Fitness & Thinking's next step
Better late than never...
‘ey up! How’s your week going?
Mine started with a flight from paradisiacal Palma following a weekend of reviewing Primavera Sound in Barcelona and will culminate in the biggest Sunday of client check-ins so far this year.
Mixed in with all of this is my want to grow as a coach and communicator, and be as open as is helpful with you when it comes to my approach to fitness and thinking and living la buena vida. Today’s newsletter introduces you to one big change and one small change that I’m making, and I invite you to join me in both of them. First:
Fitness & Thinking is no longer just a Friday thing
The crux of this week’s later-than-usual newsletter is that Fitness & Thinking has been unshackled from it’s Friday posting. This post revisits what was a placeholder for people new to F&T and lays out the new manifesto.
Part of this change is the introduction of a proper podcast (rather than an audio voiceover of the written newsletter). I recorded the first episode this week, an unscripted 30 minutes chopped into a more palatable 22 minutes, which is now available to watch and listen to on YouTube and Spotify.
Why now?
In the past 18 months, I’ve made a concerted effort to grow my Instagram presence and, as a result, my social media use has increased threefold while my enjoyment of it has completely nosedived.
Misinformation, plastic surgery, faked transformations, cookie cutter apps and highlight reels of people’s lives have all taken their toll; knowing how fake/d everything is has had a very real impact on my sense of self and achievement. I’ve invested thousands of pounds into business mentors and creators to help me break through the noise only to find their promises were inauthentic too.
Instead of being woe is me about it all, however, I want to expand Fitness & Thinking’s remit and invest my energies into the people and ideas (and formats for me) that inspire joy and creativity, reflection and growth. This isn’t (just) about @coachjackmann, or F&T being just a Friday thing; Fitness & Thinking is you and me and whoever else needs to come in and speak, write or listen, learning together what works for us and how we can make the most of our 76.6 years on this Earth. Speaking of which:
Faster 10K in 10 weeks
Now that I have no major travel plans outside of the north of England, I’d like to re-commit to my physical fitness in a way that felt sidelined through May by near constant travel and sofa surfing, and by injuries in April as my half marathon training volume caught up with me.
My goal by the end of August is to run sub-46 minutes while looking like I enjoy food and lifting weights.
You see, a big learning from my half marathon training was that the tried and tested approach to fat loss (move incrementally more, eat incrementally less) doesn’t work when you’re moving so much. After a month of pushing through the fatigue of four weights sessions a week and four running sessions, I decided to eat a little bit more, and set new distance and speed records the following week. And after two more weeks of this, as my miles kept climbing but my gym numbers started dropping, I recognised that four weights sessions a week just wasn’t tenable and dropped to three. And then easter hit and I had all of the cravings…and I allowed them. And I performed and looked better than ever.
By fuelling performance and committing to the distances I set each week, my athletics took care of my aesthetics. Did I need to eat that many easter eggs? Did Bear Grylls need to drink that much of his own urine? Exactly. (The answer’s no, by the way, just, so, you know, we’re on the same page with this…)
If you have 5K experience and would like to improve on your time with my exact routine, join my running WhatsApp group or have me coach you to your specific needs and requirements – factoring in hunger, recovery and sleep – reply to this newsletter and I’ll see you over the finish line…
And that’s it from me!
I appreciate yas as ever, and look forward to seeing and hearing where we go from here.
Until the next one, much love
J x