I am standing in the middle of a reconditioned railway arch in south London, trying to skip. With a rope. Going by the expressions on the faces of the three adults watching me, I am failing. They aren't mocking me. They are, rather, looking at me as if I was an exhibit in a display of curios; something that shouldn't be, but quite plainly is. I get their point. Six-year-old girls can skip. Hell, six-year-old boys can probably skip. Most adults can skip, too.

But not this one. I make heavy weather of it. The rope gets snagged on my hair or tangled in my size-12 feet when I jump too late or too early. Ah yes, jumping. That's tough, too. When you are north of 17st, much as Manchester is north of London, getting airborne is not a simple matter. As you can tell from looking at me. Not only is skipping tricky, it is bloody hard work. I am drenched in sweat. It's wet-T-shirt-morning in this railway arch, but only a complete perv would be buying tickets to watch. The truth is, only one person is paying money for this experience, this grotesque torture by skipping rope. That person is me. I have hired a personal trainer and the bastard is making me skip. What's more, he's invited his two colleagues to watch.

How did it come to this? Let's go back four years to when I finally decided to tackle my weight by going down to the local gym six days a week. I lost more than 3st and took my waist down from 44in to 36in. Hurrah for me. I was asked to write about what I had done and did so uneasily because, as I said at the end of the piece, I was aware that the fat bloke I had once been was still there inside me biding his time, waiting to get out again. Well, he didn't exactly get out, but he did get a big chubby foot back in the door. Which is what happens when a sluggish metabolism and an instinct to greed meet a job that involves eating. I had dreamed of wearing 34in jeans; instead I was forced back into 38in jeans. It wasn't cataclysmic, but it was disappointing.

Part of it was circumstance. Most of the weight went back on during six months of family medical emergencies, when the gym was hardly a priority. But there was also a nasty trick played on me by my own body. I lost the weight by getting on a cross trainer for 45 minutes a day. I carried on doing that. If anything, I increased the intensity. In training language I maxed out the machine, worked it on level 25. Out of 25. Get me! The problem is that the human body is cruel. It adapts. It learns. It didn't matter that I was burning 1,000 calories a session. My body was so used to it that the exercise was no longer working.

I needed something else, and that something was a bright, cheerful, unreasonably healthy 28-year-old from Barnes called Jonny Cook, with a degree from Loughborough, a winning smile, a neat line in encouragement and a recondition-ed railway arch five minutes' walk from my house. He and his half-brother Neil had recently set up Community Circuits (communitycircuits.com), a company offering group training sessions to the age-conscious middle classes of my corner of south London. But they were also there for one-to-ones. Maybe he was the answer.

Hiring Jonny was not an easy decision. Sporty people make me anxious. I fear I will never measure up. There are things I am good at; running, jumping and skipping are not among them. What would he think of me? On the plus side, however, there was privacy. In the open gym near my house people noticed me sweating like the monsoon had hit. I have little patience for people who complain about the attention that comes from being on telly. Nobody is forcing me to be on The One Show, and if I don't like being on the box I can go find alternative employment. Still, when somebody tweeted that they'd just seen me on the cross trainer "looking like a waxed Wookie giving it stax", I think I could be forgiven for rolling my eyes a little and running away. Jonny was the solution.

He was also a shock. On day one I told him I thought I was fit. He told me, very sweetly, with an open, explaining face I would come to know, that I was fit for the cross trainer, and that wasn't the same thing at all. He set about proving it by testing me with a set of exercises I had never dreamed of doing before. Some of them – star jumps, simple squats, your arse over your heels as you bend your knees – were pretty banal. Some, like melon smashers – hop from foot to foot and mime smashing a medicine ball against your knee as it comes up – felt a little silly. Others were simply cruel. I met the burpee for the first time: bend down, touch the floor, kick the feet out and back again and then jump up. Twenty times. Oh God. We did ab crunches, Turkish get-ups, side-to-sides, 123 goes. We did dips, V-sits and bicep curls. We did a whole bunch of things. And quickly I discovered Jonny was right: I was not fit. Or at least not in the way I thought I was. My work-out on the cross trainer might leave me sweaty and breathless, but this was something else entirely. This was "I'm going to puke" exhaustion. This was kill-me-now draining. It was awful.

