Before you rush into any exercise routine, make sure you know how to breathe, stand, sit and walk properly. Haydn Shaughnessy reports
If it became fashionable to walk like a pantomime mouse or Ebenezer Scrooge, I'd be called Mr Desirable. Like many in middle age, the shape is not great. Hands held for hours over the PC keyboard. Idleness too. They've both done their damage.
And every time I go training, the workout creates that rusty feeling that puts so many people off the very idea of fitness.
The search for a new body and physical enlightenment begins in Leopardstown, at the horse racetrack. Where else?
Here in the two plastic domes of the Westwood club, a short jog past the turn to Ballsbridge, Siobhán O'Reilly and Alan Farrell teach people how to stand, breathe, walk and sit properly.
"Less than 2 per cent of the people who come to see us stand the way they should," says O'Reilly. "Ninety-nine per cent of them breathe with an inverted breathing technique."
I am among them.
Once O'Reilly and Farrell have trained their charges in the principles of proper human movement, they move on to the tricky subject of how to get appropriately fit, with a timely emphasis on the damage that the modern fitness routines might be doing to our badly aligned bodies.
People, according to them, are literally out of shape.
My chest, O'Reilly says, rises too much. My body is out of kilter. There are droops and curves where there should be harmony and symmetry. This is like having a car with one wheel smaller than the other and a flat tyre at the back. It's no wonder that exercise hurts.
The effects of bad posture, bad breathing and bad gait are all those aches that make our bodies feel stiff when we get out of bed, weigh us down through the day, and make training sessions, indeed the very idea of a fitness programme, a pain.
To make it absolutely clear though, O'Reilly and Farrell are fitness trainers. It's just that anybody who wants to get fit with their help has to start by standing, breathing, walking and sitting the way humans were meant to. And the majority of us do not.
Apart from this not-so-obvious encounter with the basics of physical alignment, O'Reilly and Farrell refuse to believe that fitness training, as we currently understand it, is in any sense necessary.
They ask questions like why do you want to be fit?
And though the answer seems obvious, in reality, it is not at all clear. It might be because we think it's a good idea, because the wife or husband says we should, because we're overweight, or because it will reduce the blood pressure.
But these answers all assume something about fitness that might not be exactly right.
The popular notion of fitness, according to Harvard professor Harvey Simon, is something we've inherited from the training regimes of high-performance athletes. Many people sweat themselves into unhappiness and a debilitating sense of failure.
This is because what we've defined as appropriate training routines - high-intensity aerobics and muscle-building anaerobics - happen to be watered-down versions of the necessary sacrifices and pain that it takes to be great, to be an Olympian, a champion, the one guy in the world who can hold his head above all others.
People who strive for immortality in sport have set the pace but it is the wrong pace for most of us, according to Simon. He maintains that we may not even need to work up a sweat. Fitness, says Simon, as we get older, is much more about balance and flexibility than speed and strength, for example.
O'Reilly and Farrell embody this insouciant spirit.
So why do we need to exercise the way we typically do?
"If you want to look better," says O'Reilly, "I can show you how to do that. You can look 10 pounds lighter by standing correctly." But don't we need to train the heart by pushing it like we would any muscle?
"There's evidence that a little too much aerobic exercise - and that's maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20, we really don't know - is catatonic," says Farrell. That means it destroys the body without adding to its capabilities. Fine if you want to sacrifice yourself for Olympic gold.
"We became disillusioned with the way fitness training was evolving around the late 1990s," says Farrell, a man of modest height who, to me, looks a tad overweight but who, O'Reilly demonstrates manually, stands in perfect alignment and breathes deep into his abdomen.
The two Dubliners began to change their views on training when they attended a lecture in London delivered by Paul Chek, an inspirational American trainer who had developed a fitness programme based around the interaction of the skeleton and muscle system.
Chek's key argument is that most people go out of alignment because of their work, through bad habits, or for one of many other reasons. Thereafter, exercise simply exacerbates the imbalances that time, sitting at computers, diffident attitudes and other weaknesses have established in our bodies.
To identify and correct those imbalances, we need to focus on that eye-catching part of the body that begins around the buttocks and extends to the bottom of the ribcage. Here is the only part of our bodies where vital organs are literally unprotected by the skeleton. It's an area where our muscles are responsible for our safety.
Modern lifestyles typically lead to a loss of strength in this core area and, when there is misalignment elsewhere, it will equally typically lead to problems at the core.
My own weaknesses, according to O'Reilly, happen to be a hip and shoulder that are raised on the right, too flat a lower back, and rounded shoulders. All of which has my muscle system pulling like crazy to compensate.
The "compensation" causes intermittent inflammation in my hip, a complaint that typically flares up after exercise when all the stretching and pounding make worse a problem that is unnoticeable in everyday activities.
Result: even though I love exercise, more often than not, I don't want to do it. It's a chore, it's a bore. But more than that, it hurts in ways that are irrelevant to being healthy.
Typically, according to the Chek system, many of us approach fitness training with existing handicaps that need resolving in the core area.
"Whether we're dealing with an athlete or children or older people, we always start here," says O'Reilly, stretching her hands across a narrow abdomen before pointing out how mine sags.
She's already made the point about the bad breathing pattern. I need a lift to the bus station but hesitate to ask.
For my money, though, the Chek system offers important insights into why exercise fills many people with dread and why it is often associated with injury.
It's not that we're doing too much or too little, we're simply not in the right shape to do any.
• For a list of Irish Chek practitioners see: http://www.chekinstitute.com/pracresults.cfm
• To contact Alan Farrell, tel: 087-6772560; Siobhán O'Reilly, tel: 086-8579938. Alan and Siobhan charge €65-€90 for consultations at the Westwood or at clients' place of work or home.
• Harvey B Simon's book - The No Sweat Exercise Plan - is available from www.mcgrawhill.com or from bookshops from February 2006.