Indian Clubs

A club needs about two metres of clear radius in every direction, including above. Start every new movement slowly — a released or mistimed club at speed will break what it hits.

Use dry maple, ash or beech, free of knots, with the grain running straight along the length. A knot at the neck is where the club will break, and it breaks while moving fast.

Cut two square blanks about 70 × 70 mm in section and 450 mm long. Cut them from the same board, adjacent to each other, so the pair matches in density.

Weigh each blank and note the figures. Clubs are swung as a matched pair, and a mismatch you can feel makes the movement patterns fight each other.

Find and punch the centre of each end, then mount the first blank between centres on the lathe. Accurate centring keeps the finished club balanced on its own axis.

Rough the blank down to a clean cylinder with a roughing gouge at moderate speed. Work from the middle outward to avoid tearing the ends.

Pencil lines on the spinning cylinder for the knob at the top of the handle, the narrowest point of the neck, the widest point of the body, and the base. These four diameters define the whole profile.

Shape the bulbous lower body, keeping the widest point roughly a third of the way up from the base. This is where nearly all the mass lives.

Cut the neck to a comfortable grip diameter — about 30 mm for an average adult hand. Go in small steps and stop often to grip it; too thin is unrecoverable.

Shape a rounded knob wider than the neck. This is not decoration — the knob is what stops the club leaving your hand at the top of a swing.

Refine with a skew or spindle gouge until body, neck and knob flow together without a step. Any abrupt shoulder is a stress riser and a blister source.

Sand from 120 through to 320 with the lathe running, then stop it and sand along the grain to remove the circular scratches.

Repeat, checking diameters against the first with callipers at each control point. Weigh both when finished and take material off the heavier one until they agree within a few grams.

Balance each club across a finger and mark where it sits. The two balance points should be in the same place — matched weight with mismatched balance still swings wrong.

Apply an oil finish and buff it back. A glossy varnish is slippery in a sweating hand, which is the one property a swinging club must not have.

They are not Indian, and the name is a colonial accident. The equipment descends from the Persian meel and the Indian mugdar or jori — heavy wooden clubs used for centuries in the training of wrestlers and soldiers, and still central to the Iranian varzesh-e bastani practised in the zurkhaneh. British officers stationed in India in the early nineteenth century encountered them, adopted them, and carried them home; the lighter, longer-handled club that resulted is a British redesign of a South Asian implement, and the label "Indian club" stuck to it. Crediting the Victorians with the invention is straightforwardly wrong.

The Victorian boom. Sim D. Kehoe's The Indian Club Exercise of 1866 and a wave of similar manuals turned club swinging into a mass activity in Britain and the United States, tied to the physical-culture movement and to military and school drill. It became a competitive gymnastics discipline, and club swinging appeared as an Olympic event in 1904 and again in 1932. It then vanished almost completely, displaced by barbells and by the machine-based gym.

Why leverage, not weight, is the point. A club's mass sits far from the hand, so its moment of inertia about the wrist is large — swinging a light club generates forces at the shoulder out of all proportion to its weight on a scale. Because the swings are circular and pass behind the head, they load the shoulder in positions that pressing and pulling never reach, especially in external rotation. That is the mechanical case for them, and it is why a 1-2 kg club is a serious piece of equipment rather than a toy, and why going heavier is usually the wrong instinct.

An honest caution. The historical manuals are full of confident medical claims — curing dyspepsia, expanding the chest, correcting the constitution — that are of their period and should not be repeated as fact. What is well supported is narrower and still worth having: club work builds shoulder mobility, grip endurance and coordination through large ranges of motion. Start with the lightest pair you can make, learn the basic front and back circles slowly, and add speed only once the pattern is automatic.