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Grab the handles of a seated rowing machine, for example, and pull the weight faster or slower to move your on-screen avatar — a ball — up or down within a maze and “eat” coins as you go.

Emery arrives around 8am at Villa's Bodymoor Heath training HQ and staff using the gym at the centre are used to the sight of the manager arriving at 8.30pm after finishing at his desk, gathering details on his iPad while on the exercise bike before even making notes while using the rowing machine.

He also has a fitness room with weights, treadmill and a rowing machine, while three parakeets fly around the complex.

The atmosphere of the classes certainly did not dispel the idea that a central goal of exercise was to have a particular body shape: Adults at the gym discussed macros and the calories they were burning on the rowing machine, and swapped anecdotes about fellow gym-goers who had come in overweight but now wore size 4 Lululemons.

In the basement of his house in suburban Mamaroneck, N.Y., from which he commutes to his job in the city as chief risk officer for Natixis Americas, part of a multinational investment firm with $1.25 trillion in assets under management, he has created a miniature Ironman training facility, complete with a Vasa Swim Ergometer, a dry-land simulator that retails for $1,900 and resembles an inverted rowing machine.