When you try ballet (surely, on mysemi-recommendation a few months back, you tried ballet?) it is tremendously difficult at first. You look around at all the people who are better than you, and get a vivid snapshot of the intense, technical precision, the practice and the perfectionism involved, which is what makes it work for them and not for you.

Well, a Zuu class is the opposite of that. You move like an animal, it’s incredibly hard and everybody else covers way more ground, whether as a sideways gorilla or a crawling bear. But no matter how fast they are, how fit, how unruffled or how well-dressed, everybody looks ridiculous.

It’s quite elaborate, the Virgin Active I visit: vast and futuristic, a bit like the spaceship in Wall-E, except there is nobody fat there. The instructors are the capital’s finest, sleek, slick, focused: and also, at least while doing a frog squat, ridiculous.

The exercise is exactly what it sounds like: very short bursts of traversing a gym floor on your hands and knees. The frog squat starts much like a regular deep squat – think sitting on an imaginary step a few inches off the floor – except you press your elbows against your knees. The frog jump. Well, just imagine a frog jumping and approximate it. Physical spontaneity is part of the point. Realistically, you’ll never move that much like a bear; your aim here is only to seek the sensation of bear movement so ardently that you forget how much easier it is to stand on two feet.

Zuu fitness was invented in Australia by Nathan Helberg. He was very fit, but only “in set planes”: when he wasn’t doing specific exercises – bench presses and weightlifting and such – Helberg felt “quite weak, even vulnerable to joint instability”. I think it’s an elite athlete thing, this listening to your body. I hear nothing from mine, except appetite, pain and the odd neurotic rash.

In getting you to move differently, more elementally, if you will, Zuu aims to explore the full range of your body’s capabilities. The formless, toddler element of it is supposed to be motivating: when you liberate yourself from your learned habits, you can leap as freely as a rabbit (actually, no rabbits are mentioned in any of the Zuu manuals; I just feel that I’ve talked enough about frogs). This exhilaration will push you through what would otherwise be quite a significant pain barrier, because, much like anything that uses your own bodyweight against you, Zuu is extremely high intensity.

I got scant pleasure from the galumphing, to be honest. And when did you last see a gorilla worrying about its quads? It is a wickedly tough 20 minutes, though; like any 20-minute workout, it gives your day a fillip – and is at least better than a full 40.

This week I learned

Traditional weight training can impair your muscle groups by isolating them from one another.