Davina: ‘Exercise Saved Me When I Was On My Knees'

As Davina McCall releases her 15th workout DVD, she tells Hannah Flint why she’s on a mission to get women into fitness – and how it helped her own mental health

FOR SOMEONE WHO is regularly touted as the queen of workout DVDs (her 15th was released last week), as well as the owner of some of the best abs on Instagram, you’d think that Davina McCall would have no problem popping on her Lycra and heading to a gym class.

Not quite. Davina admits that, just like the rest of us, she’s gym-phobic; not least because she worries that she’ll get recognised – and then expected to perform like an athlete, rather than, as she puts it, just a normal woman who only works out ‘three or four times a week’.

‘When I go to a new class, I get this thing that I don’t want to go,’ she says. ‘I’m fit and I work really hard at it, but I’m not an athlete. I have the negative loops in my head that we all get. Everybody in a gym class has a story and no one is perfect. Everyone is just there to feel better.’