Welcome to Fitness & Thinking
Now not just a Friday thing – updated June 2025
‘ey up
I’ve been reflecting lately on what I want Fitness & Thinking (and me) to be.
F&T is borne out of both the idea that there’s more to life than having a six pack, and also being frustrated as a practicing coach with a strength and conditioning qualification and a masters in Psychology by pervasive dieting and supplement and clothing marketing that equates our worth with how much we weigh or how shredded we are.
Now look, the majority of my clients have come to me to shed some pounds, sure, and in an overweight nation that’s not only a valid want, it’s also why I’m able to re-write F&T’s mission statement – a major source of my income is predicated on helping people feel better about themselves.
But what I found as I ticked off both my clients’ goals and my own, is that we soon noticed a gap – where once there was food, striving, loneliness, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, regret, there was a rumbling sense of “but what now? what’s next?”
Sometimes this feeling resolved itself; in our time together, we slipped into old clothes and dared to try new ones (or take them off completely!), partners reinitiated intimacy, proposals and marriages and pregnancies happened, running records were repeatedly broken, squat, bench and deadlift records were obliterated, houses were bought and sold, promotions gained and some jobs completely dropped in order to go and travel the world. Surely then, that was it: job done! completed it, mate! Right?
I think once you recognise that you’re capable of more, and that material things can’t plug those old gaps permanently, it becomes hard to sit still and not think…
Personally, in the time I’ve been writing under the Fitness & Thinking moniker, I’ve spent seven months living and working out of a rucksack (6 of those in Southeast Asia, and the past month between Sheffield, Birmingham, London and Barcelona!), forged a steel-tough creative and personal partnership, run my first half marathon (in under one hour, 45 minutes – Strava reckons it was 1:40:01 but we all know how it can be!) and am now back in Yorkshire to ask: “what do I want now?”
Easiest to answer is what I don’t want to be: the PT repeatedly putting people’s weights away and re-correcting terrible form or the online coach watching people be “good” for five days, go out at the weekend, hide from me because they’ve been “bad” and then promise they’ll be “better” next time. Thankfully, most of my time on the gym floor wasn’t that bad and most of my clients haven’t been like that, but I’m drawing a line under it.
What I do want is to build on each of the five pillars of fitness I’ve been working on since graduating from my masters in 2016:
Physical
Mental
Emotional/spiritual
Social
Financial
I enjoy introducing people to people and ideas, whether verbally or textually, and building on those ideas or knocking them down to find truths that work for each of us. I love to move, and push myself across the first four pillars, and would like to align my purpose with and my efforts in these to establish dependable financial fitness.
If enough of you’d like to know how I’m working towards these goals, I’d be happy to cover them in a future newsletter or episode!
Now, there are some among us who are enlightened, and there are millions more who are blissfully ignorant, and more power to both groups. For everyone else in between, there’s Fitness & Thinking.
F&T isn’t a self-help blog, nor is it a guided meditation app. F&T is a weekly podcast and potentially more frequent newsletter that aims to provoke and inspire and unite people looking for their sense of self and peace of mind. Are you in?