Pumping Iron...

Oh dear, this one is going to be a tough one to write without sounding snobby and eliteist, so I'll just write it as it happens and I'll be snobby and eliteist then.

Yesterday I joined a gym...........again.

Its (I think) the fifth gym that I've been a member of, but there is a difference this time - the four (at least four) other gyms have all been private affairs, hotel gyms or a big "country club" gym with its own golf course, I'll leave you to imagine how burgeois and expensive that one was.

This one belongs to the council.

Its, erm, not very posh.

Its not very big either but its got the latest range of equipment by Lifestyle and in that respect is much more up to date than the expensive "country club" option who's aerobic equiment is six or seven years old now.

There is one other difference - at the council gym you can pay-as-you-go or join for a year for a third of the price of all the other gyms - suddenly I'm interested and not so snobby any more, just think of the money I'll save I kept telling myself.

The other attraction is that two of my friends already go there and one thing that you need when embarking on a year long gym commitment is enthusiasm caused by competition - and someone to talk to when cycling nowhere for half an hour.

Two of us arrived for our "induction" yesterday, which is basically an instructor showing us around all of the equipment and how it all works, which we both knew anyway having used similar equipment for the last fifteen years. We made our first faux pas and discovered the first big drawback of using a council sports centre when we walked into the male changing room and found it full of 15 year old boys changing into a football strip, one of the ones who could speak informed us that the male changing rooms were closed to the general public until 4pm every day as the high school next door had exclusive use.

We had to use the swimming pool changing rooms downstairs which was a bit of a bummer, but still, think of the money you're saving I reminded myself.

The building is a community sports hall that was built in 1976 (I remember it well on its opening day) and its shabby. Like all community use buildings it gets abused by the community it serves and it doesn't receive good maintenance, that is it gets maintained but never improved.

A couple of years ago Leeds City Council benefited from one of those central government campaigns to get everyone into a gymnasium and in a similarly funded campaign to the 1976 "Sport for All" push for glory, our council received funding to equip all of its twenty sports and swimming complexes with a state of the art gym, giving affordable access to the poorest of our citizens.

The only problem is of course that most of these sports centres were built in the mid 1970's during Harold Wilson's last Labour Government soviet style sports funding campaign to get us all fit and healthy and the emphasis at that time was so much on gyms but on swimming pools and mutli-use sports halls - these facilities do not really have the space for a "proper" gym.

So our local facility has used what used to be a bar area, a fairly small room (in gym terms) in which to squash a number of aerobic and weight centred machines, its slightly bigger than your typical hotel gym but much much smaller than anything that would be commercial.

Still, think of the money you're saving I kept repeating.

Still it was fairly empty yesterday afternoon and the one good thing about local authority run facilities is that there are always plenty of staff, three fitness instructors in the gym yesterday for a maximum of five clients while we were there, thats far better than any private establishment I've been in.

Its just down to the clientele then - what you might call the lower end of the social scale, a mixture of young kids in nylon shell suits trying to establish the first growth of a bicep or two, right up to the middle aged tatoo embossed bruiser in a sleeveless t-shirt who looks as though he is not unfamiliar with the regular friday night scraps in the local council estate pub - we saw examples of both yesterday - but think of the money you're saving I kept repeating.

These people are the salt of the earth I kept repeating, and think of the money you're saving, and so I tried to look as tough as they did and I didn't smile at anyone like they don't and I called them all "mate" like they do - and I think I fit right in.

Just think of the money I'm saving.

Mate