Having represented Scotland and Great Britain at judo on many occasions, winning the silver medal at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, Jenni now runs Fit4 group exercise and personal training at Putton Mill, near Duns.

Bruce runs the Putton Mill Fitness Centre and tutors on gym instructor and personal trainer courses for YMCA Fitness Industry Training.

This week, Jenni and Bruce share alternatives to running, cycling or swimming to improve fitness, and offer fitness advice to help with the everyday lives of 'ordinary' people in the Borders and north Northumberland:

What is Fitness?

Fitness means different things to different people, but if you ask someone what it means to be fit the answer typically involves cardiovascular or aerobic fitness.

That's why, when people decide to 'get fit' they usually go running, cycling or swimming. It certainly includes cardiovascular fitness, but it also includes muscular strength (the ability to lift heavy things), muscular endurance (the ability to lift light things lots of times), flexibility and various motor skills such as balance, coordination and speed.

Although some facets of fitness are more important than others in terms of both everyday functionality and sports performance, it is important for most people to think broadly when improving their fitness, doing a variety of resistance, cardiovascular, flexibility and motor skills training. However, time constraints often mean choosing which to work on, so what should you spend your time doing?

It may not be obvious at first, but the most useful is almost certainly strength which means that the standard choice of run, cycle or swim is perhaps not the best one as this type of training will not improve strength.

Improving your strength increases the ease of performing everyday tasks such as lifting your children and grandchildren, carrying heavy shopping, moving furniture, changing car wheels and lifting luggage onto the car roof, while reducing the chance of injury when performing these tasks.

Strength training is also considered the best way to counter osteoporosis, a serious bone disease which as many as 50 per cent of women and 20 per cent of men will suffer from; it will shape your body in a way that aerobic training will never do; it also beats aerobic training as an effective modality for fat loss; and it is effective in preventing falls.

If carried out at an appropriate intensity, strength training can also provide a level of aerobic fitness which is more than adequate for most people.

Strength training involves lifting weights, which seems to have received a bad press for many years, but most of the accusations thrown at weight training couldn't be further from the truth. Contrary to popular belief, it will not make women become large and muscular (or most men for that matter). Many of the women you see in muscle magazines have been on more than a good training programme!

Nor is it likely to cause injury; properly performed weight lifting has an extremely low injury rate and is more likely to strengthen your joints than damage them. Under qualified supervision, weight training can also be beneficial and rewarding for children.

Let's not forget the other facets of fitness though.

Flexibility is also useful in terms of day to day activities, as long as you build strength (there it is again!) in your new found range of movement or you might actually be setting yourself up for injury problems. Stretching is the generally accepted way of doing this and there are several classes which aim to improve flexibility. Aerobic capacity beyond a basic level is not particularly useful in terms of performing daily activities but this type of training can help combat cardiovascular disease and, although we sometimes forget it, there's more to exercise than just looking better!

Aerobic exercise has been shown to reduce blood pressure, be beneficial in diabetes management and improve cholesterol profile, although it should be noted that the link between cholesterol and heart disease is now being brought into question. To repeat an earlier statement though, you can get aerobic benefits from weight training done at the correct intensity and utilising appropriate exercises, whereas you can't get strength benefits from aerobic activities. So it comes back to the fact that if you only have time to do one thing then lift weights and you can be sure you will feel, look and perform better.