Online personal training, where the whole hour is yours.

In a group session a coach corrects what they catch. In a one-to-one they are watching only you, which means the corrections come on the rep rather than after the set, and the session can change direction the moment something is not working.

It also means the programme can be genuinely specific. Working around a shoulder that does not like overhead pressing, training around night shifts, or building back after a long break are all things a group programme can only accommodate in general terms.

Between sessions you have direct access to your coach — for a question about a movement, a swap because the gym you travelled to has different kit, or a check on whether something you felt is worth worrying about.

Worth it if you are working around an injury or a medical constraint, coming back after years off and want someone certain your setup is safe, training for a specific deadline, or if you have tried group formats and found the pace never fit.

Not worth it — and we would rather say so — if you are a healthy beginner with no constraints who mainly needs somebody to expect you at 7am. That is what the group sessions do, at half the price, and the coaching in them is not a lesser grade. Start there and move up if you find you need it.

Same technology as the group classes: a link in your browser, on a phone or laptop, with nothing to install. You prop the camera where your coach can see you side-on.

Session times are agreed with your coach rather than picked off a public schedule, which is most of the point — a one-to-one that has to fit a fixed timetable is a group class with fewer people in it.

Your camera goes on for these, for the obvious reason. Your coach cannot correct what they cannot see. It still starts off and you still turn it on yourself.

The usual objection to online personal training is that a trainer needs to be physically there to correct you. In practice a coach watching a clean side-on camera angle sees your hip hinge more clearly than one standing next to you at the wrong angle in a busy gym.

What is genuinely lost is hands-on cueing and spotting a heavy lift. If your training depends on either, an in-person trainer is the honest answer. For everything else, what you gain is the forty minutes a day you were spending in traffic — which for most people is the difference between training three times a week and training once.