Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How to Create the Perfect Workout Schedule for Body and Mind

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

This week’s episode is a proper back-to-school one - not literally. But you know that September feeling - new stationery, shiny shoes, a colour-coordinated schedule - we’re talking that, but for your workouts. Yes, we’re looking at the goal of building the perfect workout schedule for body and mind. One that will help you get stronger or faster whilst being kind to yourself. Because healthy change is never just about evolving the way your body looks - or even performs. From setting your goal to seeing it through and the whole journey in the middle, there’s a real mental and emotional component, too. That’s why, joining WH fitness writer Morgan Fargo on this week’s show are two brilliant experts. The first, Nike Global master trainer Joslyn Thompson Rule brings a tonne of knowledge about the nuts and bolts of putting together a fitness schedule that supports your goal. And the second, Chartered Sports Psychologist Dr Josie Perry, is a leading voice in understanding how best to get your mind on-side - and balance determination with self-compassion. So, whether you want to get stronger; build certain muscles, smash out a 10k or shift any excess body fat - in this episode we have plenty of inspiration and advice for you to action today. Or, you know, after the August bank holiday... Follow Joslyn Thompson Rule on Instagram: @joslynthompsonrule Follow Dr Josie Perry on Twitter: @josephineperry Follow Morgan Fargo on Instagram: @morganfargo Follow Women's Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Topics   How to build a workout schedule When to exercise to achieve a health goal How many HIIT sessions to do a week What are the best sort of health goals to make How to achieve healthy fat loss Why you should factor in enough rest days Like what you’re hearing? We'd love if you could rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, as it really helps other people find the show. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so you’ll never miss an episode.   Got a goal in mind? Shoot us a message on Instagram putting ‘Going for Goal’ at the start of your message and our experts could be helping you achieve your health goal in an upcoming episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hi, everybody. You are listening to Going for Gold, the weekly Wimpself Podcast. My name's Rochine DeVishechakain. I'm senior editor on women's health and this is your weekly chance to plug in, be inspired and get expert advice on how to achieve the health and wellness goals that matter most to you. This week's episode is a proper back to school one. I mean, not literally, but you know that September feeling. New stationary, shiny shoes, a colour-coordinated schedule. We're talking that, but for your workouts. Yes, this week we are responding to requests from tons of you and looking at the goal of how to build the perfect exercise schedule for body and mind.

Because healthy change is never just about evolving the way your body looks or even the way it performs. From setting your goal to seeing it through and the whole messy, bumpy journey in the middle, there's a real mental and emotional component too. That's why joining Women's Health Fitness Writer Morgan Fargo on this week's show are two brilliant experts. The first, Nike Global Master Trainer Jocelyn Thompson Rule brings a ton of knowledge about the nuts and bolts of putting together a fitness schedule that supports your goal. And the second, chartered sports psychologist Dr Josie Perry

is a leading voice in understanding how best to get your mind on side and balance determination with self-compassion. So whether you want to get stronger, build certain muscles, smash out to 10K or shift any excess body fat, In this episode, we have tons of inspiration and advice for you to action today. Or, you know, after the August Bank holiday. Over to Morgan. Jocelyn and Josie, I'm so excited to be chatting with you today.

This is something I think is going to help so many people who are trying to achieve their goals, but just are at a bit of a loss of how to do it. I wanted to first get a little bit of background about both of you so people know exactly who you are and why you are so well qualified to be chatting about this today. So Jocelyn, looking to you first, can you give us a little bit about yourself and what you're passionate about? Yeah, for sure. So I've been in the fitness industry for 17 years. I'm very grateful that I started at the time that I did because there wasn't any social media or anything like that as a distraction in terms of how you look, what fitness is, how much you should be training, all that kind of stuff. I was surrounded by people who were just really passionate about helping others move and move well. And I've pretty much stuck with that.

