Roundabout
Bend, Stretch, Sink
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN A NEW concern has just started up in a set of rooms above Oxford Street. It is equipped with a large number of gleam- ing chromium bars, shin- ing Indian clubs and vibrators for juggling away inert matter. The object of the exercise is exercise.
There are sloping pads on which you can touch your toes—having first lain down with your toes higher than you are There are heavy attach- ments to various beds by lifting which the muscles may be toughened; there is a red carpet and a rubber plant to welcome you in, and black wooden walls with the grain picked out tastefully in pink. The day I was there three heartily-built females were in full activity; one fair fat girl had lost three pounds over a weekend; another, a pear-shaped item in tight trousers and a loose top, was aiming more at redistribu- tion than reduction and anxiously measuring herself every few minutes; and an admirably sub- stantial Italian was going calmly through her paces like a well-bred horse.
The place is run on a membership basis, and each member is measured on joining, the sad totals being entered on a card, together with a goal for each area: bust 32, goal 36; waist 32, goal 26. This represents a three-month target; the place has only been open a few weeks, so how well the goals are in fact achieved it is not yet possible to say. Membership is £25 a year and no refunds—though it was originally hoped to charge £50, the market would not stand it. The organisation is in the hands of three smooth young people (two men and a woman) who have been sent from a parent firm in America to start a chain of such health gyms over here, comparable to that already established in the United States. There are 137 of them according to this young man; 2,000 according to the PRO.
The Oxford Street establishment has a sunray chamber and will shortly have a Turkish bath; in America they are more elaborate still, often with a swimming bath, a bowling alley, and even a health bar where you can pay an awful lot for all the harmful things you aren't eating. The man I spoke to was inclined to play down the import- ance of diet in slimming; he said that all he did was to recommend that his people ate 'sensibly' —and then outlined a programme very like that on which I have myself lost a lot of weight with- out taking any exercise whatever in any circum- stances.
Looking around at those glittering bars, those fat girls hopefully bouncing up and down, I was reminded of other well-publicised ways of shed- ding the load. The Slenderella bed, that allows the slimmer to lie upon it, what time experienc- ing the vibrations equivalent to a jeep-ride over heavy rubble; the Bohai, which is a child's rubber ball on the end of a piece of whangy metal, with which the stout party is supposed to pound the offending part until it collapses; those appalling plastic garments designed to make a woman sweat away, under her clothes, all the surplus fat from any particular area (and not, apparently, sponsored by deodorant firms, either)—all these pay tribute to the fantastic lengths that women will go to to persuade themselves they can get thinner without actually eating less.
'Aren't those Magdalen colours?' I find this all the more amazing because the agony of not eating another sponge cake seems o me to be as nothing to the agony of taking exercise. If it is disheartening to think of those girls heaving and stretching in an enclosed gym on a hot summer's evening in order to get thinner, it is very nearly as ghastly to think of he others, all over the country, who are going in for exercise for• its own sake. One grim heritage of the public schools, of puritanism, of every- hing implied by the phrase 'muscular Christ- ianity' is the little knots of women, flushed in the 'ace and strong in the muscle. who are at this very moment religiously taking exercise all over Britain. 1 remember going down to see some women's cricket in progress last winter: there they were, on a damp February evening. pound- ng away in an indoor net; it was horrifying how teen they were. It was not even that they were .0 tough (I bought them all a round of drinks End it only cost 3s 8d.), but that they seemed to pe aiming at a totally inappropriate goal. Where does bowling fast legbreaks get a girl, anyway? I can see the point of enduring physical exertion as an end towards something else, as in sailing or riding, but not coarting it for itself.
Max Beerbohm once said that whenever he felt the need for exercise, he lay down until the feeling went away : a highly sound point of view. And he was a man; for all I know, men actually may benefit from exercise. But not women. Women need food (though not all that much) and affection and sleep and (I am told) fresh air. They do not need exercise. If it develops the muscles, it develops the wrong ones: a straight tennis serve is useful for throwing china, but not for the fundamental physical activities of women, such as childbearing. The muscles developed by hockey-playing are useful only for more hockey- playing. No. Exercise may be useful, even for women, as therapy. Like lunacy it should require the signatures of two doctors: they should first make sure that the disease cannot possibly be cured in any other way.
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