Tales from the Fitness Camp with Dan Sheridan

The end of week five, and the halfway stage of my LIFE Personal Fitness camp has been reached (not that I'm counting down the days). If I've learned anything so far, it's the importance of what you do in between sessions.

Application and exertion aren't straightforward at the best of times, but surrounded by my fellow campers in the studio or at the foot of Mount Drury, the effort required to get through our sessions is easier to find.

The current Monday/Wednesday/Thursday schedule gets the working week off to a blistering start, with a brisk stomp up the Mount inserted on a Tuesday evening the perfect way to keep the body moving.

Predictably, it's exercise on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday that poses the problem – and that's alongside battling the usual suspects of too much alcohol, late nights and an assortment of food I'm not allowed to eat.

The challenge, though, is a pertinent one. In just five-weeks, the experts at LIFE Personal Fitness won't be around to offer words of encouragement and hold my hand through the rights and wrongs of exercise.

As I've mentioned on these pages before, the group mentality is a huge bonus – especially for a beginner like me – but the idea is to keep this regime going beyond the 10-week programme and avoid slipping in to ‘box-set' mode over Christmas.

Confronting one's fitness and wellbeing is all well and good, but after the first month or so I'm slowly beginning to realise that this is just the beginning.

Stomps up to the top of the Mount have become a regular occurrence.