"1-2-3-4! I love the marine core!"

That's lovely dear, thank you. Now would you be so kind as to move your pert, purple-camouflaged derriére (essential for combat in London's famous aubergine jungles, I'm sure) so that I might do my own exercises?

"I'm gonna go down to the gym!" the aforementioned personal-trainer hollers. "Get me fit and get me slim!" Without even touching the potential implications of such proclamations (that only the clinically obese go to the gym, say) do you ever get the idea that some things just aren't quite right for you?

At least at Frame, Shoreditch's latest home for the aerobically-inclined, the fitness is friendly - offering every form of exercise in one vast package of acrobatic yoga-ing, nipple tassel-twirling, power-plate-spin-class combo-ing inclusiveness.

At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, the new, slick Lifesmart looks more like the kind of gym where you'd find St. Peter squeezing in a few reps between shifts at the pearly gates. Perhaps a little Stepford Wives, I'd still prefer its holistic PTs and fruit-filled kitchen to a hollering ex-marine any day of the week.