Park Life: No gain and all pain on the road to physical fitness

IF ONE of the benefits of fitness is the feeling of prolonged youth, then something is going very wrong with my regime. However fit I manage to get, nothing seems to prevent the chronic stiffness that follows any exertion. After a game of squash or football, I invariably feel creakily ancient for most of the following week.

Vicki, the trainer in the office gym, insists that I have no excuse - that you lose only a small percentage of muscle tone and flexibility by the age of 40. So I go through all the tedious warm-up and warm-down routines she recommends, and they do seem to help prevent major injuries during the exercise itself.

But they make little difference to the multiple muscle-seizure that sets in a few hours later, which leaves me climbing stairs with great difficulty, hauling at the banister like an octogenarian, and struggling with simple tasks such as getting into a car or out of the bath.

The only time I actually feel fit is when, following a period of intense exercise, I take a couple of weeks off. The stiffness, the aches and pains wear off, my tendons feel properly elastic and my muscles hum with unspent energy for a few days. Then, of course, I lose my fitness and have to start all over again.

Perhaps it is time for a different and gentler approach; time to try yoga, or have another bash at t'ai chi. Most of us laugh when they see others doing t'ai hi - and there is indeed something essentially comic about a group of adults pretending to Sweep the Leaves, Shake the Monkey out of the Tree, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, or whatever the movements are supposed to represent. But my first sighting of these ancient Oriental callisthenics was on the roof of a tower block in Hong Kong, where a bright and breezy score of elderly residents had gathered in their slippers first thing in the morning for their routines; I found it a strangely inspiring sight.

Home again a few weeks later, at my first training session we were instructed to perform what our teacher called the Standing Meditation, which consisted of standing with your knees slightly bent, staring at the blank wall straight in front of you for 10 minutes, thinking of nothing in particular.

The woman in front of me misunderstood the instruction and locked her knees in the manner of a horse preparing to sleep on all fours. Needless to say she dozed off, to be rudely awakened a second later when her head hit the floor of the gym with a resounding crack.

Following that episode I have frequently found myself struggling to suppress giggles at the unintended comedy of my fellow t'ai chi aficionados. One instructor had a genius for relating whichever small movement we were studying - the position of your left hand during Pick the Grapes, perhaps - to that week's major international issue, whether it be sanctions against Iraq, the struggle against inflation or the outcome of the FA Cup Final.

The funniest was a hulking hippy with a compulsion to share his innermost feelings with the group, who appeared to have modelled his voice and dress sense on Dave the Dealer from Withnail and I, purveyor of the legendary Camberwell Carrot. "I feel this rush of negative energy when I stand on my left foot..." he would proclaim adenoidally, as I spluttered, trying not to make eye contact with anyone else.

But while I can laugh at the absurdities of a bunch of Westerners engaged in the mind games of a baffling Eastern discipline, I honestly believe that t'ai chi works. A friend of mine, a potter who suffered permanent back pain for years as a result of spending every day hunched over his wheel in a damp and draughty studio, tried countless forms of treatment in vain before finding lasting relief in t'ai chi.

And I was staggered to find on one occasion that I could play a full 90 minutes of football without any ill effects, although I had done no exercise for months apart from a weekly session of t'ai chi.

Each time I enrol on a course, my ambition is to master the form so I can do it at home, in my own time, without the rest of the group - without Dave from Camberwell. But like serial dieters who fail again and again, I never reach that stage. Perhaps t'ai chi is a communal activity after all: those Hong Kong pensioners were exercising together, although they all knew every move.

But I'm still impressed by the man I once saw from a deserted beach on the Atlantic coast of France, practising t'ai chi stark naked at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. Now he'd be in big trouble if he were to lock his knees...