He made up for it all by introducing me to boxing. I love boxing. This is odd, because I also hate boxing. Living down in Brixton I know full well that boxing clubs have done amazing things to divert kids from the challenges of the streets; that some of the greatest unsung heroes of our most deprived communities are the battered ex-pros running boxing clubs. But I still think two men beating 10 tons of crap out of each other until their cheeks bleed is horrible. And yet, now, I am at my happiest in the railway arch with gloves on and Jonny in front of me with the pads. I doubt I could ever do any damage to anyone; I wouldn't want to. But there is something thrilling about hitting stuff. Especially if the stuff is bright, bushy-tailed Jonny and he has been making me do burpees. The bastard usually has.

That's the thing. I know I have to do what he says. If this process is going to work, if it's going to be worth the money – it costs £30 an hour if bought in blocks of 20, which isn't cheap but is good value – I have to commit to it. Early on as I trudged towards sessions, I would find the thought of what was to come gut-churning. On a couple of occasions I almost turned back. But then I realised I was thinking about it the wrong way. All I had to do was the next thing he told me to do. If he told me to run up and down the room 10 times I would, and then wait for instruction. If he told me to do press-ups – at first I could barely do three in a row; now I can manage 20 or more – I would. This pathological control freak would simply have to cede control.

I try to see Jonny at least twice a week and often three times, and there has been an impact. I am fitter. Much fitter. He tests me on a specific set of exercises from time to time, and on most of them I am 50% up on where I was. He has a great line in patter, and even when we both know I've been crap, he'll come up with some reason for why I shouldn't be down on myself. That alone is worth paying for. Am I thinner? Well no, not yet, though I am rather more toned. I'm definitely not fatter, which is a good thing.

And the skipping? Since the day Jonny asked Neil and their colleague Anne to diagnose the problem by watching me skip there has been a little improvement. Most of the time I don't get beyond three or four in a row, especially when I'm trashed at the end of a session. What little co-ordination I have fails me. Every now and then I manage 15 in a row. Once I got to 30. And then on the day the photographer came to capture my glorious sweatiness for this article, I somehow pulled off 42. For a six-year-old girl, that would be nothing. In playgrounds across the land they are doing more than 42 every playtime. But for this middle-aged man with big hair and elephant seals for thighs, it's a major achievement. So now I have a goal. I'm aiming at 50. Wish me luck. A healthy 2012 depends upon it.

Chinese whispers. Learning Mandarin by Viv Groskop

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spends an hour a day learning it. The actress Mira Sorvino speaks it fluently. Newsnight's Emily Maitlis claims hers is "a bit ropey". Who wouldn't want to speak Mandarin Chinese? It's the language of a fifth of the world's population. And if 1.3 billion people have mastered it, come on, how hard can it be?

I have always wanted to speak Chinese and 2012 is my chance. One of my best friends was recently posted to Beijing and I have booked a flight to visit her in April. It's my first trip to China. I am excited. I am enthusiastic. And I will attempt to speak Chinese come what may, however idiotic and overambitious a goal this is. Being the prattish westerner is one of the things I am looking forward to most. That and ordering crispy duck, ideally in perfect Chinese. (Although I have heard they don't really serve Chinese takeaway-type food in China. Worrying.)

Most thrilling of all, this trip finally gives me an excuse to fulfil another lifelong ambition: to embark on a Michel Thomas course. Michel Thomas is known as one of the greatest linguists of all time, "the language teacher to the stars" (Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Emma Thompson were all pupils of his, paying as much as £18,000 for a five-day session). Stephen Fry describes Thomas's method as "a unique and perfectly brilliant way of teaching languages". As part of a television experiment in 1997, he taught a group of sixth-formers who knew no French at all to a level of near-fluency in five days.