So kind of when I started, the basics were, you know, strength training, accessing that strength through moving better, making sure you recovered. And kind of things like hit hadn't quite, they were just on the cusp of getting there with the kind of hit world, which then I feel like took over a lot of training space. And as a result, people ended up overtraining, doing too much and not really understanding or respecting their bodies. So for me, it's always just being sticking with the basics and really trying to re-educate people around that. I say I recover a lot of hit addicts because, yeah, people do too much and then they want to kind of strip it back and start again. So I love that process. I love that journey. And that's kind of where I am. I'm still kind of doing the same thing that I did

17 years ago. So yeah. Fantastic. It's so interesting what you say about hit addicts because I've taken a break from hit in lockdown and my body has thanked me for it in so many ways. Better sleep. I'm happier. I'm less stressed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Over training can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can talk for hours on this, but we'll move on. We'll move on. And Josie, you are a chartered psychologist, and can you give us a little bit about what that means and what your work involves? Sure. So I don't have that kind of, I guess, long-term engagement in the sector. I was actually working in the corporate world until 2013. And I was doing Iron Man Racing and went over to Australia to do an Iron Man. and stood on the beach with the most terrifying waves I have ever seen in my life,

having trained in nice little swimming pools in London. And the guy on the tannoy said, you can't change those conditions. You can change how you feel about them. And it was genuinely, in all the years I've done sport, the first time I'd kind of realized that your brain has so much more power over how you perform than your body sometimes does. And it was just a proper light bulb moment of, I can do something differently. I can help myself. And I got back to the UK, really thought about

kind of these processes and ended up quitting my job and spending five years retraining in sports psychology. And I've been doing that ever since, which is just a little bit of a real privilege to get to be involved in people's fitness journeys and people getting to change their lives through things that really matter and really bring them joy. At women's health, we receive so many messages from women who want to find a routine they can stick with and that works for their life. And you two are obviously the perfect people to help them get there. So the goals that we get are largely in three categories. We have women who want to build their strength and achieve a more toned look through building muscle. We have women who'd like to change their body composition,

losing excess body fat if they have it. And then we have women who really want to improve their cardio fitness. Maybe they want to be able to run a 5K with their partner or just go out for a dog or a walk or a cycle or a swim. I thought, Jocelyn, it would be amazing if you could talk us through a template or a schedule that people looking to achieve each of those goals could work to. Yeah, sure. So in terms of the strength one, my forte, I love it, it really is just making sure that you incorporate some kind of resistance training into your. you're a week. If you are looking to get stronger, you want to be strength training at least twice a week, I would say. And you want to be doing what I call big compound movements. So they are

movements that will use multiple muscles in one go rather than kind of isolating muscles. So instead of doing like just a bicep curl, for example, that would be just one muscle isolated. and you do a pull-up. I recognize that that is not something that you can go from one to the other, but I'm just saying that you're still working the bicep when you're doing a pull-up, but you're also using a lot of other muscles as well. So that's what makes an exercise compound. So you're thinking squats, deadlifts, lunges, rows, variations of presses.

With that, do make sure if you are doing this for the first time, that you do seek some advice from an expert who's going to help you to move as efficiently as possible. The bigger kind of compound movements like deadlifts and squats, they're great when they're done well, but when they're not, they can lead to injury. So if you have the opportunity to seek some advice from somebody who's qualified just to give you some guidance, that would be great. And then within that, just make sure that when you are doing those as a minimum two strength sessions, that you are also giving yourself the opportunity to recover around that as well. So you wouldn't necessarily do those two days back to back. You would leave at least,

you know, a couple of days in between both of those sessions. And then, and then obviously if you want to do more than that, if you want to do a third session, that's absolutely fine too. And would each of those sessions, if you were to do two sessions a week, would that be full body every time? And then three, perhaps would you then split it up? What would your recommendation be? Sure. It's really dependent on personal preference. So some people might want to split into a lower body day. Some people might want to split into an upper body day. For me personally, I think it's good to kind of get a little bit of everything in. not. If you have more sessions throughout the week, like let's say if you had three or four strength sessions throughout the week, you might then start to go a little bit in that body split direction. But I think there's no reason why you can't do some lower body and some upper body within the same day. Often the body part split comes when you are really, really training quite

