Five Lessons on Fitness and Thinking (and Feeling) from 2025
A handful of highlights from the past 50 newsletters
It’s been a furking tough year on this side at times but having you to write to and reflect with nearly every week has been huge for getting me through, so thank you for that.
I hope you’ve been able to find what you’ve needed or maybe not even known you’ve wanted here – whether that’s insight or hope or connection. And if you need more of something, or would like a different approach, do let me know!
Today, I want to take you through some of my hardest learned and most enjoyed lessons from the newsletter in 2025, starting with:
1. People will always look for the quickest way out
Ozempic and the Great Fitness Industry Freak-Out
When Ozempic arrived, the fitness industry panicked. Personal trainers saw their client lists shrinking. Influencers posted defensive think-pieces about “shortcuts” and “earning” results. I watched coaches I respect spiral into bitterness.
But people have always looked for the quickest route. Weight loss pills, meal replacement shakes, 2-week abs programmes – none of this is new. Heck, even I set up a 10-week transformation challenge this year wondering if people would be less daunted by it as a commitment than 12 weeks.
What’s new though is that Ozempic actually “works” for many people, in that weight loss is the goal and people absolutely lose weight with it, which means the industry can’t dismiss it as easily.
Here’s what I’ve learned: some people need the change more urgently than they need the journey. A medical intervention that helps someone move without pain, sleep better, reduce their diabetes risk? Far from “cheating”, that’s getting help.
At some point, though, maintenance becomes the work. The injection doesn’t teach you how to move, how to cook, how to enjoy your body. Nor does it help you build muscle. In fact, a not insignificant amount of muscle can be lost when people take GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic, which, if not re-built, could lead to incredible weight rebounds and worse quality of life in the long run.
That’s where coaching still matters. And if you fall in love with the process – lifting, cooking, walking – it rarely feels like work. That’s the bit we should all be fighting for.
2. You only get 4,000 weeks
4,000 Weeks: Use Them or Lose Them
Oliver Burkeman’s book title kept showing up in conversations in 2025. When I wrote my piece on the idea, I promise you I hadn’t read the book yet. When I got back from California, it was the first one I bought, and it might actually be one of my favourite books this year.
Many of us won’t even see 4,000 weeks. So what if this was your last time doing something – would you do it differently? If it’s your first time, will you actually pay attention?
You can do anything you want, but not everything. That’s the difficult bit. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to ten others. I’ve spent most of my adult life terrified of committing to anything in case something better came along.
This year I tried reducing my options. I picked four things things to be good at – running, motorbiking, Spanish, bodybuilding – and stopped forcing myself to be “productive” in my free time. If I could do things differently, I’d have swapped some of the gym work for Spanish practice while I was running: lifting weights four times a week while really learning how to run ahead of my first half marathon was a noble idea – and came in part from boredom – but it cost me niggles and recovery time.
Back from travelling, I’m not running at all, am lifting weights four times a week and look much more like I want to. Aesthetics OR athletics for me and my clients going into 2026. You can 100% do both over the course of the year but, from personal experience, I’d suggest really nailing one at a time and stop guilting yourself about the things “you’re not doing”.
When you actually commit to where you are, you get better at being there.
Side-note: but Jack, athletes are aesthetic, no? Some of them are, for sure – gymnasts and sprinters have body shapes that I think cross-discipline and cross-culture we’d describe as aesthetic, but outside of this, when clients talk to me about wanting bigger bums or bigger chests or an X-frame physique, it’s going to be much quicker for the general gym-goer to build the muscle first and then the performance. Effective long distance runners rarely have peachy posteriors; inversely, many of my successful fat loss clients have incredible looking backs after six months of training but won’t have cracked a chin-up; skills and muscles are not as tightly correlated as we might expect or hope them to be.
3. You are not the things that happen to you
Are You Living or Merely Not Dead?
This is one of my favourite pieces from the year. I combined some of the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that has moved me to make a simple point: we can’t control everything, but we can nearly always affect how we think and feel about it.
Though the more I read Eckhart Tolle, the more I recognise that even thinking about how I think or feel is daft sometimes. We are not the things that happen to us. We are not our emotions. We simply are – one part of something much bigger than any of us – so why wouldn’t we try to breathe through it and help each other along?
