Health and Fitness; Matthew Fox rocks with his "Thug Workout" and "Body Blitz" classes

When I joined my gym the first class I did for the trial day was Matthew Fox's cardio session.

His cardio workouts were nice and tough; one of his USPs was that he loves House music and always tended to have a dance while he was yelling at us to "Drive through them legs," and "pump them arms!" As we got into the working minutes Matthew had a habit of loudly commenting "EASY!" which it most certainly wasn't and I told him so. (I often said "No!" to some of his more challenging instructions; he just gave me a look and ignored my protest).

All my instructors are ambitious and Matthew devised, along with a colleague of his, a lethal Body Blitz 45-minute class. It is a fast-moving workout; a hardcore attack on each area using our own bodyweight; the sessions varied each week. My legs ached so much after my first sessions -for four days no less- that I adopted Matthew's suggested remedy of sitting in a cool bath with my lower body submerged for four minutes after each session until I got used to the leg exercises after a few weeks. Body Blitz is as near to a military workout as I can imagine. To get us to do 40-50 reps or more for each exercise, we worked in pairs opposite each other on mats and swapped places after every 10 or 20. He also had us sometimes ourselves count the reps in turn which was a neat interactive tactic that maybe helped to take our minds off the difficulty of what we were doing.

Matthew is developing his own brand of classes. He is in demand at Gymbox and teaches in all of their London venues. Along with his colleague, he has developed the Thug Workout which is what he teaches at Gymbox; it is a calisthenics-based bodyweight class using outdoor frames, like bars for pullups, inside.

Matthew also does Body Blitz type sessions in Notting Hill Gate at BodyWorksWest and it is in that part of London, popular with some of the arty clique of the capital (though Ealing has a high percentage of media workers too) that he does personal training. Matthew is definitely heading in the direction of being at the top of the next generation of celebrity trainers. We will all miss him.