intensely. And by that, I mean, you know, increased repetitions or increased weights as opposed to sweating it out. Yeah. You know, if you were doing some really, really heavy deads on one day, which is very, very taxing both on your, you know, muscle system and your, and neuraly as well, on your nervous system, then you may want to give that a break and then do the upper body the next day or the day after. So that's more of the reasoning around the body split, just to give ample rest before

you would work that that same area again. But for most people, kind of getting into resistance training that aren't necessarily competitive, I would say full body and both days is absolutely fine. And what kind of equipment would you say people need? Is it possible to get fit at home and build muscle and strength of that equipment? Because I know Argos and Amazon and everywhere is sold out of fitness equipment. I know. Who knew there was going to be no equipment? come when was it April? We should have set up equipment companies. No, I think that, I mean, you know, Instagram might tell us that we can do lots with bands,

which we can. There's a certain amount of work that you can do. But you really do, once you've mastered body weight movement and moving well and moving safely, you do need, you know, a form of resistance to. build strength beyond that. I mean, you know, from a body weight perspective, on the very, very extreme level, we have gymnasts who are incredibly strong just from body weight, but you watch what they do, and that's not something that we can kind of necessarily do at home number one or whatever.

You're not looking backwards on a tiny bar? No, no. There's no room for backflips in my living room, nor indeed my body. But no, you need to lift weights and you need to, the resistance needs to be adequate so that you can create some change within that. So if you were, if you were starting out, let's say very, very simple numbers, you might do three sets of eight to ten repetitions. You want for that weight to start to feel like, oh, I can feel that around the kind of last two. reps. And again, if you're starting out and doing those higher repetitions, what that helps to build is also your connective tissue too. So when you are working to kind of build pure strength, what you actually do is lift heavier weights for less repetitions. But if you haven't actually trained your connective tissue to be able to withstand that load, then you're going to go down an injury route potentially. So those higher repetitions when you're starting out are better just to make sure your whole body is able to progress as you increase weights and work with that. And you mentioned that there's a massive need for rest when you're building muscle and

trying to increase your strength. What would you suggest as active recovery or should some days be total recovery? Yeah, it's really dependent on the person actually. Like you absolutely should have, you know, for people who are training kind of five or six days a week, which is a lot. you really need to be taking one day where you're really just giving your body a full break. More is definitely not more. But there's also a lot to be said for active recovery, and that is just kind of moving around gentle blood flow work, which means that you'll still be releasing a level of energy,

but it's not going to be so much that you're not going to have the chance to recover from your workouts. But, you know, you've got to take into consideration not only the training when you're thinking about recovery. You've got to take all of the lifestyle pieces in as well. So, you know, your work, are you getting enough sleep? You know, are you eating in a way that is supporting the level of training that you're doing? So it's not just looking at the training going, well, I'm doing this amount of training. So I'm going to do this amount of recovery. It's let me look at the whole picture. And when I talk to trainers about programming for their clients,

the base level of the of the pyramid would be adherence like can you program something for them that they can stick to that works with their lifestyle and there's a constant level of of you know doing the training having a look reviewing it has this worked well has it not if you've if you've programmed three sessions a week for somebody and over the course of a month they've only got two in then it's like right we're not getting that third session in let's take it out let's let's reorganize a few things and let's make sure that you're sure that you can actually stick to it first, you know, before we start adding in any volume or anything like that. And it's very dependent, you know, very different dependent on who it is,

whether it's a, you know, regular kind of worker outer, two, three times a week, or whether you're again, you're going kind of to the elite level where everything is so much more measured and based around the season and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And Josie, is that something that you find people perhaps slip up on as in they go too hard, too fast at the beginning, they do more is more, and then two, three, maybe even four months and they just cannot keep it up. Yes. How do you, how would you suggest someone like that can actually create something they stick to? So what we try to get people going for is a goal that really matters to them.

