It's all done with so much more panache than I remember, when friends of my Dad's would square up to me, growling "Let's see your guard son," apparently unaware that I was six.Even the technical side of amateur boxing seems to concentrate on avoiding being hit, rather than on walloping your opponent. Holding pads which the boxers aim at, he ducks and bobs like an actor in a rap video. Occasionally, with alarming ease, he'll pat the boxer on the stomach or chin, as a way of informing him he's dropped his guard. Whereas it's unlikely that the winner of the European 200 metres breaststroke final will have done their training on a bendy thing called a "muscle-building compendium" they bought off the Shopping Channel.In between the exercises, Ray, a 64-year-old Jamaican who looks 50, teaches the technique of dodging punches. The truth is that fitness hurts.So, the club counts among its members a karate champion and a competitor in the European swimming finals, and has helped train two professional footballers. These machines, advertised by smiling models who say "Just five minutes a day of gently pushing this isometrically designed sheet of tin-foil backwards and forwards is all I need for a perfect figure," are rubbish. Then there's a session on the punch-bags, followed by an endless rounds of jumps, press-ups, and sit-ups.

Watching this activity, you realise how ridiculous is the booming hobby of pretending you can get fit with no effort. Then shadow-boxing, in which the boxers, in full regalia, dance round the ring fighting an imaginary opponent. It must be tempting, during this exercise, to relax a little as you decide that today's imaginary opponent is a four foot squirt like Ashley from Coronation Street. They talk to the boxers as mates, with great affection and not a hint of PE teacher aggression or condescension.

Which is not to say it isn't gruelling.It starts with 10 minutes of skipping. The emphasis is hardly on fighting at all, and almost entirely on fitness. Because I might have had my face punched in, but when I get home I can wash the blood off in the most dependable shower in the world."Watching John and his partner, Ray, put their lads through two hours of training, you realise how misguided is the image of amateur boxing as a haven for Cockney villains with a market-stall and a broken nose. Work perfectly, they do."Putting the emphasis on plumbing could be the way to make boxing more endearing to the public.

Imagine if every time Frank Bruno had taken a hiding, he'd said "Tonight, Britain can feel proud. "Look at these showers," he says with a contagious beam of delight "Solid. John Chambers, who helps to run it, bursts with pride as he shows you round the room, which he rebuilt with a team of volunteers. Perhaps because boxing clubs can't be reinvented in a post-modern sense, like pie-and-mash shops and Are You Being Served. When a right hook lands on your nose it hurts, even if it's done with irony. But this club, above a pub in Thornton Heath, is full of enthusiasm, and not just for thumping people.