2297
2I ditched the gym and you can too – here are six ways to get fit without it
Whether you enjoy ‘rucking’, walking, running or making your own sandbags, life after winding up your monthly membership can be your healthiest and happiest ever
June 15, 2025, The Guardian
🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取
After almost two decades of regular gym-going, I’ve finally cancelled my membership. The reasons for this are many and varied – I’m trying to save money, gym music is terrible these days, everyone seems to have forgotten how to share the equipment – but the main one is, I think it may actually make me fitter.
Working for Men’s Fitness magazine for almost 10 years, I got to try out every trend, workout style and fitness event I wanted, and I noticed something interesting: quite frequently, the people with the fewest resources were in the best shape. I’m not including Hollywood actors in this, but otherwise, it’s often true: powerlifters working out in unheated concrete sheds get the strongest, runners who stay off treadmills get the fastest, and people exercising in basements have a focus rarely seen in palatial upmarket gyms. Browsing through photos from when my own gym membership was (briefly) paused during Covid lockdowns, I look … if not quite like Jason Statham, then at least his off-brand office-party equivalent. I might not have had the best cardio of my life – even social distancing couldn’t convince me to run more than three miles (5km) at a time – but I was certainly lean.
Some of the correlation and causation here might be muddled, obviously – Covid also prevented me from getting to my favourite cake shop – but let’s not worry about that right now.
So what’s the plan? Well, as a 46-year-old father with a lot to do, I’m focusing on fitting workouts into my life wherever is feasible, combining cardio, strength and mobility as much as possible, and buying as little kit as I can. Here’s what I’m up to.
Running, fast and slow
Over recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that VO2 max, a measure of your body’s ability to use oxygen during intense exercise, is a key indicator of health and lifespan: to the extent that it’s probably one of the main things worth focusing on for longevity. Unfortunately, building up a good VO2 max takes a little bit longer than getting strong – but there are things you can do to speed the whole process along.
One is the so-called “Norwegian protocol”: working out at a high intensity for four minutes, then at a lower intensity for three minutes, then repeating – four times altogether. With a warmup on top, you’re done in little more than 30 minutes – and if you do that once a week, any other running workouts can be more ponderous or plodding. Recently, I’ve been a regular at my local Parkrun, which is always delightful – there are plenty of people far faster than me to keep me motivated, but nobody bats an eye if you put an audiobook on and turn in a 40-minute three miles.
The final thing I’m doing run-wise is hill “sprints” – a bit of a misnomer, as my nearest hummock is angled so steeply that I can barely get up it faster than a jog. This is actually a good thing; with a couple of hamstring pings in my past, my actual sprinting days are probably over, but the hilly variety still force you to work hard, generate power with each stride, and recruit dozens of muscle fibres with every step.
