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This podcast is for people who want to feel fit, strong, and energised again – but haven’t found a way to make fitness hold when life is busy.
You’ve tried plans that work on paper but fall apart under pressure.
You’ve had periods of momentum, followed by long stretches of drift.
Not because you don’t care.
But because most approaches weren’t built for real life.
On this podcast, we talk about how to build strength, energy, and confidence in your body inside a full life – not an ideal one.
Training that adapts when work ramps up.
Nutrition that stays simple when attention is limited.
Habits that survive travel, stress, family, and changing weeks.
These are honest conversations about systems, mindset, and identity – and how fitness stops slipping to the bottom of the list and starts reinforcing the rest of your life.
Hey, folks. Merry Christmas. I'm coming up to the New Year, which is a very busy time in the fitness, the well-being, the health industry after the hedonism and indulgences of the winter period. And it's probably as running a fitness business, it's one of the busiest times of year. And I think it's a combo of what comes before and also the, I guess, the stereotype or the the societal norm of the new year being this point where we wipe the slate clean and we go, this is gonna finally be the year that I make the change.
Jake:And I read this crazy stat that ninety five percent of people who start a new fitness or diet plan in the new year will have fallen off within the six months. And if their goal was weight, they would have put that all back on by the end of the year. So today, I wanna talk about why that is and give you an action plan so that that doesn't happen this time if 2006 2026, in fact, is the year where you finally want to change your life, get this sorted, and start making your health and fitness a priority. So number one is that you have to take action. By action, I mean you have to do something in order to create that change.
Jake:In order to get the outputs that you desire, you have to take action on the inputs. Those inputs could be exercise, could be sleep, could be the way you eat, it could be recovery, it could be how you spend your time. But the most important thing is that you take some kind of action. Procrastinating, putting it off, putting excuses in the way, however valid they feel, your goals do not care whatsoever about your excuses or your reasons that it's not going to work for you this time around. If you generally want to make a change and see the results that you want, you need to take action, not just for a day, not just for a week, not just for a month, not just for a year, but for the rest of your life.
Jake:And we'll come to that shortly. Now, once you're taking action, you need to make sure that those actions that you're taking actually align with the goal that you want to achieve. So if, for example, you decide my action is that I'm going to start running three times a week, but your goal is to build some muscle, get stronger, and have a leaner physique, then that running is just going to be like running straight into a brick wall. It's not actually going to move you any closer to your goal other than the fact that you are building some kind of proactive habit, right, some positive habit. But the actual action itself is not actually aligned with the outcomes that you want.
Jake:So whilst it checks off step one, which is take action, it doesn't actually check off step two, which is align the approach with the goals that you want to achieve. Just in the same way, if you wanted to lose body fat, for example, or lose weight, you have to reduce the amount that you're eating in some way or another versus if you want to gain weight, you have to increase the amount that you're eating. So it's kind of easy to see it with diet, but we often get a bit confused when it comes to training or exercise, making sure that the approach that we want is aligned with our goals. And we could also add into there what's the optimal approach for that too. Because let's say you want to lose some body fat, you wanna look a bit leaner, you wanna be a bit more athletic, And you take up the running.
Jake:Well, running can get you there, but it's not going to be as effective as strength training or combining it with strength training. So you can see how the approach is really, really important. Just in the same way, if you wanted to get fitter and be able to run a marathon, doing solely mobility is not gonna help you get there either. So aligning that approach and the actions you're taking with the goal and the outcome that you want to see. Now once you have a right the right approach and you're taking action, you wanna make sure that you're actually pushing yourself hard enough.
Jake:What I mean by that is that your body will only adapt to the stimulus that you are placing upon it. That is really the nature of getting stronger, building muscle, getting faster, getting fitter, getting leaner. Your body is adapting to a set of actions, set of behaviors that you are placing upon it. Now if you are not telling your body that we need to adapt and we need to evolve, aka actually training within your means or eating within your means, what we might call maintenance, then your body is not actually going to be stimulated, and it's not going to adapt to adjust to that change. So a great example for this is, let's say, push ups.
