Gym Bunnies: Virgin Active Gym, La Lucia, KZN, South Africa

We’ve never been gym bunnies, Roy and I. Neither of us has belonged a gym for the past 10 years at least. Yet here we are at Virgin Active La Lucia, notching up a creditable three or four visits a week.

Virgin Active La Lucia has just about everything you could wish for in a gym

Amazingly, they still had my name on the database, going back to the mid-90s when I was a member of the Workshop branch of Health & Racquet – which was acquired in 2000 by UK company Virgin Active.

I’d almost forgotten that, but I do now recall dashing from my Durban City Hall office to the Workshop branch of H&R for a lunchtime treadmill session. Or, on lazier summer weekdays, topping up my tan at the old City Baths across the road, in West Street.

Monthly Membership

Because we leave to join the family for Christmas in Perth, WA (via Singapore) in a few weeks’ time, we’ve taken membership for only a month. The fee is R1,400 each, more than twice what one would pay monthly for a year’s membership. That’s motivating in itself!

The main lap pool also hosts Splash classes, but it’s colder than the acquacise pool – and you have lots of gym-goers peering down at you from their treadmills, bikes and other less readily identifiable machines

The Splash class was what first attracted us. Roy had enjoyed the daily aquacise, or water aerobics, at Brookdale Hydro (see my previous blog ) and wanted more of it. Here at Virgin Active there are two Splash classes around 8.30am – one in the aquacise pool and the other occupying a single lane of the lap pool.

Roy, surrendering to the joys of aquacise

We hang with the grannies in the former: the water’s a warmer 30°C (absolutely nothing to do with incontinence, we hope) – and there’s music: Abba one day, Latin pop the next, the Beach Boys another. A few of us sing along.

It may not look like it, but the underwater action gets fairly frenzied at times

Virgin Active really does have everything you could want from a gym. Apart from the spinning studio downstairs, there are two big studios offering back-to-back classes in anything from yoga and Pilates to Barre180, Express Abs, Kick (martial arts) and Zumba.

The regular crowd shuffles in to Arlene’s great yoga class – Mondays and Thursdays at 9.30am

I’m loving Arlene’s 90-minute yoga class on Mondays and Thursdays at 9.30am. On Mondays it comes straight after Splash, so when I get home I’m forced to snatch a noonday snooze on the sofa.

Virgin Active even has a spa with a full menu of facial and body treatments – including a current promotion: R300 for a 60-minute full-body massage.

You can get a 60-minute full-body massage for just R300

The wide variety of sometimes daunting equipment is all fully occupied by the pre-work crowd from the time the gym opens at 5am (!) until 8am or 9am. Once they’ve hurried off, you may find Roy cycling on one of the many stationary bikes.

The bikes downstairs are seldom used and the air-conditioning works better

The Inner Man

After our workout, glowing with sweat and virtue, Roy and I meet up at the gym’s Kauai café outlet for a coffee or a red cappuccino (made with rooibos tea espresso). The menu is a healthy one and what comes out of the kitchen is pretty good.

After a summer of baguettes and butter, Roy* is back on the 5:2 diet. This means restricting daily calories to 500 (for women) or 600 (for men) for any two days a week, and eating “normally” for the other five days.

(*I pretend to be on it too, but I cheat -sometimes terribly.)

The 5:2 regime has worked quite well for us before, but hasn’t yet showed results this time round. Something to do with double G&Ts at the Gin Bar, scrumptious pork bellies at Pintxada, and vast Dom Pedros at Butcher Boys?

Maybe our “normal” days need to be more normal – but that’s not easy with so many good restaurants and great friends on our doorstep.