One thing you should know
about Phil Parkin! - let's get this out of the way straight away.....
I am not a qualified fitness instructor or personal trainer. But having tried so many different ways of exercising over the years (albeit in a fairly casual way) and observing its effect on me and my body, I have learnt quite a lot about aspects of getting and keeping fit (some more than others). Apart from direct observation, much of this learning was from books, but also from information gleaned from gym instructors, personal trainers, doctors, physios etc.
So how did this dreadful accident called Phil Parkin take place?.......
I won't insult my parents, so I'll brush over that and stick just to the things related to the theme of this site.... at school I was reasonably athletic I suppose. I was sort of good at everything without being best at anything if you know what I mean. I was good at ball sports, so made the school team at football and cricket.
Glossing over the next few years, which included a lot of social activity - even played bass (very badly) in a semi-pro rock band at one time - but no exercise or sport at all, I finally started to play football again. The only problem being that, at that stage, I was smoking so much that whilst I could still run, after the match I would sit in the changing room coughing for the next hour or so before I could get to the bar and join my team mates in the after match celebrations (or commiserations).
This, combined with the birth of my daughter Sarah, convinced me that I really HAD to give up smoking - I haven't smoked since.
I felt so much better that I started playing tennis as well.
All went well until in my late thirties my knees really could not take any more - they would swell up after a match and would sometimes take a nearly a week to get back to normal, despite all the physio attention and prescribed exercises. So I stopped all sport altogether and any other exercise along with it.
In my fifties I really had become rather large. As I say elsewhere, for my size and light bone structure, being over 15 stones was gross, so I decided I really would need to exercise a bit to do something about it. And this I suppose was the beginning of the story of my belt.
