Your firstsession,minute by minute

There are twelve spaces on the yard and two of them are painted FORGE, closest to the door. They are for first sessions. If both are taken, the whole yard is free after 18:00 and there is on-street parking on Alma Street that is free on Sundays.

If you are coming by tram, Shalesmoor is a six-minute walk. Turn right out of the stop and follow the road down.

Unit 6. The big roller door is a delivery door and it is usually shut — you want the normal door to the left of it, with the black handle. It is unlocked from fifteen minutes before every session.

Someone will say your name. Not as a sales technique: there are twelve people in the class and the coach has your name written on the whiteboard before you arrive, because they knew you were coming.

Shelf on the right as you come in, six feet of it. No lockers, no padlocks, no pound coin. Nothing has ever gone missing but we will say plainly that it is an open shelf.

Your phone can stay in your pocket. Nobody minds. People check the time, text somebody they are meeting after, put a song on. It is not that kind of gym.

Two changing rooms, two showers, two toilets, all of them lockable and all of them cleaned every morning. There is a bench, hooks, and a mirror that is not in the main room.

About half of people come already changed and walk straight through. Both are completely normal. Trainers with a flat sole are better than running shoes, but if all you own is running shoes, wear the running shoes.

A coach takes you round the room. It genuinely takes about four minutes because the room is not big: racks and platforms along the long wall, rowers and bikes at the far end, dumbbells and kettlebells on the short wall, chalk bowl by the platforms.

They will show you the toilets, the water, where the bin is, and which rack is yours for the hour. Then they will ask you two questions — anything that hurts, and whether you have lifted before — and write the answers down.

Filtered tap on the wall between the rowers and the changing rooms. There is a stack of paper cups next to it if you have not brought a bottle.

There is no juice bar, no shakes, no supplements for sale. There is a kettle and a jar of instant coffee that belongs to everybody.

Eight minutes, led from the front, everybody doing the same thing at the same time. Bike or row for three minutes, then hips, ankles and shoulders. It is deliberately easy and nobody is out of breath at the end of it.

This is the part of the hour where you are least on your own, which is exactly why it is here rather than at the end.

Squat, hinge, press. Five to eight reps of each with nothing on the bar, while the coach stands next to you and changes one thing at a time. Not five things. One.

Everyone in the room started here, including the person nearest you who is currently moving something that looks alarming.

Small jumps. The coach decides, not you, and the decision is deliberately conservative — the aim of the first hour is to find out what you can do well, not what you can do at all.

You will almost certainly finish the session thinking you could have done more. That is on purpose. It is the difference between coming back on Thursday and not being able to sit down on Thursday.

Three or four sets of the main lift with a couple of minutes between them, on your own rack, at your own weight. The rest of the class is doing the same session at their own numbers. Nobody is racing anybody.

The coach will be with you for most of this and will leave you alone for some of it, which is the point — you are learning to run a set yourself, not being supervised through one.

Somewhere around here you will be breathing harder than you expected from something that looked slow, and one of the lifts will feel clumsy in a way that is irritating rather than painful.

This is normal and it is not a verdict on you. Coordination arrives before strength does, and it usually arrives in the third or fourth week.

Bike, row, or carry something from one end of the room to the other. Four minutes, scaled to whatever you have got left. On a first session the coach will usually make it shorter than everyone else is doing.

This is the only part of the hour that is meant to be uncomfortable, and it is four minutes long.

Everyone strips their own bar and racks their own plates. Plates go back in weight order, bars go on the wall, chalk gets swept. It takes three minutes and it is the reason the room looks like it does when you arrive.

On your first session somebody will show you where things live rather than watch you work it out.

Two minutes at the whiteboard. What you lifted, what your bar weighed, what you said hurt, and what to start with next time. Paper card in a box file, filed under your first name.

You get told what is on it. There is no assessment, no score, no body composition scan, and nothing that gets emailed to you as a PDF later.

Somebody will say see you next week and mean it as a pleasantry rather than a commitment. If you want to book another session you can do it there and then, and if you do not, nobody will follow you to the door.

Nobody has asked you to sign anything. There is no form at the end of the free session, no card details taken, no direct debit set up "just to hold the slot". You can go home and think about it, and you will get one phone call and no more.