WHY waste money on a personal trainer when you can waste it on a pretend personal trainer?

Gyms are boring. They're sweaty, bright and painful too, but most of all they're boring, plain-walled hives of dullness, drudgery and tedious repetition. It's down to the fact that there are no trees or buildings or frolicking lumps of wildlife to distract you, no progress from A to B to give your physical toil a sense of purpose. There's just a small panel of numbers gradually ticking past on the treadmill's information panel and an incessant background whirr. You'd probably fall asleep, if you weren't so busy hacking up your lungs.

Unsurprisingly, the hideous boredom of gym-based exercise takes a heavy toll on motivation. But it needn't be that way. Celebrities have chanced upon a superb answer to the problem in the form of the personal trainer. This is a highly sculpted person employed by the rich and famous to stand nearby during a workout, barking loud statements of encouragement and occasionally punching their client square in the face to stop them from nodding off. But these exquisitely toned bullies carry a prohibitive price tag. That's why you're fat and ugly. Well, it's why you're fat. You'll need a surgeon to fix that face.

Mindful of this beauty gap between rich and poor, a group of net-based exercise fiends at Playtrainer.com have launched a bid to squeeze their shiny physiques directly into your MP3 players. Like a cross between Mr Motivator and the Lawnmower Man, these digital coaches have converted themselves and their teachings into ones and zeros for easy transmission over the web pipes. Hey presto, portable personal trainers to hold your hand and guide you through the tedium. They can't punch you in the head yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.

The downside? It's £20 a month. The savings certainly add up if you compare it to the cost of genuine one-on-one tuition, plus you don't have the crippling embarrassment of being the kind of loser who needs some cross-eyed titan to bawl at them while they jog, but whichever way you look at it, it's still £20 a month for a bunch of audio guides and workout videos. It would be much simpler to just take the cash down to the corner shop, blow it all on cake, eat until you start hallucinating then cry yourself to sleep. It worked for us.