Personal and Impersonal Training

 Personal and Impersonal Training

 

I’m standing in a steady drizzle, on a surface of uneven and cracked tarmac. At least I am not wearing singlet and shorts but a fleece and cycling leggings. I am being told to do various physical movements, most of which I find difficult, if not painful. This has got to go on for an hour, unless the rain worsens. What age am I? Seven, or nearly seventy? In my head at this very moment not much separates the two.

 

I have a personal trainer. He and I are in direct line of descent. As my father would, had he lived, have turned 104 this year, it is easy to conclude that the PT is not him. Being an Army Man, he always stayed pretty fit, and no doubt underwent a good deal of “PT” in his time, although then the initials stood for “Physical Training” (or for generations of witty schoolchildren, “Physical Torture”).

 

I also have Impersonal Trainers. This means I am in a class. Not one of the world-wide YouTube classes, but a subscribed-for Zoom Pilates class. Actually, more than one, although all are run by the same instructors.

 

In the recent Olden Days we met in a community centre. One day, we hope, we’ll go back there or somewhere similar. For now, it’s a camera in a room.

 

The main problem with the sessions, apart from creaking bones and non-elastic sinews, has been location, location. Where to put one’s mat? And one’s device, for Zoom? There are choices: Kitchen- But your flailing arm (ie doing circles) hits the cooker. Sitting room – but your flailing arm hits an armchair, or a speaker stand.

 

Then there’s the Great Outdoors, where I began this piece. At present we’re allowed to meet one non-household member for exercise. This is obviously a reference to a Personal Trainer. London is blessed with parks. You can see the PTs and their clients everywhere, lunging, stretching, boxing, skipping.

 

I’ve fairly recently started the park sessions with the linear relation. This takes a bit of getting used to. The thing about parks, apart from drizzle, is the other people. Not the other trainers and trainees, but the people strolling past, in couples, with children, in small, possibly illegal groups, and, of course, with dogs. 

 

I jog regularly, so I am used to all these types as we briefly encounter one another on our journeys. But trainer and trainee are a sort of tableau (with some movement) in one spot. They are subject to the mild scrutiny the others, or the intrusive interest of their dogs, as they pass nearby. Acute self-consciousness is a state quickly to be got over for the plein airsessioneer.

 

The Zoom classes, by contrast, are fairly solipsistic. You are either alone with the trainer, if one can be “alone” with someone in a different location. In a class, you can create that illusion by manipulating the settings offered by Zoom. One blanks out all of your classmates, leaving only the screen image of the trainer. The trainer is surveying the “gallery” images of everyone and praising or cajoling certain individuals. His or her audio feed will be heard by all, but there’s no sneaking envious or derisory glances across the classroom.

 

Outside or on camera, it all works tolerably well, although there’s no escaping the intrinsic and wearying loneliness of lockdown activities.

 

What doesn’t work tolerably well is the remote singing lesson. (I don’t think I could contemplate a lesson in a park. Self-consciousness would be unconquerable.)

 

Singing at a phone or tablet, to an accompaniment coming from the same machine, barely coordinated and with a somewhat compromised sound, under the screen gaze of the tutor, is extremely frustrating and not at all much fun.

 

I can understand that one might have to put up with this method, if one is studying seriously, or keeping up for professional reasons. But it is certainly a dampener on hobbyist learning.

 

November 2020