There's not really a lot to reflect on this week. It's just been another week of getting up at 5:30 to go to the gym to learn more stuff. We did have a good day on Monday at the tennis club Jubilee party. Like churches, clubs rely upon a few enthusiasts to get things organised and clearly the enthusiasts had done a great job. Now we're not "in a church", as people like to point out to me (I'll moan about that in a minute or two!), we had the chance to not be at a church-based celebration. Probably the first time for 20 plus years that we've been able to do this. In some ways it was remarkably similar to a church event, and in others clearly not. Somewhere there has to be a balance between organising a church-based event and inventing people to that, and on the other hand encouraging folk to attend non-church events where they can interact with friends and fellow human beings. Perhaps if we did more of the latter we'd realise that the missing are not as unhappy as we think they should be.

The PT course is now underway. The downside of doing a Personal Trainer course is that you think you know about exercise! I'm supposed to be a professional, but I feel like an amateur in comparison to some. As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of the gym. It's great to get on the treadmill and walk and run, and to pick up a few weights and put some of those hidden muscles to work, but overall the gym is not an exciting environment for me. Hopefully I'll be able to do some creative, non-gym based things in the community for people who don't want to be athletes but would like to not get out of breath walking to the shops!

Designing exercise programmes is quite a complicated job. There are lots of things to take into consideration. Repeating the same routine over and over again is not only monotonous bordering on boring, but in the end once you've adapted to the routine you won't see any changes because your body won't be asked to do more. So you need to keep upping the intensity or frequency or type or time spent exercising. Then there's this thing I've been reading about called periodisation with micro cycles, mesocycles and macrocylces. It might as well have a unicycle in for brain to get on and ride around in a state of confusion!

I have 7 more days to get my head around it all and then the rest of my life to build the experience to do it as well as I can. Maybe I'll enlist the help of few friends to practice on. At least if they injure themselves I can offer remedial massage!

Before I go, let me point you to a short post by Simon Jones. Simon and I were at college together and he often writes thougthful stuff on his blog. His most recent post raises a pertinent point about what we focus upon as churches.