Doubt is something we all face—whether in life, faith, or fitness. It creeps in when progress stalls, when we question our worth, or when the path ahead feels unclear. For me, there have been times when I wondered if the effort I was putting into training was even worth it. The scale didn’t budge, the weights didn’t feel lighter, and my motivation wavered.

Life can feel chaotic at times, with competing demands from family, work, and the constant noise of the world around us. It’s easy to lose our footing, to feel stretched thin or disconnected. For me, establishing a consistent exercise routine has been the anchor I didn’t know I needed. Fitness became more than physical effort—it became a way to steady myself in faith, to prioritize my family, and to find clarity in business and life.

There have been moments in my life when I’ve felt utterly lost. The kind of lost where questions like, Why am I here? What’s my purpose? echo in the silence. It’s unsettling to feel adrift, to wonder when—or if—you’ll find solid ground again. But during these times, I’ve learned that waiting doesn’t have to mean standing still. Waiting can be a time of preparation, growth, and purpose.

Having been in gyms, clubs, teams and many personal as well as group training sessions it’s apparent that the most successful clients and trainers, in terms of the results achieved are less about the ‘Training’ and more about the ‘Personal’. Having solid knowledge, skills, and aptitudes and indeed a love of training is absolutely essential for personal trainers and coaches, you can’t fake that or at least you can’t fake it for very long.

Something most people don’t talk about in the corporate world: is the health and fitness of top executives. The toll of long hours, stressful taskings and a never ending calendar of meetings and calls is incredibly intense to manage effectively.

COVID-19 has brought about a major shift in how employees operate, with many being forced to work from home for well over a year at this stage. While employees dutifully adapted and have performed admirably, companies for the large part have not. Initial messages of support and camraderie have given way to messages of getting everyone back into offices. I’m not so sure many of us really want to go back.

The media have labelled it an epidemic; the politicians are calling it a crisis and those in the medical profession are forecasting dire metrics as regards the increase of weight related illnesses in the coming decades. It makes for frightening reading for everyone and is only gaining more and more media attention as we all apparently gain more weight.

Your mind is an extremely powerful vessel. If you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You should be picturing yourself one year from now having consistently made little changes and consistently stuck by the changes when you made them. You might be eating and training in a completely different way than you are today but that’s because you’ll have learned and adopted so much that you’ll be applying it and building on previous results.

All things being equal and without any valid excuses (be honest 99% of your excuses are lies) it doesn’t matter what I put on these blogs, what plans I outline to you, what I write to motivate you, what I write about nutrition, I can show you a all the motivational videos and posters in existence but the fact of the matter is none of that matters if you don’t get up off your ass and start to work for what you want, attack the thing you think you cannot do.

Psychologically I believe things really started coming together when I began to make the smaller changes. Winning the little seemingly insignificant battles, at the start which mainly involved making sure I didn’t skip a day’s training. At that point I still considered training to be the 100% of most crucial element of a health and fitness lifestyle.

A lot of food manufacturers love to put the calories for a tiny amount e.g. 25g of our product is 50 calories and you think that’s fantastic and then you go and smother your meal in it not realising that it’s 200g worth and you’ve just added 400 calories to your intake without even realising it. It’s better to spot this when you’re out shopping than a few weeks down the line when you’re trying to figure out where you went wrong.

You’re probably seeing a pattern here with our Blog articles. Ignore the media hype around foods, instead focus on getting a balance of healthy wholesome foods and don’t exceed your daily calorific intake levels. That’s really it, I’m going into a lot of detail on the various aspects of dietary requirements and tweaks here but that is it in a nutshell

I still eat bad food and I still love it. The only difference between the unhealthy version of me and the person I am today is that today the ratio of good food I eat is much greater than the ration of bad and I consistently eat good food when I plan to. As I’ve mentioned before if you can nail down your Monday – Friday diet it gives you some wiggle room on the weekend to eat some bad food. Think about your shopping trolley, what goes into it will go into you and your loved ones.

Adopting a healthy lifestyle is so often about the little choices you make on a day-to-day basis. These might seem like small and meaningless acts but if you add up the cumulative benefits of making the right choices when it comes to your health and wellbeing they will add up and you will feel the benefits.

A training buddy or buddies will often put you in situations where you may be a little bit afraid. They might sign you up for a triathlon or you might be competing in a big game in a few weeks. You’ll mentally break yourself down every day and question if you can do it, that’s fine we all do it, remember that without fear it wouldn’t be as satisfying to do it. As I’ve mentioned before your fear can become a very powerful weapon to drive you to your goals.

To grow you must hurt it is as simple as that and the more your challenge hurts the more you will grow when you beat it. That food that you cannot resist, if you can get past that addiction or bad habit you will grow so much in terms of your discipline and confidence in yourself. Your training journal and plan are powerful tools for you to use to remind you of your ‘why’ and for reflection on how far you’ve come.

Don’t spend your time feeling sorry for yourself because your week isn’t exactly as you need it to be. You never put the time in to get your week in that format so you can’t expect to have it ready made for you in an instant. Focus on small changes, focus on your weekly overview, and cut the rubbish out, find the slots in your day when you can do some training and as I say make the small changes that are going to add up make big impacts on your health and fitness lifestyle.

At a high level it doesn’t matter where or what you start with, the important thing is to start. You can see from my health and fitness origins that I didn’t exactly set the fitness world a blaze and I slipped, tripped, and stumbled my way for a lot of it. What I started doing differed significantly from what I moved onto, this is evolution and especially as a beginner you can expect a similar experience.

Giving up is the easiest thing, continuing despite the adversity builds character, it builds resilience, and it feels good to accomplish something when it’s difficult. If it was easy there’d be no joy or satisfaction in completing whatever challenge you’re facing. If it was easy, we’d all look like whatever the media brand today’s perfect physique.

There is no better metric than how you feel, if you eat clean and train dirty you will feel better in yourself. From time to time your metrics might not change all that much but it’s important to remember that how you feel; how your clothes feel on you and your general well-being are not something you can really measure. Remember this isn’t a quick fix it’ll take time; the most important thing is consistent effort.