Body Combat was turning me into a rockhopper penguin. So I tried this hair gel

At the end of a hard gym class, someone usually reaches for their phone. We’re red-faced and sweaty, the studio floor is damp and there’s usually someone slouched against a wall trying to recover. We’ve just spent the best part of an hour punching, kicking and jumping ourselves into exhaustion, so naturally this is the moment we decide we should all be photographed.

This was where I had a problem. I could arrive at Body Combat with my hair looking perfectly respectable and emerge less than an hour later resembling a rockhopper penguin. Short pieces would be sticking out from either side of my head, while the sections I’d carefully twisted back had gradually worked themselves free. Everyone else seemed to have normal post-workout hair, but not me.

I wasn’t expecting to emerge from HIIT looking blow-dried, I just wanted my hair to remain roughly where I’d put it.

I needed something that could cope with sweat, punches, kicks, jumps and repeated head movement without it giving up halfway through the class. If it could survive all of that and still leave my hair looking roughly like the hairstyle I’d arrived with, I was interested.

There is a difference between a hair product keeping everything in place while I’m wandering around doing the shopping, or sitting at my desk, and asking it to survive Body Combat. Once I’m hot, my scalp is sweaty and my head is moving constantly, those shorter hairs around my face seem to regard it as their cue to make a bid for freedom.

There is, of course, a very obvious solution to keeping your hair out of your face while punching: a French plait. Unfortunately, despite reaching the grand old age of 50, holding down a career and mastering several pieces of gym equipment that initially looked capable of killing me, I still can’t French plait my own hair.

I have watched the YouTube tutorials, so I understand perfectly well what is supposed to happen. Then my hands disappear behind my head and all communication between my brain and fingers seems to stop. Three sections become four, I lose one completely and another somehow acquires half the hair from the wrong side of my head. Five minutes later I’m holding something that looks less like a French plait and more like a sailor’s knot.

So I cheat and I divide my medium-length hair into sections and twist them backwards into my own rudimentary approximation of plaits. From the front, they look quite convincing, but please don’t inspect the back. For ordinary life they’re fine, but Body Combat has other ideas.

Sweat loosens the shorter hairs around my face, jumping starts shaking everything free and somewhere between the jabs and roundhouse kicks I begin sprouting those two distinctive tufts at the sides. Hair grips weren’t solving it and pulling everything tighter was giving me a headache.

Which is how I found myself buying a tube of got2b Glued Ultra Styling Hair Gel. There is something reassuringly unsubtle about the name. The 150ml tube was £5.50 at Boots when I checked, and the product promised super-strong hold for up to 72 hours. That sounded a lot more ambitious than anything I had planned for it.

Seventy-two hours? Pet, I only needed you to survive Body Combat.

Rather than use it once, take a post-class photograph and declare the rockhopper problem solved, I kept testing it for a month. That meant repeated Body Combat and HIIT classes, plenty of sweat, jumping, punching and kicking, and plenty of opportunities for those shorter hairs to escape. This was less a beauty test and more an endurance experiment.

The first thing I discovered was not to get carried away with it. For my medium-length hair, one small squidge is enough. I work it through the sections I’m going to twist and then smooth a little over the shorter hairs around the sides of my head, because experience has taught me that they will be the first ones to make a run for it.

The gel is clear and looks disconcertingly like actual glue. It goes through my hair fairly smoothly, though, and I don’t need to plaster my head in the stuff to get everything into place. I’d initially assumed serious hold might require half a tube, but a little genuinely does go a long way.

My hands are another matter as they’re sticky afterwards and need washing immediately, so this is not a product I apply and then absent-mindedly pick up my phone, water bottle or car keys. Still, when something has the word Glued written across the tube, I can hardly complain that nobody warned me.

Once my hair is twisted back, it feels secure and the only question was whether it would stay that way once I started sweating.

If you genuinely want to test the hold of a hair gel, I recommend subjecting it to Body Combat. Within minutes I’m warm, then properly sweating, and soon we’re punching, kicking and jumping around the studio while I attempt to remember the combination and, on a good day, which leg everybody else appears to be using.

Normally this is when my hairstyle begins to change. The shorter hairs get damp first, then the twists start loosening and eventually those familiar little blonde frizzy sprouts appear at either side of my head.

With got2b Glued in, they didn’t.

The twists stayed put and the shorter hairs around my face remained under much better control. More importantly, this wasn’t one unusually successful class. I kept using the gel over the course of a month and the same thing kept happening.

By the end of Body Combat I might be red-faced and desperately in need of my water bottle, but my hair still looked like the hairstyle I had arrived with. When somebody reached for the phone for the group selfie, I no longer had to hide away at the back of the crowd. I was front and centre!

For me, that’s far more useful than knowing whether a styling gel can technically hold my hair for 72 hours. I don’t need three days, I need it to survive the hour when I’m asking the most of it, and it did.

There was always going to be a catch. You can’t spend a month celebrating the fact that a product absolutely refuses to let go of your hair and then be surprised when, after class, it still refuses to let go of your hair.

But somehow I was.

Undoing my twists after Body Combat didn’t return my hair to its pre-gel state. The product remained very much in place and my hair still felt set where I’d applied it. Getting everything back to normal took a proper wash.

After a really sweaty Body Combat or HIIT class, that isn’t much of a hardship because I’m heading for the shower anyway. But it does affect when I choose to use it. If I’m doing a hard session and know I’ll be washing my hair afterwards, brilliant. But if I’m squeezing in a gentler workout, planning to take my hair down and then go somewhere looking vaguely presentable, I’d think twice.

This is not, in my experience, a product that quietly disappears once its work is done.

There was one other thing I noticed during my month-long experiment. If I left the gel in after a sweaty class and allowed my hair to dry, I sometimes noticed a little white, dandruff-like residue.

I wasn’t applying the gel to my hair and then spending the day in controlled conditions though. I was getting hot, sweating heavily and allowing the combination of product and sweat to dry again. What happened afterwards was therefore just as relevant to me as whether my twists survived the class itself.

That is really the point of The Saffron Experiment. I’m less interested in what something is supposed to do in perfect conditions than what happens when I actually use it. In my hair, under my particular combination of product, sweat and exercise, I occasionally saw some white residue.

Rock-solid workout hold and a little goes a long way. It loses only a point because that impressive staying power also makes it harder to remove, and I occasionally noticed a little white residue after a sweaty class.

Yes, because for the ridiculously specific Body Combat problem that sent me looking for it, it works.

I’m not testing whether it can produce an elaborate hairstyle, and I’m not the woman to conduct a French-plaiting experiment. I don’t need 72-hour hair or an elaborate slicked-back bun. I just need my homemade not-quite-plaits to survive an hour of me throwing punches at thin air without my hair turning me into a rockhopper penguin.

But the hold is rock solid.

When you reach midlife, you accept that not every problem takes self-improvement. A few years ago, I might have decided the answer was to watch more tutorials, practise and finally learn to French plait properly. I’d probably have got annoyed with myself and added a completely unnecessary skill to the list of things I apparently should know how to do. At 50, it’s simpler.

I bought the gel.

I bought got2b Glued myself. This article is not sponsored and Schwarzkopf had no involvement in the review. Product details and prices were correct when checked and may change.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.