Mike Richards:

At 5'10, 15.5 stone is just too heavy, but year-by-year those pounds creep on and once they're there, they're just so hard to loose. For me, despite 35 years of regularly sweating away in gyms or pounding the streets, I've just always been on the heavy side. With my 50th approaching far too rapidly, I just had to admit to myself I was fat and that was that, and all my clothes from the slimmer younger me went off to the charity shops.

Until I hit 38, I kept my weight in control pretty well, but then I slipped a disc in my lower back and spent the best part of a year unable to do anything as strenuous as tie my shoelaces. Half a dozen lumbar punctures and a couple of nerve blocks did little to help for more than a day or two each time, and my eventual discectomy didn't go too well. Two weeks after the operation I was back in hospital on morphine to control the white light pain of a very inflamed spine. Though things gradually got better, for the next ten years it wasn't a question of whether my back hurt or not each day, just of how much it would hurt. And though I spent hours exercising and stretching each week, my weight just went up and up - from twelve stone when I slipped my disc to nearly sixteen stone after those Christmas indulgences.

Then early last year, I bought a very battered and bruised old warhorse of a Concept2 from a local gym, and stuck it in our spare bedroom. Pretty much every morning I'd just put some music and have a nice, meditative a little row - not much, just twenty minutes or so each day.

I'd used a Concept2 once or twice a week at gyms for years and always enjoyed the feel of it, but never spent more than ten minutes or so on one, because so many people had told me rowing was bad for your back, and that if you've got a back injury you really shouldn't row.

But I didn't find that at all - rather, as I rowed a little each day my back started feeling better. Over the ten years of back pain, I'd become a bit lopsided as I always stood favouring one side to help ease the pain, and was always rather stiff around my lumbar region. But the rowing really seemed to help to balance me out. Over the weeks of rowing, I gradually became less imbalanced and my back started to feel more comfortable. I remember seeing an advert somewhere that had said "just move more", and I thought, that's right, isn't it, I'll just move more... For me, the regular movement of rowing every day really did help my back loosen up and become more balanced. Over the next few months, my back pain gradually just melted away. For the first time in ten years, I'm no longer in pain each day.

Not only that, without any real effort, the pounds started coming off too. An extra three or four hundred calories a day of morning exercise, twinned with just being a little more conscious about my eating, just gradually slimmed me down. Nothing drastic at all, but with dropping a pound or so each week for a year, off came fifty pounds. From 15.5 stone, I'm now comfortably below 12 stone and seem to be quite happily staying there, eating pretty much whatever I want.

What has helped along the way - well first and foremost the Concept2 rowing machine itself I think is a really tremendous piece of kit. Battered and bruised as my first machine is - it must be twenty years old - I've never had a problem with it. Rusty and flaking it may be, but it works just fine, day in, day out. But some other things have helped too.

Discovering the Concept2 website, with training plans and online log book has been invaluable. I had never before kept a record of what my daily exercise, nor worked to a set program - but I found that printing off a program to improve my 2k times and by keeping a log of my daily rows really did help motivate me to get fitter and improve my performance. In the first instance seeing how slow I was compared to other people on line was a bit of a downer - but I soon overcame that and found it very motivating to see myself gradually creeping up the performance rankings - especially once I dropped down into the lightweight category, which gives me a great reason for staying below 175 pounds!

Joining a virtual team - in my case Age Without Limits - has been a wonderful motivator too and has helped me to feel part of a wider community. Participating with them in the regular challenges set by Concept2 has been good fun, and really has made me do more than I otherwise would. Having completed a marathon for one of the challenges earlier this year, with the Fall challenge looming, I fancied having a go at a longer row just to see what it would be like. To help motivate me, my darling wife very kindly bought me a brand new Concept2 model D with PM3 monitor, which I inaugurated with a 24-hour row. Well, OK it was really only an 18-hour row, as after that I just did the few metres each hour needed to qualify as a 24-hour row, but none the less twenty four hours later, with only one small blister, I'd rowed just over 200km. Nothing like the monster distances some of you row, for me it was an achievement to feel proud of and something I would never have thought possible a year ago, after back surgery and 10 years of chronic pain.

So, all in all, what's my Concept2 experience been? Quite simply, for me, it has been life changing. Within a year, Im fifty pounds lighter, I've lost eight inches off my waist, I feel fitter and healthier than I have for years. I may be fifty in a few months, but I feel like a young man again - my blood pressure has dropped to 100 over 60, my resting pulse is below 50 - and most of all, my back pain has gone. And though even yesterday my chiropractor told me I shouldn't row because "rowing's bad for your back", I have to say that just hasn't been my experience. I feel so much better for those few minutes each day on my Concept2 - and as I go through my middle years, as the poster said, I'm going to carry on and "just move more"!