The Fitness Café

If gym chains leave you cold, this could be the place for you. The Fitness Café in St John’s Wood is a great combination of small, personal gym and health-food café.

You can head downstairs for a session in the well-equipped gym, follow that up with a soft-tissue massage and then refuel with a ‘superfood salad’ in the café upstairs.

The gym runs a number of classes, including pilates, WaterRowing, spin and circuit, tai chi, yoga and cardio kickboxing. They also teach something called NIA, which is a mixture of aikido, dance and yoga. The classes take a maximum of five people, so there’s more scope for individual attention than in your average gym class. However, having recently been told by an NHS consultant that I’ve got a seriously knackered right knee (that’s the medical term for it) I needed something more tailored to my needs.

My personal fitness trainer for the day was Ilan Shaki, a sports scientist by training. Before giving me an exercise plan, Ilan first did a thorough assessment of my health, including blood pressure, hip-to-waist ratio, body-fat composition, bike test (VO2 Max equivalent), body-mass index and various flexibility tests. This provided a baseline to track improvements over time. Then I had to set some goals – always the hard part.

After a warm up on the cross-trainer, we headed out to the tranquil courtyard (made extra-tranquil by the lack of planes in the sky) to do some padwork. Next, Ilan focused on strengthening my core muscles and my leg muscles, especially important as I need to compensate for the lack of stabilising tendons in my knee.

At the end of the session, Ilan gave me a template for a food diary as well as a training plan. ‘Plans are usually updated every 4-6 weeks to avoid training plateaus,’ Ilan said.

It was a great workout, but the best part of the morning was guzzling the Sicilian Sunshine juice that Tundi, the café proprietor, rustled up. Tundi, a qualified nutritionist, runs cookery classes in the café, where the focus is on cooking nutritionally balanced meals.

The Fitness Café is a great concept in holistic wellbeing. What I like best about it, though, is the lack of annual membership fees. It’s all pay-as-you-go. My kinda place.

The Fitness Café
97 Boundary Road
St John’s Wood
NW8 0RG

Tel. 020 7372 4913