We need more access to cost-effective sports

Jan 31 2003 By Nicholas Craig, The Journal

Did you, like me, set yourself up for failure struggling to make and keep at least one New Year's resolution?

Most revolve around achieving a leaner, fitter frame, now that the Christmas chocolates are only fond, if lasting, memories.

Diet and exercise fads will come and go, but the one thing that remains is they'll keep coming. Television keeps pushing exercise routines and equipment, and each year people spend hundreds of thousands of pounds for that one diet or exercise that will make them lose weight.

January has been blitzed with B-list celebrities promoting their new videos, from salsa to pedal power. An extraordinary array of diets is also on offer - cabbage soup, high-fibre, meal replacement plans, low-fat, grapefruit, zone diets and ones which seem to involve traffic light colours.

The boring logic of the "eat less, exercise more" camp is ignored as we willingly submit to crash and burn diets all promising to lose those extra pounds without a single craving. Who's kidding who? If you type "diets" into a Google search, 2.2 million Internet sites are identified within 0.08 seconds, which is, ironically, the time I could ever stay on a diet.

While we pour money into sensational new diet plans, we are seeing playing fields being sold off to developers, and local authorities fight to keep leisure centres busy and open to suit the public despite tight budgets. I'm a fervent advocate of sport for all ages and sizes. It does more for you mentally than any TV personality's video programme, and the physical results affect your well-being as much as your waistline.

We need more access to cost-effective sports. The yearly costs of some gyms are extraordinary, and probably put off many who would benefit from regular exercise. The social dimension of sport is important - I meet many new and old friends on the cricket pitch, golf course and tennis court - and the informal setting can drive forward business proposals as well as encourage companionship.

Many of the people who could find sport just the tonic they need are turned off at school. The plumper, slower, less competitive kids hate the very idea of physical exercise, and that feeling of failure can last a lifetime.

If they were introduced instead to alternative sports they could enjoy, they would grow up healthier and more positive at work and at play. We need some flexible thinking from government to help us achieve new levels of lifelong fitness.

* Nicholas Craig is a partner at Watson Burton law firm.