Thomas's method is all about one-on-one tuition. But here's the problem. He died six years ago at the age of 90, having refused to explain his method properly to anyone. Nonetheless the CD empire he left behind is thriving, with more than 2m copies sold. You can now buy them as an app, too (in French, German, Italian and Spanish). The Chinese app launches in January. This, surely, is a sign. Michel Thomas can speak to me from beyond the grave through my iPhone.

I start by picking up the 10-hour CD course for £50 on Amazon. (Hooray. I have already saved £17,950.) It turns out to be narrated by Harold Goodman, a doctor who spent 10 years working alongside Michel Thomas and studying his techniques, and who has come as close as anyone to discovering his secrets. Goodman summarises it: "Don't try to memorise, or repeat anything. Don't try to learn. Just ride the train. The train is on the track."

It sounds close to hypnosis. Or just weird. (I speak to Goodman later over the phone and he assures me it is not hypnosis.) Strangely, though, it works. Within half an hour I have learned the legendarily difficult four "tones" of Chinese simply by copying Harold's sing-song intonation and the strange hand gestures he describes (you learn to move your hand as you speak to encourage you to remember the tone). This is seriously impressive. By the end of the first CD I can already say a few phrases: "Are you busy? I'm busy." "I'm English. She's Chinese."

Armed with this knowledge, I call Fuchsia Dunlop. A British-born chef and author of the award-winning memoir Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, she is the only fluent Mandarin speaker I know. I try to shout down the phone at her in Chinese: "I'm English!" (In Chinese you say literally: "I be brave kingdom person.") She listens intently, pauses and then says: "Hmm. I'm just getting 'person'."

Dunlop explains that the Michel Thomas course is just teaching me spoken pinyin, the official system for transcribing Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. Pinyin literally means "spelled sound". (I can't claim to have learned the original characters, as all I'm picking up are sounds which I "see" in my mind in English: like "war" – "I", "knee" – "you", "kosher" in a Liverpool accent – "but".) She explains that it would take a lot more effort to learn the written characters and to move towards being able to read and write Chinese. "You can learn spoken to a basic level without the characters," she explains, "But it doesn't get you very far. You can learn basic tourist Chinese just using pinyin, but you can't develop any level of sophistication."

"You have to decide what you want to get out of it," she adds. "If you want to show goodwill on a trip to China and make simple requests" – yes, that's exactly what I want – "then pinyin will get you there. It depends how intensively you study, but after a year of weekly evening classes, I could have a few basic conversations." A year? I have four months – although the train is on the track, so maybe my journey will be faster.

On the plus side, Dunlop says, Chinese is "pretty difficult and few foreigners learn it. So even if you turn up and just say ni hao [a basic greeting], they will think you are a genius." She describes her own study of Chinese as a "potentially infinite project" which never really gets any easier.

The following week Dunlop lines up one of her colleagues at a Chinese restaurant in Soho to be my guinea pig. She is a menu consultant at Bashan: most of the kitchen staff don't speak any English. This will be the first time I have spoken Chinese to anyone. I have learned most of my Chinese sitting in the Sainsbury's car park for two hours at a time. You'd be surprised how many people go and sit in their cars in supermarket car parks. Maybe they're all doing Michel Thomas courses.

I start with the first things I learned, spinning them out into conversational pieces, or as close as I can get. "I am English. Are you Chinese?" Yap Koi Lee, the restaurant's supervisor, repeats it back, checking that he understood me. This is just as well, as I would probably not understand any potential answer. I am emboldened. "I am English! I am busy!" Oh dear. But Yap Koi Lee looks on encouragingly. "They are not Chinese," I say with some force, gesturing to some other people in the restaurant. "And they are not American." (American is "beautiful kingdom person".)

Then a brainwave hits me. I can make a joke. "I would like to be American," I say in a sad voice. Yap Koi Lee laughs. I can make jokes in Chinese! "We would all like to be American," I add, with some feeling. I have made a profound, semi-ironic philosophical statement in Chinese! (Sort of.)

Our conversation is extremely limited. It's not really a conversation. It's just me barking out random sentences. "I would like to read a book. Would you like to read a book?" (He looks too frightened to disagree with me.) "She would not like to read a book." I gesture dismissively to the photographer, whom I have just labelled illiterate. "But she is a good person," I add generously.

