January 2023 fitness: forget the peachy bum, my tip is to exercise with absolutely no goals - Gaby Soutar

The inaugural January fitness class always requires a bit of effort. I’m sure I’ll be absolutely fine once I get there, after I’ve squeezed my post-festive-season body into leggings. I can see them nagging me, as they hang – a long time dry – on the pulley, like a mole after the catcher has been. I imagine this is going to be a bit like shoe-horning a Cumberland into a chipolata’s skin.

It’s especially difficult as I’ve been wearing loungewear for weeks.

I’m calling it that, as it makes the blancmange pink floor-skimming dressing gown sound more sophisticated. It felt good to let my flesh billow freely, but now I’m to be trussed up in restrictively thick Lycra.

This includes the dreaded sports bras. Putting on one of those requires dexterity, and the ability to dislocate a scapula on removal. You know that they’re a perfect fit when you can’t breathe.

There are other elements that are making me drag my heels. These include the chilly trudge up the road, at dusk, to my beloved council gym.

During the holidays, this was deemed drinkie o’clock, when we got into the habit of mixing a whisky sour, and slumping in front of a Netflix series.

No longer, it’s back to gritty normality.

My motivational internal voice has become louder than a sergeant major.

“Come on, boy,” it says, and I don’t bother correcting it. “Look sharp. Up and at ’em”.

It is time. Now that I’m constructed almost entirely of cheese and Maltesers, I know I’ll feel leaden as the music starts and I'm instructed to lift weights, stretch or leap.

But, as soon as my endorphins start to bounce, I’ll be loving it again.

I am a real fitness addict. The studio-based classes are my weakness.

There’s Metafit, yoga, Bodyattack, Bodypump, Bodycombat, Bodybalance and something new that I’ve discovered called Gym Blast, which involves frenzied press-ups and reps on machines including the heaver, the snow-plough, pull-me-push-you and the double-handed yanker.

I’m sure they have more technical names.

As I have zero hip action, I draw the line at anything dance-based, so Zumba is a hard no, and I avoid Step. I cried in one of those classes, because I was so confused.

The fly-by-night January new resolution joiners will be joining in for the next couple of weeks and I’ll be all resentful when I can’t get a spot in my favourites, but they’ll give up soon.

They’ll leave because they made a mistake, in that they expected instant results.

I’ll still be here, doing my six or seven sessions a week, sometimes more.

Experts are always telling you that you should be aiming for something. You could be striving for a de rigueur peachy bum, toned abs, better mental health, or to shed lard. I once had a fitness instructor whose whole spiel was about calorie loss, and “come on ladies, let's get you into those bikinis”. I avoided his sessions. I didn’t like his assumptions about why we were there.

My secret is to have NO goals. It’s my existential fitness regime – do it anyway, even though there’s no point.

As far as objectives go, I did have a vague notion that, in 2024, I wanted to learn how to do a handstand, but that was after a few too many whisky sours.

I followed the start of an online tutorial then thought, nah, I’m too bottom heavy for this. There’s a reason why the Eiffel Tower is broader on the base.

Anyway, I’m not hoping for any fringe benefits. If you exercise purely for its own sake, then you won’t quit once you achieve those gains.

I do it for fun. It makes me feel alive.

My mum is 87 and can only walk a few metres. I want to enjoy movement, until the time when I can’t.

Before I discovered fitness in my early thirties, I did almost no exercise, apart from walking and occasionally cycling to work. I dabbled in a bit of yoga and Pilates, but rarely more than one session a week.

At primary and high school, I was always the one in PE who skived, or sat on the bench, feigning illness, usually period-related so they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

I was last in all the sports day races. The egg would never stay in my spoon.

I poured scorn on Mr Motivator and his neon cycling shorts. However, in my teens, I admit that I did own a ThighMaster – the briefly fashionable gadget that claimed to slim your thighs. It was dispensed with once I realised it wasn’t going to budge the cellulite that Just Seventeen magazine told me I was supposed to be unhappy about.

Also, back then, when walking home from school, I would cut across the football field and, almost every day, I’d get hit in the head by the ball. It never crossed my mind that they were aiming at me, I just thought I was very unlucky.

That made me hate sports even more, when even the inanimate equipment plotted against me.

Anyway, I didn’t get the point of fitness. Nobody ever tells you about the lovely chemicals that are released in your brain, and that you can simply do it for the sake of it. There doesn’t have to be a prize, whether that’s a peachy bum or a wooden spoon.

You just have to be able to squeeze into those leggings.