Jake:Let's just take push ups for an example. And let's say your goal is to get stronger and build some muscle. If your current ceiling, so let's say the most push ups you can do is 15, and if you know anything about me, you might be thinking 15 is not very many. Well, if you do push ups properly, 15 can be more than enough, but that's another conversation. Let's say we do 15 push ups.
Jake:That's your ceiling. But every workout, you get down and you kind of go through the motions. You do nine. You do 10. Never really reaching that point where you're struggling or it's hard work, then your body's not gonna really adapt.
Jake:And all you're really doing is just using a little bit of energy, which in some seasons is absolutely fine, and we'll we'll come to that when it comes to consistency. But if you actually wanna see those changes, you need to regularly be telling your body, like, we need change. We need to seek that discomfort. And I would add that discomfort, that feeling of discomfort, not pain, not absolute exhaustion, but just mild discomfort and maybe a bit stronger discomfort once in a while, that is one of the best possible indicators that you are actually stimulating change in your body. So it could be something that's more habit based, like, right, that waking up at five a.
Jake:M. Because that hour is the best hour or opportunity you have to do your workout. Or maybe it's something more direct, like that bit of hunger on an evening because, yeah, your body is utilizing its fat reserves for energy and you are losing weight. Or maybe it's that last couple of reps that you grind out and your muscles are then going, we need to grow, we need to adapt, we need to get stronger so we can handle this stimulus in the future. And that when you think about it, that's really all making progress and improving your health, your fitness, your physique is.
Jake:It's just telling your body we need to be better in order to handle this stressor in the future. So make sure you're pushing yourself. I can't tell you the number of people let's say you just go into a normal commercial gym and the number of people that are in there for an hour, ninety minutes, and they spend half the time chatting, they just sit on the machine and just do a few reps, go around each machine. They're really doing very, very, very little. The time that they spend in there is just a lot of junk time.
Jake:And if you actually looked at the stimulating work time that they put in, you would find it's a very, very small amount of time. So make sure that you are pushing yourself very, very regularly. The next one is perhaps the most important, and I would consider my specialty, which is consistency. None of this matters if you cannot continually do it time and time again forever. I was going to say a period of time, but ideally, we want to do this forever, right?
Jake:If we want the results to last, we need to continue taking the action. That is a fact of life. So what does it take to actually be consistent? Well, let's just go back to that definition. Consistency is someone's ability or record of taking the same actions time and time again over a period of time.
Jake:That is what consistency is. Inconsistency is a person's inability to take action time and time again over a period of time. And I think, from my experience, it's the thing that people really, really struggle with the most. People find a good plan. They start taking action.
Jake:They push themselves. They align it with what they want to achieve, but then they struggle to be consistent because something throws them off. They have a busy day, the kid's sick from school, have some work runs over, whatever it is, but they struggle to be consistent and they fall off. Whether that's in the short term, just not really doing enough in the week, or whether it's in the long term, they stay consistent for a few weeks and then they fall off. The key to consistency, I've broken it down to three main things from my experience.
Jake:The first one is building your plan for your worst days. Now, what I mean by that is that if your plan only works on your best days, so a day where you have loads of time to train, you can make perfect meals, you're not going to get pulled away, you're not stressed, you sleep well, then it's not a plan that's going to survive real life. Now this isn't to say that you shouldn't aim high and have contingency plans for the good days, but it's to make sure that your plan can survive those best days those bad days, for example, or those busy seasons. Because for successful people with families and busy careers or businesses, you're going to have a lot more busy hard days than you are days where everything's clear and everything goes to plan. So does it make sense to plan for the minority or plan for the majority?
Jake:And, of course, the answer is plan for the majority. So we want to make sure that your plan can work on one of those really, really, really busy weeks. Like, what does that minimum viable action look like? And then build your plan around that. So what most people do is they build a plan around the best day.
Jake:So it's the ninety minute workout six times a week. It's the perfect plan where all the meals are cooked at home and perfectly clean ingredients. That was in apostrophes if you were just listening. And that can fall apart so, so easy. What I suggest is that we build it the other way.
