IT may not surprise you to learn that about half the number of people who join a gym or start an exercise regime drop out, sometimes after only a few weeks or months.

What is surprising, perhaps shocking, is that about half of people with potentially serious heart problems also drop out, though their life may depend on exercise.

Motivation and confidence are important when it comes to exercise, particularly for the older generation, but increasingly for what is often dubbed ‘the PlayStation generation’ or “the Facebook generation”, there are many technological distractions that can prevent a person from taking exercise, not to mention people working in deskbound jobs or spending too much time on the sofa at home or behind the wheel of a car.

But the main problem is not reaching young people – it is older people who may have health problems and would reap the rewards of regular exercise, both supervised and unsupervised.

Adam Miles, manager in charge of fitness and wellbeing at Nuffield Health, a fitness centre in Perdiswell, off Droitwich Road, Worcester, says drawing in women over the age of 50 remains a major hurdle for many gyms and fitness centres even though as many as two out of three of them are estimated to be overweight.

He said: “A lot of the people we want to encourage to get fit have low self-esteem and are not confident enough to use a gym. One of the questions is, how do you attract people in order to help them? This is not just about getting people on a treadmill – it’s about giving them a better quality of life. I would like to see more people using gyms and fitness centres who are over 50 and have medical conditions. We are trying to create courses and programmes which do not directly use the gym to build up their confidence in smaller classes. Hopefully, within 12 weeks they will want to use the gym regularly.”

Steve Cooper, who runs cardiac rehabilitation classes to help people recover after a heart attack or to prevent people suffering one in the first place, has formed a partnership with Nuffield Health to try and reach a wider group of people who can benefit from exercise. He said: “Fifty per cent of people who start an exercise regime drop out. That’s exactly the same as the population with cardiac problems. They have had a major, life-threatening event and they still drop out of classes. One of the reasons I became involved was to give people more confidence. You would be surprised how much people gain in confidence when they come to me.

“They can be anxious to begin with and lacking in self-esteem. Within two to three weeks or a month, they are different people. A number of people who have come to me have never exercised in their life and have told me ‘I never realised how much I would enjoy it’. They think it is some instructor saying ‘come on!’”

Adam believes younger people are also less inclined to push themselves and reap the long-term rewards of regular exercise. He said: “People are less inclined to push themselves now. When you start to push children and young people they say ‘that’s enough of that’. The PlayStation generation has now become the Facebook generation. Many of them are on social networking websites all the time instead of exercising.”

Steve says he has noticed that people coming to him for help tend to be younger. He said: “The people who come to see me in the future will be a lot younger than the ones coming to see me now. I have some people in cardiac rehabilitation at the age of 28.”

The rise of obesity is reflected in statistics supplied by NHS Worcestershire which show that one in 12 people were obese 30 years ago when now it is one in four. The prevalence of obesity has effectively trebled since the late 1970s, caused by a series of factors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, genetics, poverty and poor education.

If people know what is good for them and what is not, how many units of alcohol it is safe to drink each week, what a balanced diet consists of and what is a sensible level of exercise, it follows that they are likely to be healthier.

Steve is keen to support this central premise. Ideally, health care is about primary prevention – stopping someone suffering a cardiac arrest or other health problem – rather than secondary prevention which is providing rehabilitation after the event.

This is why many gyms and fitness organisations, including Nuffield Health, Britain’s largest healthcare charity, now provide a far wider range of services than a traditional gym.

Nuffield in Worcester also offers health checks, fitness assessments, information on healthy diet and healthy lifestyle, blood glucose, cholesterol and bone density testing and even flu vaccines.

Leaders are even looking at bringing on board a GP.

Steve began a sports degree in 2005 but discovered an interest in exercise for health rather than sports training to become a British Association for Cardiac Rehabilitation (BACR) instructor.

He works part-time for the NHS as a fitness instructor and in the community, running classes for individuals who have been through the hospital cardiac rehab programme and wish to continue exercising.

He now runs his Fit-Heart classes at Lansdowne Crescent church hall in Malvern, Evesham Rowing Club, the University of Worcester and Marina Court in Tewkesbury.

Steve has now launched a new weekly class at Nuffield Health which will start today at 4.45pm.

Exercise classes are of a circuit style and designed so individuals can exercise at their own level. For more information visit fitheart.co.uk or call Steve on 07973 37786.