This time last year Dubliner Joyce Gavin was sales manager for computer services with Wang Ireland. She loved her job and on the surface her working life seemed ideal. But underneath she had a burning desire to give it all up to become a personal fitness trainer. She realised her ambition in January this year when she "let go of the river bank", and left Wang to set up Amazon Fitness Consultants.

A former bodybuilder who represented Ireland in international competition for five years, Gavin began training as a fitness instructor in the early 1980s while she was working in an insurance company in Dublin. "When I left school I did what was expected of me - I signed up for the permanent and pensionable job but I was always sport and fitness mad and would really have preferred to have gone down that road," she says.

"There was nowhere to go in Ireland to train in fitness as opposed to PE at the time so I found out about courses in Britain and carried on with the day job while doing my fitness training through Britain," she says.

Gavin qualified as a fitness instructor in 1985 and thought she had achieved her goal when she was subsequently appointed manager of a Dublin health club. However she found it impossible to survive financially on wages of £2.50 an hour and she was forced back into mainstream employment. She subsequently became a sales rep with Canon and worked with a signage company before joining Wang.

"I have to say I've always enjoyed my day jobs but the desire to be working full-time in fitness has always been there," she says. "Since qualifying in 1985 I have continued to train and retrain and I do an average of two courses every year. I also attend conferences and workshops on an ongoing basis to keep up with new ideas and developments in the personal training field."

At 40, Gavin believes she has the right combination of life and professional experience to make a go of her fledgling venture. "A lot of people, especially women, are put off the idea of fitness training or are intimidated about going to a gym because of the lycra and leotard brigade. Yet they would like to do some form of training in order to feel better and to improve the quality of their lives," she says.

"Because I'm older and I've been out in the world I'm able to empathise with their needs and fears and I have no problem tuning in to them and finding common ground to chat about during the sessions. With most of my clients we're talking about a desire to tone the body and to improve flexibility and strength rather than getting involved in aerobics workouts or heavy sessions in the gym. Basically I can walk into someone's house and train them with the contents of their kitchen press! Give me a couple of tins of beans (to act as weights) and we can make a start. You don't need masses of room, just a clear space where we can work," Gavin says.

Gavin also maintains that having a personal trainer is not as expensive as it sounds. "I'm not cheap, but I'm very good value," she says. "Clients get individual attention, I devise a very focused programme for them alone and because the one-to-one relationship tends to encourage motivation I generally get good results and get them faster than someone training on their own in a gym."

Clients use Gavin for a variety of fitness needs. Some want to lose weight, others to tone up, others to rehabilitate after an accident or injury. Gavin will work with a client at home or she will go with them to a gym and supervise them there. She has clients from Monkstown to Malahide and her "office" is her car. "I start at 6 a.m. and work until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. and spend the day hopping between locations," she says.

Some clients would see her as often as three times a week others only once and she estimates the cost of her training at between £20 and £50 a session depending on the duration and what's required. "Some clients opt for very effective half-hour slots while others want longer sessions so I work around their needs. Most of the people I see want to make lifestyle changes so we're looking at a broader picture than just fitness."

Gavin has recently qualified as a Pilates instructor and she hopes to set up a dedicated Pilates studio in the near future. Pilates is a German method of toning and strengthening the body long used by dancers. It came to public attention a few years ago when it achieved notoriety as the preferred fitness training method of celebrities such as Madonna and the All Blacks.

"Pilates is a beautiful technique which not only improves the condition and strength of the body but also of the mind. It works well for those in rehabilitation and it's a very revitalising method of training that makes you feel so good afterwards," Gavin says.

"Pilates is about toning and conditioning without adding bulk. It's a low impact technique revolving around a series of exercises which you do on a mat. The system of movements is low, fluid and controlled and I've seen good results so far with clients reporting inch losses from waists and hips in particular. I am keen to develop the Pilates side of my business because I have a lot of time for it as a fitness method and I will be running some classes starting this month. I have to keep the classes small because I need to give people individual attention when they're learning the routine. I think people should be able to walk away from a fitness session feeling good about the fact that they've learnt or achieved something.

"I am really pleased that I finally had the courage to go with my gut instinct and to do what I always wanted to do. I've had some fraught moments of course, but because of the Celtic Tiger people have the money to spend on someone like me so my timing was good. Right now there are not enough hours in the day or enough days in the week."

Contact Point: Joyce Gavin, Amazon Fitness Consultants, (01) 209 5478.