Around 30 years ago, after the umpteenth depressing vision of myself in the mirror, I decided to put a muscle or two on my skin and bone frame. I gave myself a good kick and joined a gym, like so many others, in my hurry to see results.

Great, only in those days gyms only provided activities linked to certain indoor sports and I certainly didn’t want to do judo, karate, basketball or volleyball: I wanted to do weights!

After carefully shopping around, I found a real MUSCLE BUILDING gym and immediately found myself in a reverse Gulliver’s Tales situation. I was surrounded by blokes who all seemed body guards and used to lift weights (snorting and sweating like horses) that I couldn’t have handled even with a hoist.

But what alternative did I have to that purgatory of weights, sweat, suffering and fatigue? I was offered the usual gymnastics course or pre-ski training, if I was a skier. No thanks!!

Anyway, I persuaded myself to go the gym and after a while, to my astonishment, some girls with brightly coloured shorts and leg warmers started attending. I asked the instructor what they were doing there and he answered solemnly: “AEROBICS”.

Well, in my opinion, that was when the concept of “the gym” was changing everywhere, from the reserve of hulks you imagine with moustaches and singlets with “Virtus” written on them, to a place that welcomes the fair sex and ordinary mortals who merely want to get back in trim – yes with fatigue but also with music and more entertaining methods.

Since then, I’ve seen the birth of countless activities designed to tone up and fill out even the most hidden muscles of the body. Hordes of enthusiasts doing courses in everything from steps, gags, antalgics, body pumps, total bodies, spinning, fit box, pilates and so on (and if you don’t know what these things are, I’ll give you a brief description next time) down to some very weird specialities indeed.

Nowadays gyms even have videogame consoles (Nintendo Wii). You wield a controller as if it were the equipment used in the game, a racquet in tennis, a bat in baseball, etc. The instructors claim you can train having fun and burn up calories as you would in any other aerobic activity, plus you can memorize your performance data and track your improvements over time.

So we’ve come quite a way with respect to the gym with just barbells and dumbbells, haven’t we?