I don’t have everything sorted. I’m better at separating my ego from my injuries but I still assume the worst when someone doesn’t reply to a message. I’m so much better at seeing letdown as growing pain but I still get jealous sometimes when someone I love talks about someone else in their life making them happy in a way that I could have done for them.
I’m getting better at noticing the gap between what happens and how I react to it. I’m working on making the gap smaller: in part by calling it out when it shows up, in part asking for things if I want them, and, ideally, laughing about my reactions with other people when previously I might have gone off by myself to fume. It’s not easy. It’s actually pretty fucking painful sometimes but acknowledging it’s alright to not be perfect and that accountability and an apology can go a long way have meant a lot of growth in the six pillars this year.
4. Rest isn’t the opposite of productivity
Work a Job You Love and You’ll Work Every Day of Your Life
Between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day this past week, I spent six hours in bed in the afternoon – sleeping, reading, watching a TV series, not looking at my phone. It was bliss.
This time last year I was on beaches and under waterfalls in Southeast Asia, and I was less relaxed there than I was in my bed with a thick duvet and a small lamp on. Intentionally filling time with rest and non-work has helped me feel happier in 2025, whether it’s five degrees in Mexborough or five tacos in Mexico. Rest doesn’t have to be earned, it simply needs to be had.
The “work a job you love” myth sold us the idea that if we just found the right thing, we’d never need a break. Turns out, doing what you love makes it even harder to stop. You have to build the rest in, or you’ll burn the thing you love into something you resent.
5. The stretch and the squeeze
Jeff Nippard, Mike Israetel, and the Lengthened Partials Debate
In 2024, fitness influencers hammered us with “lengthened partials” and “stretch under load” as the secret to muscle growth. Then, this year, many of them walked their claims back. Turns out the data wasn’t as solid as they’d sold it.
I started putting the squeeze back into my training when I noticed that my muscles didn’t look as full as I might have wanted despite doing all of my favourite movements and progressing the quality or quantity of work over the course of each training block. The feeling and fullness of my muscles seems better for both the stretch and the contraction, not just one or the other, and my enjoyment of training has gone up again in part for being able to see that what I’m doing is working.
It’s fine to be a follower. It’s fine to have opinions. It’s not fine to sell “results” based on shaky data, particularly when you call yourself “science-based” and your whole point was to improve reliability and trust in fitness information.
My heroes shot themselves in their arguably under-developed physiques this year. I decided to lean into my own training and coaching data, my pattern recognition, rather than prophets profiting from moot points and sometimes falsehoods.
The lesson isn’t “don’t trust anyone.” It’s “trust yourself enough to notice when things do and don’t work you.”
Honourable mentions
Two pieces I didn’t include above but that shaped the year:
You’re a POS, Says Who? Me.
This one’s about identity and injury. What happens when the thing you built yourself around – runner, lifter, athlete – gets taken away? The podcast really dug into this with Niell JJ, Lucas Hynes, and Helene Garnett, all of whom had different takes on what it means to be your best and watch that definition change over time.
It’s Not About Your Vorsprung durch Technik
Like my parents, I’m an extraverted introvert. I want people around but don’t want to feel responsible for them. I want space but feel guilty taking it.
This year, outside of my coaching, running clubs and a library card helped me get a fix of people without the responsibility for their moods or the guilt of not talking to them (or even enjoying their chat). They helped me feel less alone, even if I just went there to work/out – because that’s allowed too.
This has been a big learning curve in my last two romantic relationships and something I’ll be better at with everyone going forwards.
F&T podcast
F&T episodes go out weekly, this week’s is with Imran Naeem, the co-founder of Natural Progression Boxing Academy. Here’s how to keep up:
Spotify and Apple Podcasts (audio only) on Wednesday evenings and
YouTube on Thursday mornings.
If you’ve enjoyed the show, do leave a like, comment or five star review.
If you can do this, I promise to keep doing my best to bring you the most thoughtful, silly, serious, and soul-searching conversations about what it means to feel fit and well in the world we live in.
And that’s it from me and the newsletter in 2025!
I appreciate every single one of you. Here’s to 2026 and our best years yet.
With love
J x