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One of the most important things that has kept me alive through the difficult times are the friends that I have and the routines that I have to try and keep them with me.

Over the years because of work and family I have lost friends along the way but I have realised that if you can make a routine of meeting people who you like, who feed you and don’t eat you, it can only be good for you and for your soul.

With that in mind, I set up my second regular club this year to see one of my great friends regularly, with the excuse being “doing something else”.

So, there is a story to this one and you might want to set something up with one of your friends in the same way and please feel free to steal.

I cycle with a group of guys some Sundays, but lots of Sundays I don’t.

The guys that I cycle with on Sundays are good guys, but most of them are younger than me and most of them are fitter and most are better looking and most of them have a better physical condition.

Two of the guys who are brothers-in-law meet three times a week at a local gym at half past 6 in the morning to do an hour worth of work out and both of them are in great shape.

They jokingly called us “Vanity Muscle” and have invited me along many times but I wobble too much.

So, one of my best friends Carl Dunstan, who I have mentioned in these blogs already and he is a Physiotherapist and understands all that exercise stuff and biomechanics better than anyone I have ever known.

So in summer I suggested that we set up our own little club, but not in a gym, in my garage and we would meet once a week to do circuits before work.

It started in July, but we couldn’t call it Vanity Muscle so we decided to call it Insanity Muscle and Insanity Muscle was born.

We’re now at the stage where we meet twice a week, usually Tuesday and Friday mornings at half past 6, into the garage goes the Nespresso coffee machine with four pods of coffee and two cups, a bottle of water for me and one for Carl and I also have a wireless speaker and my iPad comes in.

Carl writes the programmes because he is a physiotherapist and he brought the mats. I set up the first Insanity Muscle playlist with the rule that we could add a song each of what we wanted until it got to the duration of one hour. After it got to one hour we locked in the playlist so that we were then able to add songs and remove any other song on the list that we wanted (including the other guys songs), we are now on version three of the Insanity Muscle playlist with the first two locked in my phone.

A 45 minute session takes us 75 minutes and so we try to be slicker than that, but the thing about Insanity Muscle club is that we talk to each other about what we want and while it makes us feel better at the start of the day (and it always, always does) it improves and helps our mental health and our friendship.

One of our big goals was to do a single pull up each, by the 24^th December and I will fill you in on the progress on that later perhaps in the blog.

It is precious now though and it is locked in. So our Wives know that we meet in the mornings, at these times and it is just a thing that happens.

It might not be Insanity Muscle for you, it might be something completely different, but if you can regularise something like this, it becomes such a gift.

For a while in the summer we gave up lifting weights and we walked the dog for an hour, during that time we decided that Carl should come and work with me and give up Physiotherapy and try to help me change the world.

He starts on the 6^th January.

You never know what might happen if you start something like this.

Blog Post Number - 2234