So while kind of building strength and getting more toned feels like a good positive goal, it's not particularly graspable. What works much better is something you can really visualize. What would that look like to me? What would it mean to me? How would it make a difference in my life? And so when you can find a goal that connects more to that, if I was stronger, I would be able to lift my daughter up

when she gets tired walking home from town. If I was more toned, I would feel more comfortable, when I was in this environment. And when you have a goal that really then matters to you, it's much easier to stick to it, because you can see what you're heading for, and you can see why you're doing it. And with any goal we set,

whether it's an elite athlete or somebody wanting to do their first park run, it's all about, well, why are you doing it? And when you get your why, and you know what the purpose is and your reasoning, it's then much easier to set a great goal that works for you, and everything else filters off that. so you can make it it makes you very accountable to it

because you know you wanted to do it in the first place you set it out so you can say to kind of close friends or family you don't want to be a gym ball but you can say to your really close friends and family this is what I'm trying to achieve can you check in with me every now and again to make sure I've done that session keeps you really focused

you know why you're doing it it doesn't feel like a chore something that's hard to do that you don't want to do it it feels like a really good opportunity. I get to go and work out again. I'm really looking forward to being stronger to seeing what extra I'm able to lift this week. We don't want it to go too far.

We don't want people to feel pressure or that expectation. But when it's a few people close to you that you know genuinely love you for who you are, there's no pressure with it. It's just they want you to achieve the things that you want. And so they're helping you do that. And that can be really good. And it stops that.

Oh, look, there's a shiny new thing over there. I'll just go and try that. Oh, look, there's a new hit video I want to go and work on. And I'll just add that into it. It keeps you really focused on. This is what I wanted to achieve. And you work with your trainer to get to that. And this is how I'm going to do it.

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example. Are having goals like that that are performance-based helpful as well? Yes. So ideally, we set an outcome goal, which might well be that I want to be strong enough that I can do a 10-kilometer walk and still be able to lift my glass of wine at the end of it. So it feels something that matters to you and you want to work towards. And then you break that down into performance-wise, what would that look like? So that would be me being able to do 10 press-ups or, all of them with beautiful technique. And then you break that, okay, well, how do I do 10 beautiful press-ups? And you break it down into specific processes.

And then actually we try and forget about the outcome goal and even sometimes the performance goal. We just focus on the processes. And if you just build those into your life and you work out when you're going to do them, you keep them realistic. So just as Jocelyn was saying, you don't try and do, you don't set out with,

I'm going to do it every day. because that's not realistic in most people's lives. You work out what is doable and you schedule it into your diary. Literally put it in your diary as if it was a meeting. Because then it gives you that extra bit of accountability. To yourself as well, I guess, as not just necessarily for other people.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I write down, the start of every day, I write down two things I'm going to do in my house, two things of exercise or fitness work I'm going to do, and six pieces of work work. because 10 things feels accountable to achieve in a day, but they're staring at me if I don't do it. So it's like, right, what time am I going to go for my run?

And then it doesn't just get left to the end of the day and put back and back and back. And then you're beating yourself up at 9 o'clock at night because it didn't happen. Definitely. You would hate to see my to do this. It's many, many sticky notes. You have to get really, really focused on prioritising

and making sure that that fitness element is part of those priorities. But it's what six things do I have to achieve today work-wise? It's really tricky to filter down to. It might mean you overachieve and you can add other things later, but it means your fitness stuff doesn't fall off the back because other people's priorities end up taking over your own. That's so powerful and so true.

