Thanks so much for wanting to learn about how I stayed fit and healthy during lockdown. Your item will be with you imminently via email. Whilst you wait, I would like to tell you a short story. I have called it…

Kettlebell

So like millions of other people the world over I found myself banished to my house for an indeterminate period of time over the last months. This meant adapting to a new way of living and working. Along with my office closing, the onsite gym that I went to 5 times per week during lunch breaks was shutting down as well.

The moment I heard the rumours circulating about the impending work from home scenario, my first thought was that I wasn’t going to be able to train. This may make me sound like an obsessive gym addict, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I hate the gym, and the moment I would be forced to stop going, the routine that I had painstakingly crafted for myself would likely be lost for a considerable period of time, maybe even forever. 

There had to be a cheap, easy, convenient way to keep the momentum going with my workouts, so off I headed to my local branch of Decathlon sports. In typical fashion I had sold all of my home weights when I had most recently moved house. This had happened before, as they always seemed too much hassle to transport. When would I possibly ever need them again?

Of course, I now had my answer. But with them gone, the shelves of Decathlon were the nearest chance for salvation, where I could scour for options. So, along with my cabin luggage wheelie bag that I cunningly took along for the expedition, so that I wouldn’t have to carry anything heavy the whole way home, to the local shops I walked.

After a bit of time browsing the shelves, I elected to buy the heaviest kettlebell in the store. It was ‘only’ 24kgs, which is fairly heavy, but little more than half the weight of the dumbbells that I was using for certain exercises at the gym. So the weight was wheeled back through the mean streets of Staines, or St. Aines as I knew it as a kid – a thinly veiled attempt to glamourize the place.

Once home I looked at it. What was I actually going to do with this and was it alone, going to be enough to keep me in decent shape until my full liberty was restored and the doors of the gym once again opened?


Well, this is me putting the kettlebell to use, and although I look like I am constipated, this facial expression is a good thing. It means that I am feeling the benefit of my workout, and not that I need the toilet - I promise.


If you would like to know how I made that one kettlebell keep me in decent shape during the Corona virus lockdown, then…