Is hypnotherapy REALLY the secret to turning you into a gym bunny?

Lying swaddled in a blanket, I am on the floor of a dark room flickering with artificial candles.

There’s soothing spa music playing discreetly in the background as a woman with a gentle yet surprisingly firm voice instructs me to walk downstairs. Not real steps, I hasten to add, but the ‘metaphorical pathway to my subconscious’.

This is ‘commitment therapy’, a new class on offer at trendy exercise chain Gymbox in London, known for its intense workout sessions set to frantic techno tracks. Here, however, there will be no muscle-pumping or profuse sweating. Instead, I am trying something scarier: hypnosis – with the goal of making me love the gym.

‘Hypnosis works through inducing the sort of slow brain waves you normally experience when lightly asleep or dreaming,’ explains hypnotherapist Hannah Apperley. It’s an ancient technique to put willing guinea pigs into a trance-like state that leaves them open to suggestion.

By relaxing me and then ‘suggesting’ a more positive attitude to exercise, Hannah hopes to make me, a committed gym-phobe, yearn for the Lycra-clad burn.

You can see why a gym chain selling £120-a-month memberships might consider that a boon, but the notion of getting healthy through hypnosis is having a bit of a moment across the board.

Model Abbey Clancy had hypnotherapy to manage her fears about parenting, singer Adele is believed to have used a £320-a-session hypnotherapist to lose weight, and actress Reese Witherspoon has also talked about the calming benefits of hypnosis.

As for me, I frequently resolve to become a toned gym bunny but I’ve never come close. So would I like to wave a magic wand and develop some staying power? Yes. Do I believe it can work? Hmm.

My doubts grow as I enter the class and meet my fellow hypno-babies. A woman in her 20s says she wants to do yoga daily; a muscular man says it’s his dream to run a marathon; another wants to run more marathons and the guy on the mat next to me longs to lift heavier weights.

‘I hate the gym and I find working out boring,’ I tell a room of bewildered faces. ‘Can you make me love it?’

‘Yes,’ trills Hannah confidently.

My doubts grow as I enter the class and meet my fellow hypno-babies. A woman in her 20s says she wants to do yoga daily; a muscular man says it’s his dream to run a marathon

Hannah says that while ideally I’d stick it out for four to eight hypnotherapy sessions, if you really want to change, you can see dramatic results after just one.

I join the others as we lie in a circle on our backs, feet facing the wall and our heads together in the middle. We close our eyes as Hannah tells us how we commit to things every day: the things we choose to wear and eat, for example. These tiny commitments are easy, she says.

But when it comes to bigger choices, the goals we really care about, we put them on a pedestal so they feel ‘unattainable’. She invites us to imagine we’re walking down a flight of stairs while counting backwards from ten. I wish I could tell you what she said after that but I cannot, for the life of me, remember.

After 20 minutes, when we are asked to ‘return to the room’ and join the ‘sharing circle’, I feel reluctant to come back to reality. We talk over how we’re planning to act on our goals — and I tell the group I am going to work out every day. Yet I know I don’t mean it.

I join the others as we lie in a circle on our backs, feet facing the wall and our heads together in the middle. We close our eyes as Hannah tells us how we commit to things every day

Hannah spots my doubts. She asks if, instead of my vague pledge of ‘working out’, I can commit to doing ten squats every morning. ‘I could,’ I say, this time believing it.

Did I do the squats? I’m afraid to say I did not. But much to my surprise, I’ve done yoga from YouTube videos every day since the hypnotherapy, and a ten-minute ab or arm workout afterwards. And I’ve enjoyed them.

Maybe Hannah’s right about those shifting goals and the answer to my phobia is doing yoga at home (sorry Gymbox), not learning to love pumping iron in the dark… 

• gymbox.com/classes/commit ment-therapy.