"You got 'Davina's Awesome Abs Workout'?"
"WOT?"
"Kerry Katona's '30 Minute Gutbuster' then?"
"WOT?" The DJ repeats, lifting one of his headphones and craning forward to the gurning reveller leaning over the decks. More slowly mouthed requests follow, but to no avail as the DJ, looking perplexed, goes back to spinning his wheels of steel.
Of course, you don't actually get people asking for music at clubs to workout to. Keeping in shape and losing weight are not the objectives on a night out at the local discotheque. Most of the time there's a line between music for fun and music for fitness. While many millions aerobicise to tunes in gyms and halls across the world, when you go clubbing or to a gig, the focus is on your enjoyment, not the exercise.
I am one of life's eternal pedestrians. I don't own a car and since I had my bike purloined by some miscreant some time ago, I don't cycle anywhere either. Living and working in a small city means that I'm not hugely disadvantaged as a result, however. I'm lucky that I can walk to work each day, and I'm even luckier that the last slice of my daily jaunt takes me through Cardiff's lovely Bute Park. As a consequence, I get a decent amount of exercise each day.
I still don't do enough though. And there are many like me. And there are even more still who are fairly physically inactive. Organisations like Sport Wales have an aim of getting more people moving. In order to do this, they, and other agencies like them, need to find ways to reach the ones that don't 'do sport'. If support is in place early in life, given the right motivation, skills and opportunities, children can develop active habits and set themselves up for a healthier life, but for those of us more long in the tooth, it is a bigger challenge to turn our stubborn minds around and onto new things.
I've talked before about the one sport I really enjoy playing (football) and also how I fit some fitness into my commute by jogging home some days. But, aside from that, I'm not hugely keen on exercise itself. It certainly isn't high up on my list of things to do for fun. I don't enjoy running, cycling or swimming for any respectable period of time, though I have tried to. On hearing about me jogging home, sportier colleagues than me (i.e. all of them) have enthusiastically asked in the past,
"You caught the running bug then?"
"No," I reply, "I do the minimum that means I can eat pies with impunity and not have to buy bigger trousers".
So, what's the answer for people like me? (aside from leaving us to swell like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Well, it's essentially the same solution for anyone who struggles to motivate themselves to exercise, and that's to find something that's fun first, calorie-burning second.
Glastonbury and its smaller siblings have been and gone again, and it reminded me of my own bout of festival fitness a few weeks ago. It was a much smaller affair, with some 4,000 of us somewhere in a field in Somerset. A friend and fellow festivaleer had himself a Fitbit or similar on for the duration of the three-day funkathon, (complete with house, techno and both drum AND bass,).
He noticed one morning, as he dragged his partied-out husk from his tent, that he'd done 5,000 steps that day, according to his wrist-based wizardry. We both mused on this for a moment or so and then thought that, of course, the measurement started at midnight. With us putting in a good few hours of shape-throwing between then and eventual collapse, we'd done half of the recommended 10,000 daily steps without even realising. Because, when you're dancing for fun, be it at a festival, a club or in the kitchen, you don't feel like you're doing a workout.
After the weekend's dust had settled and our hearing had mostly returned, I asked my friend how many steps he'd done. An average of 40,000 each day, it turns out. Comfortably the most I'd done in any one day since I've had my phone (which keeps a record of steps as well).
So, although many will have imbibed a fair few jars of cider/Pimms/moonshine at festivals this summer, and diets may well take a nosedive too, attendees can at least feel smug about their aerobic output over the course of each event, as long as sufficient moves get 'busted', so to speak. You do have to 'give it some' to reap the body benefits.
It's potentially a seasonal alternative to more well-known forms of exercise I reckon, and one I'd advocate as an avid festivalgoer myself. So get your glitter on, I say, and get moving. In fact, I'm tempted to petition parliament about subsidising festival tickets as a means of reducing obesity levels in the UK...