IT'S difficult to look glamorous when you are bouncing up and down like an epileptic jelly, your boobs alternately acting as ear muffs and knee pads depending on whether you are in an upward or downward motion.

To be honest, I have difficulty with glamour at the best of times. I have a tendency to trip, slip and smash things even when - or rather particularly when - I'm in a posh frock and heels, so I tend to give glamour a wide berth.

But I would challenge any normal woman (for "normal", read someone whose bum wobbles for half an hour after she runs upstairs) to look glamorous while exercising. Cindy Crawford can do it. Elle Macpherson can do it. Heck, Olivia Newton John just about pulled it off in the Eighties (give or take the odd duff headband).

But any woman who has so much as half an ounce of spare flesh on her bones just can't.

You can buy all the latest workout gear: the gravity-defying sports bras, the double-strength Lycra shorts and the flashy trainers that pump up, light up and, unfortunately for everyone in a three mile radius, smell up your wardrobe. But these only work in a glamorous sense if you never move while wearing them. Lean nonchalantly against a running machine and you'll look great; actually get on the blummin' thing and you'll look like a blancmange in a bin bag.

My best pal and I were on the phone just the other night swapping exercise horror stories, much to the distaste of my partner whose viewing of a serious documentary was disturbed by my regular outbursts of "you think you've got problems mate, just imagine if Jordan got jogger's nipple" and "honestly, I ended up with a bruise on my bum that looked just like Michael Portillo".

Now it might surprise you to learn that neither my chum nor I are exactly supermodels, unless of course Cindy and Elle regularly eat their own bodyweight in Kitkats. We are what you might call generously proportioned women. We have both also recently taken up exercise again after lengthy breaks to have babies (me) and to get drunk (her... and me again, I'm afraid). And the combination of these generous proportions and movements of a distinctly bouncy variety really is a sight to behold.

For my sins, I now do an irregular, ill-executed but nonetheless enthusiastic programme of tae'bo (a cross between dancing and boxing that makes me look like Frank Bruno in a tutu); Claudia Schiffer's lower and upper body workouts (which basically involves me screaming in agony while the Teutonic supermodel shouts "more crunches, more crunches"); and skipping (just me, a rope and several neighbours staring open-mouthed as a grown woman skips in her own back garden).

My friend has taken a braver and more taxing route to health - a route that takes her on to the streets, where she (gulp!) exercises in public.

I would rather throttle myself with my own skipping rope than be seen jogging round my neighbourhood, but my chum is made of sterner stuff.

Does she care that she has to wear two sports bras (her cups runneth over at the best of times)? Does she care that she has to slap on a couple of strategically placed corn plasters to avoid getting jogger's nipple?

Does she care that gangs of small boys run in a straggling mass behind her whistling Eye Of The Tiger?

Does she care that she might have to turn to Vaseline in the very near future if she is to avoid painful buttock chaffing?

Of course she cares. But a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do if she's going to get fit enough to run upstairs in her unsightly Lycra leggings without having a coronary.

Updated: 09:53 Tuesday, August 05, 2003