This time last week I had never heard of a hip abduction. I’d have assumed it involved something rather painful and possibly life-changing.

Now, having been an active participant in one, I know better. It can be quite painful, but at least I emerged with my limbs intact.

Similarly with a leg extension. I was heartened to see that there were no screws or pins involved. But I can’t see it giving me legs like Naomi Campbell.

Neither of these procedures necessitated a hospital visit. They were among the many weird and somewhat torturous-sounding exercises in the gym I visited last week.

No, I’m not a member - I prefer to exercise in the fresh air - but participated in a trial, along with a friend. And it was scary. The brutal-looking machines could have come from Hannibal Lecter’s lair.

With names like diverging lat pulldown, pectoral fly, and rotary torso, I skirted around these black, brutish lumps of metal with their weights and pulleys, wondering what each was for. Only by surreptitiously watching other people, did I get an idea of what to do.

Bikes and rowing machines I could handle, although I made the mistake of trying to keep up with the James Cracknell-type rowing next to me and almost gave myself a hernia.

York Press:

Gyms: millions use them to get fit, but for others the thought is just torture

The last time I visited a gym John Major was running the country. I was living temporarily in Hastings in Sussex, and my super-fit friend, who was on the same training course, joined a gym. She managed to persuade some of us less fit and generally slobby types to go along. I didn’t fit in then anymore then I do now. I remember it being full of lithe, honed people, the women looking like they’ve just sprung from a Victoria’s Secret commercial. It is the same today. “Why do women like this need to go to the gym,” I pondered, as I huffed and puffed on the treadmill alongside one of these creatures. “They look like that because they DO go,” replied my friend.

At my recent gym session, it was heartening to see a couple of women my size and a good deal larger. It was dark outside and, in the sea of size zero females, I did wonder if they had wandered in believing it was TGI Fridays. I felt far more comfortable alongside them than the usual line up of Kate Mosses.

Gyms are so boring. Outdoor activity comes with an ever-changing view, not just the inside of a warehouse playing videos of scantily clad models showing off their physiques. It doesn’t help your self-esteem to be surrounded by videos of stick-insect women smouldering on beaches and wrapping themselves around muscly men.

I may be wrong, but I find being confronted with such images depressing. Wouldn’t it far more motivating to show films of morbidly obese women who can only get across the living room on a hoist?

Surely this would shock you into pedalling faster and running harder?

Yet despite all the negatives, I may go again. It’s warm and dry, I quite enjoyed the rowing and I could do with a few inches abducting from my hips.