different things before we came up with some basic ideas around where to begin this program.
I was also the first meditation teacher because I was really pro-meditation. And that was also a really same thing — really figuring out, ‘Okay how do we present this?’ Because it's just so different when you're starting in a place where people already have the context on the different kinds of meditation. That's very different from people that have maybe only spent time on their bike and aren’t really sure about this practice. So we thought a lot about, ‘How do you make it accessible in a way that's like both true to what it's supposed to be, but also truly accessible to anybody?’
A topic often brought up in the South Asian community is around the cultural appropriation and whitewashing of yoga — the fact that it’s obviously derived from South Asian culture without due credit to its roots. How have you navigated that, and do you feel that as a South Asian being in this space, you've had the ability to ‘reclaim’ this practice?
It's such an interesting conversation. There are people — South Asians — who I talk to who are absolutely up in arms about Western modern yoga practices. And then there are South Asians who go to yoga sculpt classes and have no concept of yoga beyond fitness. So there's this range — even within our own culture — of what yoga means.
I think the easiest way to think about it is not doing anything that would make my parents cringe. I want to teach yoga in a way that would make my parents proud. To me, that’s a great check. And I'm not super worried, to be honest, but I think it's a great place to start if I'm ever unsure about something.
But the other things that I'm interested in are really democratizing the practice and making it accessible to people. Therefore, I think there's a few things that I've done, and that I continue to do to help bridge this gap. This is my opinion, and I hope that I'm wrong, and I'm totally open to being wrong here: I think that yoga is evolving. I don't think it's possible to stop this in its tracks and say, ‘We're going back to being super traditional.’ I don't think that's going to happen.
So what I'm looking for is how can I work with what's happening, and find solutions to make sure we still talk about philosophy, to make sure we still understand that yoga isn't fitness, to make sure that there are places where people who maybe don't have access, or even know where to go to learn about it, can still learn about it.
I make sure that when we have a beginner program, we have a lecture portion that talks about philosophy. If people don't have access to that, I have a whole thing on my social media where I’m talking to a professor of philosophy, etc. about it. I want to make it accessible to people, but I also don't think that I can force anybody to learn or think about things in any particular way. But I'm excited to be in a position where I can talk about this, to realize: there are more people that are going to take this 10 minute lecture; there are more people who are going to learn about this; that are going to say, ‘Oh, maybe I could think about this in a different way.’ So that's how I’m trying to bridge the gap in a way that feels like I'm doing it with integrity. I will also say… it would be awesome to just have more South Asians in this space because the other part of this is… I am one person with one point of view. And I think we should have other people sharing their different points of view, too.
Full episode on Apple, Spotify, our website, or anywhere you stream podcasts! Episode brought to you by Azhar PR and The Desi Crime Podcast.