And it's also a way of choosing yourself and making that time for yourself as well, which is so important. The second goal that we get asked a lot about is how women can lose excess fat and weight in a safe and sustainable way. There are so many quick tricks and fads out there that are way more harmful than they are helpful. And providing people with information that can really help them achieve those goals is so important.

Josie, I know you work a lot with people who perhaps take it a little bit too far. And I wondered how people can frame their weight loss goals in a healthier way. That's a really good question because lots of people do want to. to lose weight. But as a sport and exercise psychologist, as soon as you hear that, it kind of gives you an edge and you're a little bit worried about it because people, it can become quite compulsive and you can take it too far and then it can be really, really detrimental to your health and your mental well-being and to your relationships and everyone around you. And so what we try and do when we're setting goals is not try and not do things. We always try and focus on the positive

of a goal of how can I achieve something. And so we can reframe something like, I want to lose weight to, I want to have a healthier lifestyle. When you have a healthier lifestyle, you tend to lose weight. And so instead of I want to lose 10 pounds, we might actually put, I want to make sure that every day I have my five fruit and veg. Because when you change your composition of your food towards much more natural, healthier food, then that's going to happen, but you do it by putting really positive habits in place rather than constantly calorie counting or being on an app and checking what you're eating

and getting to know how many calories an apple has versus how many calories a donut has. So we really try and keep it focused on being really healthy rather than trying to lose weight. And even then people can take it too far. So there is an issue around what people call orthorexia where you end up doing certain diets or eating habits has an excuse to lose weight. And so when we see people with some of those very restrictive eating habits, we really have to focus on how can you have full body health, full body mental health as well, and not just trying to lose weight. So absolutely people need to be a healthy weight. It helps every part of your life. It's the best way to have a long, healthy, enjoyable life,

but to do it in a positive way of looking for how we create that rather than what we cut out. And what would some of the signs be of someone who perhaps is displaying slightly compulsive tendencies towards exercise and weight loss? There's two things we tend to look out for. So one is a lack of flexibility. So if you're not going out with your friends because you had a gym session scheduled,

and it's the only opportunity you had to go out with your friends, but you had that session scheduled for 2 o'clock and you were not going to miss it. When that happens regularly, you've gone way past the I'm Being Diligent and actually you're stopping yourself enjoying other parts of your life. And the other area is when it tends to cause conflict.

And we will see people that have got really into certain sports and they'll push it so far, they end up getting divorced. Or they're losing their job because they don't have the time to train in the way that they wanted to, or they're upset that they've not got the relationship with their children that they might have wanted because they're so focused on their sport and their exercise. So when you find it starting to cause any conflict, or when you're being really rigid about what you have to do and have to eat or have to exercise, those are

the kind of the red flags to look out for. And it's so easy, I think, to slip into certain tendencies that you think you're being such a hard worker and so diligent. Actually, they're harming more than they're helpful. And it's a badge of honour in some ways. I work a lot in endurance sports. And we often see girls that haven't had periods for years. And in certain endurance sports, it's almost been a badge of honour.

Like, I must be training hard enough. I don't get periods. Actually, that's incredibly unhealthy for you. You'll like to have lots of hormone issues. You won't have a libido. You're more likely to get stress fractures. It's very difficult to have children later on in life. And yet it's almost celebrated as meaning you're working really hard

and you're really diligent. And we should never be celebrating those elements. Diligence is fabulous. Drive to perform brilliantly is fabulous. But there has to be that balance of how do I keep my health at the same time. And its health, I think, is that macro holistic view as opposed to just, like Jocelyn said, it's not about X days of work, X days of recovery. it's looking at your whole life and seeing how it all plays together.

And there's a really lovely phrase I saw recently that was around stress is stress. Your body doesn't recognise whether it's physical stress or mental stress or fitness stress that you're putting on it. It still has to recover. And often our coping mechanism for day-to-day physical stress is to go to the gym. And it can be really effective at making us feel better. But it's still actually adding extra stress on. And at a certain point, so that we don't get burnt out, we have to spend some time really looking after ourselves and having that decent recovery process. 100%. I couldn't agree more. And Jocelyn, for someone who has a healthy weight in mind, they really like to get there because like Josie said, there are so many benefits to it.