Jake:So we go, okay, thirty minutes, three times a week, we have a few principles that we live by in terms of nutrition. And then, obviously, we can always aim higher than that on those good days, on those easier days. We can make that workout forty five minutes. We can add that extra workout in. But the benefit of this is mostly mindset based because when we have a really hard plan to actually stay consistent with, when we miss it or we fall short, we feel like we've failed.
Jake:What do we do when we feel like we've failed? We beat ourselves up. We self sabotage. We quit. We give up.
Jake:We tell ourselves what's the point that we failed. Whereas if we actually hit our targets every single week or we overexceed our targets, we've got a learner driver in the middle of the road, we feel good about ourselves. It keeps the fire alive. We stay motivated, and we actually go, wow, This was actually a really successful week. I didn't only just hit my targets, but one of the days on that thirty minute workout, I actually did an hour because I had more time.
Jake:And I actually managed to cook all my meals from scratch six days out of 10. So it's all it is is really a mindset shift, but it allows you to take consistent action, continually hit the mark, keep that motivation and that fire alive, and most importantly, not fall into that trap of telling yourself that you failed or that you haven't kept your promises to yourself or feeling guilty and then ending up either self sabotaging or quitting. So all it is is a simple trick to actually build for those worst days rather than the best days so that you can stay on track and actually stay really, really, really consistent. The second thing is being flexible. And this is something that we talk about again and again and again within Vibrant People, and you may have heard me talk about it on some of my channels before.
Jake:Now flexibility does not mean being able to touch your toes or fold in half like a pretzel, but what it means is your ability to actually adapt to changes in circumstance. So that circumstance could be time, it could be energy, it could be location, it could be external demands, could be appetite. And actually going, there is no such thing as a perfect plan, and a rigid plan is a plan that's fragile. A rigid plan is a fragile plan. A flexible plan is a strong, robust plan.
Jake:So what I mean by that is what happens when you plan to train at 5PM after work, work runs over, it ends up being a ten hour day, and you get home late. The rigid plan would go, oh, you missed your workout. You haven't got the sixty minutes. It hasn't gone to plan. What's the point?
Jake:Do nothing at all. Whereas the flexible plan goes, okay, cool. Let's just do fifteen minutes. Let's use what we have available. Let's see this as an opportunity.
Jake:Let's see this as a glass half full rather than a glass half empty and actually make the most of the situation. Another example could be, oh, my intention was to cook dinner cook lunch at breakfast time and take it into work so that I knew exactly what was in it. But it was a really busy morning. I had to do the school run. I woke up a bit late.
Jake:It was really busy, so I didn't have time to do it. And now I've got to get lunch out. Or what's the point? I'll just make the worst possible choice. Instead of going, okay, cool.
Jake:Like, what's the best choice I can make within this situation? So that is flexibility in action. It could also be, usually, I love to train in the gym, but I've got home late and I'm just gonna do a workout on the kitchen floor. That is flexibility in practice, and flexibility is a superpower for busy people, and it will be the thing that allows you to stay super, super, super, super, super consistent and never fall off track because there is always a positive action that can be taken, whatever the situation is. And then the third and final thing is just really understanding that there are going to be seasons in your life.
Jake:There's going to be seasons where you feel like you can push. Maybe it's time. Maybe it's external circumstances like the age of your kids or the way that work is at the moment or the way that you just feel. Maybe it's your energy, your mindset. There's going to be seasons that allow you to push, really strive for growth, take things to the next level.
Jake:But then there's going to be seasons where it's really hard, where life feels full, where everything's busy, everything feels against you, you're stressed, you're tired, everyone's vying for your attention. Now, the most important thing to recognize with those seasons is, first, that they both exist for everyone. And secondly, that they both require action, but it is not the same action. Because what most people do is that scenario a, the good season, they push. They get results.
Jake:Great. Fantastic. And then scenario B comes around, the hard season, and they just go completely off track. No training, no nutrition knowledge at all, no self care, no sleep, and they just go completely off plan. What you need to realize is that season b is actually just a place where you need to just hold the line.
Jake:You don't have to rise to those standards that you had in scenario a. You can almost have like a fallback plan, which is, right, this is a really busy period. What is that minimal what are those minimal viable actions that I need to take every single week just to hold the line here and come out of this season, at the very least exactly where I went in rather than feeling that every time you come out of one of those seasons, you're back to the beginning, and it's just a grind to get back to where you started. Imagine how good that would feel. So that really comes through two things.
