The rise of smuggercise: the latest craze for cringeworthy couples

It’s just what they did, they shrugged: they walked together, ran together and routinely hit the weight rooms à deux. Basically, if it involved a raised heart rate and the risk of underarm sweat, they did it.

As the week progressed, I realised theirs was a delicate art. Exercising together is fine — good, in fact — but there are perimeters; a secret line that cannot be crossed. Recently, F1 driver Jenson Button and his partner Jessica Michibata crossed that line. #yogacouple, the tweet read, beneath a picture of the two of them undertaking a complex yoga pose by a Hawaiian lake. He has a six-pack; her body looks as though it was made by Mattel. I like Jenson and Jessica. They remind me of Sting and Trudie in the early days. Before we realised that all that yoga was a euphemism for tantric sex. But this? It wasn’t, shall we say, very nuanced.

They’re not alone, of course. You’ll have seen other practitioners of smuggercise. They’re the couple hogging the adjacent treadmills or taking selfies in which they’re thrusting with kettlebells. The same couple who monopolised your last dinner party talking about their marathon PBs (personal bests). If you want to see what I’m talking about, hop on to Twitter and put in #fitcouple — you’ll see hundreds of them, doing synchronised bicep flexes, lunges and far-too-intimate stretches.

It’s not that I’m against working out together. I’ve edited Women’s Health magazine for the past two years. Many of our readers train with their partners. I’ve been doing it for the past ten years of my relationship with my husband Will. The science stacks up, too. In fact, a recent study by Santa Clara University discovered that those who worked out with a partner were happier and more energetic than those who didn’t. Something to do with all the lovely endorphins rushing about, no doubt.

But how to do it and not irritate everyone else around you? First of all, time it right. I took Will to yoga in the first few weeks of our courtship. It was in a very upscale loft space in a snooty corner of Notting Hill. He wore his pyjama pants (they were smart-ish, but still) and a band T-shirt. His toenails, I noticed for the first time, were like field mushrooms (in both shape and colour) and, he had failed to tell me, he was incredibly hypermobile. His limbs moved like Catherine wheels. The instructor ended up giving him a semi-private lesson for the entire class. He didn’t listen. He laughed when she asked him to try the tree pose. The other yogis were not amused. We argued straight after. I thought he wasn’t taking it seriously enough. He thought it was a load of hippie nonsense. I do yoga alone now. So maybe gauge your partner’s attitude towards your favourite core class or reformer Pilates before you take them along.

There’s also zero point in doing something in which one person vastly outperforms the other. Relationships should be about equality, even on the gym floor. A couple of years ago Will and I were invited on a cycling trip. It was billed as a weekend of ‘fun’ and as long as we were both relatively fit (we were), everyone would be happy. For a start, it was in the French Alps (should have been a warning sign, really). There was a mountain-biking competition going on. We had to cycle on bikes that looked (and moved) like combine harvesters before careening down dirt tracks as narrow as a bra strap. I cried. Will tried to be strong. He’d been run over in Brixton, twice. Yet even his legs were shaking. But that night, as one of the group was taken to A&E to fix a bloodied forearm, we went and scoffed fondue and laughed the hardest we had in years. Adrenaline, you see, is a powerful aphrodisiac. (There’s also something incredibly intimate about failing spectacularly together.) So I would urge you to do something together that genuinely scares the bejesus out of you. Trapeze perhaps, or a Tough Mudder endurance race, in which, I’m informed, you both get electrocuted as you cross the finish line.

My friend Robin and his wife Fi are big champions of the endurance race. They do around three a year. That’s on top of the Friday night ‘circuits with Cecil’ and the weekly 26-mile bike ride into work and back. They are both impossibly good-looking. Their arms dip and peak in all the right places. They look healthy and alive and yes, a little part of me hates them, but they’re incredibly inoffensive. They’d never dream of posting anything on Twitter and they routinely go for a massive fry-up after a workout (that’s the whole point, surely, Robin says). It takes the sheen off them somewhat. Makes them normal.

Francesca Fox’s partner is a personal trainer. Look him up on Twitter. His name is Scott Francis (@FrancisDiet). He looks like He-Man (in a good way). The two of them met on Twitter when someone asked Francesca a question about gluten (she’s a chef), linking Scott in. Three hours later they were still chatting. Six weeks later they moved in together. They train twice a week. On Fridays, as a treat, she confides, they visit their favourite London gym for a couple of hours, then Nike Town. Finally they go for dinner. ‘The best part of the day is hitting the gym, though,’ she laughs. They’re very careful not to flaunt it when they’re on the gym floor. ‘Scott is very professional,’ she says. There’s no touching, no hogging machines and certainly no coordinating outfits. And that’s exactly how it should be.

To make it work you also need to have shared goals. Beach holidays make excellent motivational tools. You’ll be in minimal clothing for most of the trip; you’ll eat a lot and will be watched intently by other couples, who’ll peer back at you from behind self-help books. If this isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is. Will and I took to the gym in the run-up to a 17-day Balinese trip. It was the wedding of a glamorous couple whose friends, we knew, were (an impressive) 18 per cent body fat. We trained three times a week and when we were over there we sweated it out in the badly ventilated gym every morning. There was something glorious and incredibly uniting about both being in the shape of our lives. It’s that whole idea of progressing together. And being fitter than everyone else in the room. But did we tell a soul? Of course we didn’t.

With exercise, as with life, there will be some things your partner is good at and some things where you must lead the way. I like to linger and stretch. Will is always anxious to move on. But because we’re a team, we have to do what the other wants. When we run together I make Will stretch; he forces me to run faster. We both benefit. My fitness levels have soared by trying to match his pace. He, in turn, hasn’t got shin splints. If your partner is way ahead of you in the fitness stakes, then it’s best to take it slowly. Matching their pace will result in injury and quite possibly an argument.

Personally, I find the best exercise to do together is one where you can talk. That’s why running never quite worked for us, and the gym was too noisy. So now Will and I are those sad old things I think one refers to as ramblers. Every Saturday we head out with the dog. Will plans a route, I pack the lunch. We walk around 20km, talk and catch up on the week. Although I should probably rethink the matching Barbour jackets…

7 ways to avoid being branded a smuggerciser

1 Never wear matching or coordinated outfits.

2 No PDAs (public displays of affection). An occasional high five is acceptable. A squeeze of the ass is not.

3 Avoid the ‘sexual’ stretch. No one needs to see how far your legs go back.

4 Save six-packs/biceps/body fat percentage comparisons for when you return home.

5 Remember, hogging one machine is bad. Hogging two because you want to discuss your Ocado order is plain rude.

6 Instagram is for taking pictures of dogs and rainbows. Not conjoined press-ups.

7 Oh, and no Zumba. Under any circumstances.

Farrah Storr edits Women’s Health