This column is usually concerned with the various ways you can cover, adorn and accessorise your body, but for one week, I am taking a fashion “fast”.  At this time of year, between browsing the January sales and looking forward to the new season’s arrivals, the body itself is at the forefront of our minds, so I want to share a recent non-fashion obsession with you. After all the body is the canvas for all our fashion fantasies – never mind making sure that last season’s investments have any future beyond the season of indulgence.  The new year rings in the best of intentions, but no amount of shiny new things will improve your style as much as a great body that is feeling good from the inside. “Feel good to look good” is a cliché with more than a grain of truth that we hear over and over, yet tend only to act on at this time of year. Apparently, two thirds of people with gym memberships never use them, and I can believe it.  A friend of mine, ex-fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Pippa Vosper, managed to convince me to travel to Chelsea last autumn just before the start of the bi-annual gruelling month of fashion week travel and late night dinners, to squeeze in a health kick at the Lomax gym on Fulham Road.  A bunch of wary fashion editors congregated on 10 bikes set together in a room with mood lighting and amped-up music to try out RealRyder – think of the traditional spin class made famous by Soul Cycle in the US, but wobbly. Here, the not-so-stationary bicycles also pivot from side to side, so as you ride you also have to use your upper-body strength to stabilise the bike.  Vosper first discovered RealRyder when she went to review the experience for a health and fitness column she was writing. “After the first class I was hooked,” she tells me, “so I approached Lomax about instructing a couple of times a week and trained until I could shout the moves through three solid hours of spinning.“  Her energy is infectious. Despite feeling after my first session like I’d spent as much energy as I normally do in a month, and sweated more than I ever had, later that evening I was bouncing off the walls – full of the best kind of energy and probably high on endorphins I’d never really felt after any other exercise session.  Now I am hooked too. I just need to figure out how to get in more than just one class a week. When I asked Vosper for her advice on how best to schedule them in, her answer was characteristic of her sunny but strict teaching manner: “You just need to commit to a number of classes a week and not cancel for any reason, other than being out of the country. Schedule set times in your diary each month; these are your times to work out and if you know this, other commitments will be worked around this 'you' time. Knowing you have a minimum of two classes a week, will leave you feeling energised and proud of yourself for working out and will make the effort so incredibly worthwhile.”  Thankfully, there’s also a boom in great looking exercise gear – while many established retailers are ramping up their “activewear” category, there’s a new crop of young, independent brands like Charli Cohen and Lucas Hugh (the designers behind the elegant sporting uniform costumes for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire film) whose designs bring an element of the runway to the gym. Perfect for keeping me interested while I work my butt off to make sure I am in the best possible shape when those spring pieces land in store.
Caroline Issa tries RealRyder, the addictive exercise class at Lomax Chelsea, to get in the best possible shape for the new season