How would you suggest they could structure a training program around that with a safety and sustainability in mind? What I often have to do with people who are, you know, looking to get to what will be a healthy weight for them, is I often have to get them to get them to train a bit less and eat a bit more. And invariably I have people coming to me who are doing multiple hit sessions throughout the week. And I'm not anti-hit. there is a there is a place for it and hit in its purest form is not what we see in in gyms but there is a place for it but there's a small place for it within the bigger picture and so often it's it's reducing those hit sessions down it's adding in some resistance training and it's eating more food and also again to josie's point of you know often there can be a huge amount of

of calorie counting. And I always like to think of food more in terms of nutrient density rather than just it kind of being, you know, the calories. So you can have a ton of whatever meals from whatever company saying, you know, this has got X amount of calories and whatever. But actually from a kind of nutritional perspective, how much, you know, how many nutrients are you getting from that food? So it's kind of really just looking at all of those pieces.

But really all of the, certainly the first one and the second goal, and whether it's to get strong, whether it's to, you know, lose excess body fat tissue, it continues to be, you know, resistance training, conditioning. And then an element of whether it's mobility or recovery. So I would often give a very, very loose template of, because, again, it depends on, you know, how much time people have. But one to two strength sessions a week, one to two conditioning sessions a week, and then one to two sort of mobility stroke recovery type sessions in the week.

And then just doing that consistently over time. What that does, I mean, our bodies are incredible. They are so incredible. Could you give up a little bit of an explainer on what? conditioning is and then perhaps a few examples. Yeah, sure. So just, you know, what you would recognize as running or swimming or cycling. So just getting, you know, your blood pumping, basically. Now, that can be something as simple as walking. Walking is the most underrated thing ever in the entire world. It's amazing. It could be something as simple as walking all the way up to

those that higher intensity training. So it could be, you know, something super quick and short, like a 100 metre sprint or a 60 metre sprint. So there are different levels of conditioning. But it's basically getting your heart rate up and getting blood pumping around your body essentially. And I think being able to go out and go for a 5K run, for example, is something that so many people wish they could do.

but they might just not have found the schedule or the structure or the thing that will help them get to that point. For people who are looking to improve their cardio fitness, would the conditioning that they do go up as opposed to someone who's looking to build muscle, for example? So do you mean in relation to running, would you say? Let's say cardiovascular fitness. So someone who can't run a 5K but wants to. Yeah, sure. So I think I often find that people who, you know, make the decision right, I'd like to run a 5K.

And they lace up their shoes and they head out of the door and they set off at a pace that they're not going to be able to maintain probably for a minute or two because they're just kind of like they've got that initial motivation. I'm going to go. And very soon they're like, whew, maybe I've set that, you know, goal to. too high. It's always about just starting with, and I think this is something you already mentioned, Josie, with just things that you can, that are absolutely doable. And again, we're so used to in fitness that big, shiny, impressive goal, you know, that I'm going to go and I'm going to do whatever. And then for your first step to be, right, let me just go and jog really slowly for a minute and that's all I'm going to do today and then you know go back home and it's

really like oh I'm not going to post about that on Instagram so I only ran for a minute what are people and da da da da da and all the chatter um but it's it's um just starting with small small small small tiny achievable goals like as again as jose you were saying rather than loads of things loads of priorities whittle them down can I do this you could ask you know um A lot of people do you think you can go out and jog for a minute? Is that doable? Okay, great. You know, is too doable? Brilliant. If you can do it absolutely fine, but just kind of small goals and always to start out slower than you, then you feel comfortable with, I guess, because everybody's like, oh my God, I used to be able to do it. And it's just kind of like,

