The female Jean Claude Van Damme...Not

Every Friday lunchtime, a random team of fit and unfit people gather in a tiny boxing studio on Stanley Street, Central to kick and box at each other.

There are only a handful of girls who participate in this exercise. Three to be exact. The reason is (as a girl I am justified in saying this, so there) those girls who do come along for a trial usually come with the assumption that it's another gym bunny aerobics class, where you can wear makeup and look pretty without breaking into a sweat, and then they get the shock of their lives. They get shocked at the fact that we wear real boxing gloves and that we punch real sandbags and each other. They usually also get punched in the face by accident (OK, so I did that, once. But come on. It was an accident). They usually never come back. But the ones who do keep coming back every week for an hour of "secret training" as our French instructor calls it (that's the way he pronounces 'circuit'), they don't hold back.

No. We are the ones who punch so hard and with so much force that we can barely hold the face lotion without trembling afterwards (ever tried applying lippy with a trembling finger? It's hard). We are the ones who know exactly how to do a twirly kick (I can't remember the real name) without falling over - I think the men find it really hard to keep their balance). We are the ones who kick until our shins are bruised, our thighs are trembling and we have to wear heels on stairs. We also, um, break into a fair amount of unsightly sweat. We get teamed up with men and we punch hard, they punch hard and...I would like to say we punch back, but actually we usually fall straight back into the wall at the sheer force. But hey, we can't do everything right at once.

I think the instructor finds it quite amusing that we try so hard. Just you wait. One of these days, we are going to break into the film world... J., E. and I will become the next Charlie's Angels. Yeah.