Confessions of a reluctant gym member, by Barnaby Wigglesworth

An original contemporary magazine column.

Every January, millions of us make the same promise, and every January a small army of gyms is waiting to take our money. This year, I am ashamed to say, I was one of the volunteers. I signed up to PeakForm, a ‘premium fitness experience’ on the ring road, for £49 a month, a figure I tried very hard not to convert into pints.

My induction was led by Jaxon, who was twenty-two, had arms like two Christmas hams and called me ‘mate’ forty-one times in an hour. I know, because I counted. He showed me the machines. There were a great many machines. There was a machine for pushing things away, a machine for pulling things towards you, and a machine, as far as I could tell, for sitting on while looking at your phone. Each one had a screen. Some of them had more processing power than the computer that put men on the Moon, and all of it was devoted to telling me I had burned eleven calories.

Then there are the mirrors. Every wall at PeakForm is a mirror, so wherever you stand you are confronted by an infinite corridor of yourself, red-faced and wobbling, receding into the distance like a sweaty hall of fame. Nobody else seems to mind. The regulars gaze at their reflections with the tenderness most people reserve for newborn babies.

The sounds are a symphony of their own. There is the clank of weights, the thud of trainers on the treadmills and, from the far corner, a man who groans every time he lifts anything, as though he is giving birth to a small piano. Over it all, at a volume designed to drown out thought, plays music so relentlessly cheerful that it feels like being shouted at by a toddler.

Let us consider the treadmill. Outside PeakForm’s front door, not two hundred metres away, is a park with a lake, an avenue of horse chestnuts and a path that loops round it for a perfectly pleasant mile. It costs nothing. Inside, forty people pay £49 a month to walk on a rubber belt that goes nowhere, staring at a television showing a park.

The spin class was worse. Picture a darkened room, thirty stationary bicycles, flashing purple lights and an instructor on a stage screaming ‘Climb that mountain!’ at people who were, in reality, in a converted carpet showroom in Dunford. I lasted twenty minutes. I left with the legs of a newborn giraffe and the hearing of a retired bell-ringer.

To be fair, and I am trying very hard to be fair, the gym works for some people. My neighbour Sandra goes five times a week and is, at seventy, considerably fitter than me. The staff were friendly. The showers were hot. If you enjoy exercise that comes with a soundtrack and a score, PeakForm is probably heaven.

For the rest of us, it is an expensive way to feel inadequate. In March, I tried to cancel. This required an email, a phone call, a ‘retention conversation’ with a man named Tyler and thirty days’ notice. I now walk the dog round the park every morning. It is cold, it is muddy, and nobody has called me ‘mate’ once.

I have never felt better.

The modern gym is described as a ridiculous place. How does the writer try to show this?

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