you went out at the pace that you used to go at and you haven't done that in so long. So what were you thinking? But very soon those small pieces build up to, you know, longer distance runs as your body is more able to do it. I think one thing that you said that was really interesting is about small achievable goals that you work towards consistently. And that makes such a world of difference to achieving those huge goals that seems so astronomical at the outset. How do people identify when perhaps they need to reach? readjust their goals, as in they've either improved to a level where they're now finding it easy and perhaps could build another goal that is a bit of a stretch, or if it's too macro a goal, how do they bring it down? I would say it's about reassessing your motivation,

actually. So when your goal isn't doing it for you anymore, because you've either achieved it or just not getting you out of bed to go and do whatever you need to do, it's about really addressing your motivation. And we know from studies there are three kind of pillars that our motivation comes from. So the first one is having a sense of belonging. So being part of a community, the fitness community, listening to podcasts of other people doing similar things to you, feeling like you've got friends on social media, you can chat to about your sport. That really helps, kind of give you a little bit of extra motivation. The second one is competency. So feeling like you've got the skills you need. So if you're working on specific skills, kind of how to lift really well,

or building up to running a minute extra at a time, then that helps get you feeling like, yep, I can do this. I can set my next bigger goal. And the third one is really important, and that's autonomy. So having a voice and a choice. So I am doing this because I want to, not because my friend says so or that there's a challenge on Instagram that I wanted to follow.

I'm doing it because it matters to me. And when you've got all those in place, your goals tend to kind of just appear because you start to be thinking in the right way of what's going on in my community what have I built up the skills to do that I need to stretch myself a bit more to do and what makes me excited what gets my tummy turning that will give you the next big goal and then you go through that whole process again of there's that nice big goal I'll break it down to performance goals I'll break it down into those processes of how am I going to do it And then for people who have set too big a goal, I know it can be mentally hard to perhaps bring that down a notch.

Is that something that's necessary to do if perhaps the goal that people have set is just too big right now, Jacey? Absolutely. And I work with a lot of teenage athletes who you'll have your first session with them and now say, my goal is to go to the Olympics. You're like, brilliant goal, really inspiring. It's going to make you work really hard to get there. But most Olympic medalists on average are 26. So you've got 10 years to go before you're likely to get there. Let's break it down. Where are you going to need to be in five years for that to be a realistic option? Okay, where are you going to need to be in two years?

Where are you in one year? And when we set goals, we actually usually work about six months ahead. Because it needs to feel touchable. If it's too far away, we can't be bothered to do it. It just feels undoable. If it's too close, we're not going to be. to put the effort in because we know we're likely to be able to do it. So breaking things down as, yeah, that's my big goal. That would be brilliant to do. But how do I, what are those journeys

along the way? What are the staging posts? And I'll pick an earlier staging post. So it still feels doable. And a staging post is another word for an achievable goal or something's not your journey. Yes. So an achievable goal that's along the way. So that you know whether that big goal is still feasible. If you keep missing those achievable goals, then maybe that big goal isn't achievable for you and you might need to be looking somewhere else. But it breaks it down into, in the next six months, what could I be able to achieve? And that feels much more doable for a day to day. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jocelyn and Joseph for coming and chatting and sharing all of your wisdom with us because like you say, there are so many things we can reframe to help us

achieve those small goals that keep us consistent basically, which is the name of the game. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having us. How much good stuff was there in there. I hope you guys feel like you are armed and inspired and ready to go attack your September workout schedule, whether you're doing it in the comfort of your home or you've decided to go back to the gym. If you've enjoyed this episode, absolutely do share, let other people know about the podcast. Subscribe. that you never miss an episode and if you've really enjoyed it you can always rate and review on Apple Podcasts which we really appreciate because it helps other people find the show and

you know we just quite like reading your lovely reviews i'll be back next week with a new goal to hear and tons more expert advice until then have a brilliant week