My vocabulary is starting to run out. "Hello. How are you? I'm English!" I ramble, slightly late in the day. "They are all American!" Yap Koi Lee looks around, slightly confused. (There are still no Americans present.) There are a few words where my pronunciation is weak and the poor man obviously can't make head nor tail of what I'm trying to say. Zhen (person) is a tricky one. As is the verb "to be", which sounds like a small, snarling dog with an underbite trying to say "shhh".

Eventually I release him from the torture of my repetitive, demented, pro-American, book-obsessed rant. He smiles and says in English: "Not bad. But Fuchsia speaks Chinese better than you." For her sake I should bloody well hope so. Never mind. If I don't get to "crispy duck" by April, I'll just have to busk it. No sweat. I be brave kingdom person.

Primp yourself

From dog-grooming courses to night riding and learning Gothic hip hop, 2012 could be your year to shine

Forget ballroom and street dance, it's all Gothic hip hop and Belly-Bolly Fusion this year. For more on the latest trends and classes, plus video tutorials, visit moveitdance.co.uk

The Raymond Blanc cookery school at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons is introducing a new one-day fish-cookery course in 2012. It costs £350 per person and includes lots of lovely eating, too (manoir.com)

Throughout January, London dance and fitness studio Frame (moveyourframe.com) is running detox yoga workshops each weekend, as well as Introduction to Raw Food workshops on 14 January and 11 February with Better Raw

Fed up with Fido looking like a scruffbag? Learn how to pamper your pooches to perfection at Delights Grooming in Chiswick (delightsgroomingcourses.co.uk)

Feel like you need to do more than watch the Olympics on the telly? Join the Gold Challenge (goldchallenge.org) and you can train in one of a host of Olympic and Paralympic sports and raise money into the bargain

Listen up, surfers! Get to grips with hand planing, a "turbo-charged version" of body-surfing, at the Extreme Academy in North Cornwall. More details at watergatebay.co.uk

Want to combine writing a novel with chilling out in Ibiza in May? Check out createescapes.com and get sound advice from publishing professionals and novelists, including Carol Birch

Time to stretch your legs and start running. For training tips, events for all levels, and articles, go to therunningbug.co.uk. For more advanced athletes, try running as nature intended and go barefoot (therunningbarefoot.com)

Cyclists, worried about crowded streets? Why not go riding at night? Many local clubs now organise regular night rides, or go to bike-events.com for details of national events

Forget swimming baths that reek of chlorine: take the plunge and go wild swimming. For events, details and inspiration, go to outdoorswimmingsociety.com

At the Gaia House Silent Meditation Retreat in Devon, you'll be asked to hand in your phone at reception so you can get in touch with your inner zen on a residential course (gaiahouse.co.uk)

Learn the fine art of turntablism in classes taught in small groups. Perfect whether you are a DJing newbie or you'd just like to brush up on some skills (pointblanklondon.com)

Impress your friends by turning into Will Hutton. The LSE runs a summer school to introduce you to recent developments in macroeconomics. For details, go to lse.ac.uk

Learn how to handle your negative feelings with More To Life (moretolife.org), a life-training organisation that runs weekend courses throughout the year. The next one is in London on 27-29 January

Get busy with the cucumber sandwiches and scones and host a Sunday afternoon tea party for a group of local elderly people. To sign up, go to contact-the-elderly.org.uk

Don't despair in solitude when you're coaxing your runner beans along: growington.com puts home growers, urban farmers and allotment enthusiasts in touch with one another to swap tips and produce. It also features in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new crowd-funding platform, peoplefund.it

The Tree Council needs you! Become a tree warden, gather seeds or simply go for a wander during Walk in the Woods month in May (treecouncil.org.uk)

Wondering what to do next? The two-day Crossroads retreat helps anyone facing major life changes. They take place at the Benedictine monastery, Turvey Abbey, but are not faith based. £250, crossroadsretreats.co.uk