Features

Let’s get physical!

Philip Wrigley.
© Copyright Claire Grogan

Fitness. There’s a word to bring terror to the hearts of many of you reading this magazine. It used to have the same effect on me - like presenting Carrie Bradshaw with a pair of espadrilles; I would have run screaming from the room. However “fitness”, if you hadn’t noticed, is the watchword for our times. We are all being instructed to take control of our bodies and along the way stop being such a drain on NHS resources.

Twenty years ago the idea that anyone with HIV could also be fit was ridiculous. Then came HAART and thankfully things are very different these days; we are all learning to live longer and more regular lives.
In fact, we now have to learn how to match the fitness levels of our non-infected peers. It’s a bizarre observation that the HIV clinics nowadays seem to be filled with tanned, buff women and men, many of whom don’t look as if they have had a day’s illness in their lives. This is of course a sweeping generalisation – there are many people around who are still very ill and for who anti-retrovirals are a mixed blessing, but as a trend, people with HIV are trying to get fitter all the time.

Personally, exercise for its own sake used to be something that filled me with utter incomprehension. Then I turned 30.”

Much of this stems from something that occurred in New York and San Francisco during the eighties. At this time it was easy to spot people with HIV/AIDS – wasting crippled men with hollow, purple marked faces. It was a time of enormous fear and prejudice. Men who as yet didn’t know their status began to dose themselves up with steroids and supplements and join gyms in an effort to present to the world a picture of health and virility. This fantasy distanced them from those people who seemed to be, and invariably were, on the edge of death – it was a type of denial. It didn’t matter what was going on in the blood underneath that taught overstretched veneer, how could someone who looked so healthy possibly be sick? The craze took fire and, although of course there has always been a fetishistic interest in muscle within the gay community, I believe that this change is the basis for the gay obsession with muscle and the body beautiful that has become much more mainstream throughout the 1990s and into the 21st Century.

Now, I am not saying that this trend is a bad thing (far from it), it is just interesting to think about where its roots lie. Although based in denial, it was motivation for people with HIV to take charge of their own health.

Personally, exercise for its own sake used to be something that filled me with utter incomprehension. Then I turned 30. I needed something that would slow the decline that I saw opening up ahead and the gym seemed to be the only possible way out.

In those first few weeks I somehow managed to get past the annoyingness of working out. There is indeed something innately ridiculous about going into a building with the sole intention of picking up something heavy and then putting it down again…several times, or running for 30 minutes and not actually getting anywhere.
For me, the gym became a place of refuge, somewhere that I could retreat from real life and disappear into the physical. Almost like sex, except that at the gym I don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone other than myself and I don’t sweat as much. But when push comes to shove (and it does), exercise takes you over and for the period that you are in the gym it is wonderful to slip off the mental stresses of 21st C life and glorify in the animal physicality of it.

I have been a regular gym goer for 17 years now. I hesitate to say that from those early days of 3 days a week I am now a 13 days a fortnight man. Somehow my day doesn’t feel quite right unless I have been to the gym. It is second nature – I rarely even give it a thought. It is just something I do.

Now you probably think after this that I must have the body of a young Mark Wahlberg (even an old Mark Wahlberg). No such luck! I am firmer and stronger, but at 47 I still have pretty much the same stats I had when I was 30, but then when I see some of my contemporaries I realise that is actually no mean achievement, especially given my devotion to several rather over priced patisseries in Soho.

Above all, though, I am fit. I feel well. My immune system responds to exercise and my CD4 remains very high – even if it is just a psychosomatic effect, who the hell cares? Who would have thought that people with HIV would ever have had the chance to feel this way?

As I became more and more involved with exercise I found myself training to be a fitness instructor. I trained at the YMCA in Central London and around the time that I qualified something amazing was happening there. The POSITIVE HEALTH scheme was being founded. This was a clinical referral-to-exercise programme for people with HIV. GPs and consultants would refer patients to the scheme for a 13-week programme of personalised exercise with one-to-one input from a specialised personal trainer. I became one of the first trainers on the scheme and I was staggered at the change in clients as they came through the programme.

When we started the scheme many clients had been, or still were, very sick. 80% of them had emotional/psychological problems, usually depression and some had been socially removed due to family/peer prejudice or from being housebound. POSITIVE HEALTH gave clients a place where they could meet other people in the same situation and have someone, who understood their needs and fears, spend time devoted to them. Clients would arrive in fear and trepidation, most never having been in a gym before, and within weeks, quite apart from the huge physical improvements, would become much more confidant and relaxed. This was a space where they could physically take control of their own health. It had a phenomenally empowering effect.

And it still does. The benefits to people with HIV are enormous – it helps build lean muscle mass, improves your heart and liver functions, increases your energy levels and appetite, helps you sleep well and can assist in combating lipodystrophy.

The scheme recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. There are also a number of satellite schemes, which have sprung up all around the country under the auspices of the YMCA. It is a testament to its success that several people who were once clients on the scheme have now qualified as trainers themselves and are teaching on it. Indeed the chap who currently runs the scheme, Garry Brough, was one of its very first clients. He tells an inspiring tale of how he arrived still recovering from PCP and KS and suffering from muscle wastage; but having finally checkmated the reaper, he staggered onto the scheme 10 years ago and never looked back. He is now the muscular, healthy, fit man that you can see three days a week scampering around the YMCA – he is practically unstoppable.

As people living with HIV in the 21st C, so many more of us, admittedly not all, have the opportunity to take charge of our own health and make a difference to our lives. At this time of year when so many gyms are making a huge profit on all those New Year resolutions when people turn up for three sessions and then are never seen again, go out there and shame those “healthy” negative people - take up some exercise. Start weight training, take up horse riding, join a swim group, take a step or a salsa class, go skiing – do something active and stick to it. Get out and do something - I can guarantee you that the rewards will amaze you. PN

Most central London HIV clinics have systems for referral to the scheme. Please ask your clinician. It is not possible to self refer to Positive Health.

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