Jake:There's obviously a practical side of, like, what does that look like on one of those busy seasons and what does it take for me to hold the line. But I would say more than anything, it's just a mindset thing. It's just about going having that perspective of actually accepting that those seasons exist, and it's totally fine. Like, you don't need to be pushing all the time. It's totally normal to have seasons that are just about holding the line and maintaining where you're at.
Jake:Now, the final thing is one that's really, like, not talked about very often, and it kind of seems obvious, but it's enjoyment. Because you can be taking action. It can be aligned with the goals that you want to achieve, and you're getting the results. You can be consistent. You can be pushing yourself.
Jake:But if you're not actually enjoying it, how long is it going to last? Now, enjoyment is a tricky one because it can kind of affect all of those variables because you might want to build muscle, get stronger, be leaner, be more athletic, but you really just hate lifting weights or you hate doing bodyweight training, you hate watching your nutrition. Now, that's a tricky situation to be in because the thing that you do find you enjoy might not be very aligned with the actual results that you want. And the thing that I recommend is really trying to find where the enjoyment comes from for you and also, like, mixing things up, not in a way to make it novelty all the time, but in the sense of, okay, cool. I enjoy playing football, but really my goal is to be strong and build muscle.
Jake:Then it's kind of like finding a balance between the two. Right? What does that actually look like in a week? And people parking in the middle of the road. What does that actually look like in a week, and how can you balance the two so that the maybe the training side doesn't feel so monotonous and boring and you still get a taste of the football to keep you activated and keep you motivated and engaged in what you're doing?
Jake:The other thing is actually thinking about, like, which part do you enjoy? Maybe you enjoy the community side. Maybe you do enjoy, like, training. You feel like the feel of it. You like the results.
Jake:You like the way it makes you feel. So really trying to, like, figure out where does the pleasure come from for you and just really like doubling down on that. And obviously, if you can get yourself to a point where you enjoy the whole process, you enjoy the training itself, you enjoy the way that you eat, you enjoy the feeling in the short term and the long term, you enjoy the results that you get, then obviously you can then get to a point where this can feel completely effortless. And really that is the dream, right? To be able to have the give the inputs that you enjoy and have the output that you feel amazing, but it just feels normal.
Jake:It feels effortless. It feels like it's on autopilot and it's just part of everyday life. Because at the start, yes, change requires some discomfort and it's going to feel different and it's going to require effort. But trust me on this, if you are consistent long enough, you obviously start getting results and you actually enjoy it as well in some way or another. This will become very, very easy for you.
Jake:I promise you that. There's still going to be hard days. Don't get me wrong. But when you've experienced the joy that it brings to your life, you are never going to want to quit. And you're actually going to feel worse when you don't take those positive actions for yourself.
Jake:And from working with thousands of clients now, that's one of the things I hear so often, and I love to hear it, is after being with us for six months, eight months, twelve months, they might have a week off and they're so eager to get back to it because they actually notice how bad it feels not to be eating well, not to be training, not to be prioritizing their sleep. So it goes in the opposite direction where the struggle is actually not doing it versus actually doing it. So, guys, I want you to take those things into this year coming up, 2026. If you are deciding that this is the year where you're gonna make the change to your life. I'll just run through them again quickly as a summary.
Jake:Take action. Align the actions with the outcomes or the goals or the results that you want to see. Push yourself. Discomfort is the best indicator of change. Stay consistent by making the plan work on your busiest weeks, being flexible day to day, and also recognizing that there are seasons to push and there are seasons to hold the line.
Jake:And then finally, over time, find the joy in what you're doing, whether that's the actual approach you take, taking joy from the feeling, from the results, experimenting, seeing it as fun rather than seeing it as torture. So I really hope that's going to help you get a solid plan together that actually lasts this year. And if you want any help building that plan, you can just DM me the word ACTION, and I'll drop you a message, and we can have a chat about how that might work. Take it easy, guys. Have a great new year, and I'll see you on the next one.