SPORT should be more like shopping to get women interested in it, according to the latest research. Oh yeah?

It seems that a load of fibbing females have been telling innocent researchers that all it will take to get them into the gym and working up a satisfactory sweat up is for someone to paint the changing-rooms pink, run a duster over the (co-ordinated) surfaces every now and again, put some nice scent in the loo and stick a Nectar card scheme into the place.

These revelations have the Women’s Sport And Fitness Foundation all excited and calling for sports centres to ape the ‘experience’ we girlies have come to expect from our favourite sport – shopping.

Now, I do force myself down to the gym every now and again, but it will take more than a 60-minute make-over for me to skip down there with gladness in my heart.

Like most women, my aversion started in my schooldays, and I still shudder at the memory of where it all began.

Think getting cold, wet and filthy in horizontal sleet on quagmired fields where the school sadist lay in wait to scythe your shins from under you with a well-aimed hockey stick.

Think being forced into crimplene stretch gym shorts and draughty aertex blouses that perfectly set off the blue-and-ginger mottling on your frozen arms and legs.

Remember running the gauntlet of the communal changing rooms where bets were being taken on who would be the last to wear a vest; dodging veruccas in the lukewarm communal showers, and suffering the smug, appraising stares of the physically precocious.

And picture the misery of team sports with the attendant hell of waiting to be picked by the athletic netball captain.

Ah, the joy of sport for girls of 13 back in 1974. It was 20 years before I stopped having nightmares about it.

Nowadays I accept that in order for my body not to degenerate into complete decrepitude it is necessary for me to use it from time to time.

So I drag myself along to endure my 45 minutes on treadmill, upright bike and cross-trainer.

But If I were asked what would make me more likely to turn up more regularly, it would not be a paint job.

I’d want cubicles, yes, I grant you. If you are not actually to ban well-toned women from cavorting around in their underwear, you should at least stick them in a confined space to stop them from inflicting their perfection on those of us for whom such a physique is a distant memory, if not an impossible dream.

You could chuck out the mirrors, too. Most of us have looked long and hard at the ones we have in our bedrooms, and know exactly what we look like in Lycra, thanks very much.

You could also ban all the appalling hip-hop videos that are the regular diet of those plugged in to the row upon row of machines in the average gym.

It’s purgatorial enough to be pounding it out on a hamster-wheel without having to look at some overweight chap jabbing his finger at you as a procession of beautiful women throw themselves at his corpulent majesty.

Finally, you could make the swimming pool a place for swimming instead of a gathering place for yummy mummies to whip up a tidal wave with their Boden-clad babies, and for poseurs to swan around clogging up the Jacuzzi, sauna and steam room.

Do all this, and some of us might get along a bit more often.

But don’t hold your breath.