Connecting the Dots by The Collective

Anna Yulusova grew up in a family of swimming coaches and was in the water by the age of two. She moved from swimming into pentathlon and then kickboxing, where she won three Russian titles and an Asian championship before stepping away from competition at twenty. She completed a double degree in psychology and international relations, moved to Barcelona without a word of Spanish, and went on to spend twelve years at an American agricultural multinational, latterly as a senior treasury executive covering fifty entities across EMEA.

A restructuring brought her into an outplacement programme and her first experience of executive coaching. Today Anna is an ICF-certified executive coach and mentor working with accomplished women in their forties and fifties as they move through perimenopause and menopause. Her approach treats body and mind as one system, bringing together training, nutrition, stress management and nervous system regulation with the mindset work she developed through her own transformation.

In conversation with Grace McNamara, Anna explains why the strategies that served women for decades often stop working in this season of life, and why eating less and training harder can make things worse. She describes the “I want myself back” moment that brings most clients to her, the 360-style assessment she starts with, and the change that follows once women see the full picture. She also shares a candid story from her time as a manager, when she did not understand what women on her team were going through, and makes the case for companies to support women leaders through menopause so they stay in their roles.

The most personal part of the conversation returns to her father, who was also her coach, and the belief she carried into her forties that love had to be earned through performance. Anna talks about how she unlearned it, what recovery means for an athlete and an executive alike, and why pushing all the time leads to burnout.

In this episode

• Why what worked in your thirties may stop working in perimenopause
• Treating body and mind as one system
• Supporting women leaders through menopause at work
• Recovery as part of performance
• Separating self-worth from achievement

Chapters
00:00 Welcome
00:49 A childhood in the pool
02:50 From pentathlon to kickboxing
04:46 Choosing a future beyond sport
07:04 Studying, loss and a move to Barcelona
09:18 Building an international corporate career
10:56 Restructuring, outplacement and a first coach
13:29 Founding her coaching practice
14:39 Body and mind as one system
16:22 Why she works with women in midlife
18:25 “I want myself back”
20:13 Why pushing harder stops working
24:40 Taking the conversation into corporates
29:24 Teaching in business schools
30:27 Performance, worth and her father’s words
37:02 Collective spotlight
38:58 Close

Collective spotlight
Anna celebrates Mel Robbins for the way she brings everyday, relevant topics to a wide audience with humility. She credits the Let Them Theory and shares how she applied the same idea as a parent before the book was published.

Resources
Connect with Anna Yulusova: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-yulusova-coach/

Hosted by Grace McNamara. Produced by The Collective.

Elite coaching has always been limited by the coach's calendar. Dania Valladares, founder of Agora Fitness and one of the top 20 startups selected at the AI Powered Women 2026 conference at MIT, is building AI agents trained on each coach's own methods. Her aim is for that expertise to reach clients who would never get a slot.

Jen Halsall co-hosts with Nathan Hyland of The Collective. Their guest is a software engineering leader whose career began with a computer science degree in Havana. Dania traces her path from Cuba to Mexico to engineering leadership in the US. She describes how her father's terminal diagnosis, arriving as she was expecting her first child, led her to Ashtanga yoga, meditation and breathwork, and to the mission behind Agora.

The conversation looks at why static PDFs and pre-recorded programmes have been the only way coaches could scale. Dania explains why she sees AI as the next digital surface after websites, social media and apps. She describes how a coach's agent is built from their client notes, programmes and ebooks, and how the agent questions the coach to find gaps in the method. Training, nutrition and biometric data then flow back to the coach, so the method keeps improving.

Jen and Nathan put the questions coaches and operators are asking. What does this mean for gyms where most members never buy personal training? How is quality protected when so much general guidance underserves women? How does a client's context carry across a team of coaches? Where does the agent stop and hand over to a human or a medical professional?

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:10 From Havana to engineering leadership in the US
03:42 A turning point: family, yoga and the mission behind Agora
05:45 The calendar bottleneck for coaches and clients
08:00 Why coaches rarely treat their offer as a product
09:54 AI as the next digital surface for coaching
12:04 What the experience looks like for the client
13:57 Personalisation, cohesion and how a coach's agent is built
17:50 Closing the feedback loop when life gets in the way
19:34 Building a team of coaches with one shared client context
21:16 What it means for gym operators
24:01 Quality control and the gaps in women's health guidance
27:53 Early feedback from coaches
31:28 Rethinking the hours-for-income model and trainer churn
33:48 When you can't make your session
34:22 Adherence and daily conversations with your coach
35:56 Scope of practice, guardrails and handing over to humans
38:05 Building in AI as a woman and Latina founder
40:35 Collective spotlight
41:56 Closing thoughts

Resources
Dania Valladares on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dania-rosa-valladares/
Agora Fitness: https://agora.fitness
The Collective: https://wearethecollective.world
All episodes: https://wearethecollective.world/podcast

Connecting the Dots is the B2B podcast from The Collective, covering women's health, leadership and innovation across fitness, health and wellness.

In the second of two episodes on the fitness professional career path, part of The Collective's What Good Looks Like series, Jen Halsall continues playing boss of the world with Aimee Barry, Chief Operating Officer of Les Mills UK.

Aimee began on the operator side, working in women-only clubs in Australia, before moving to the UK and the supplier side of the industry. Her focus today is bringing more instructors into fitness and building better career pathways for them. She describes a disconnect at the heart of the problem. Operators say they cannot find enough instructors, while instructors say they cannot find the right work.

The conversation covers how people now enter the industry, from freelance routes to the academies that larger operators are building to train members and front-line staff from the ground up. Aimee sets out the foundation every new instructor needs, which is safety and quality, with continuing education built on top. Jen makes the case that education should be matched by progression in pay. Aimee argues that the industry undervalues group exercise because it rarely measures the return a great instructor brings through retention and referrals, and that measuring it is the route to fairer pay.

Jen and Aimee then turn to personal training and make the case for a hybrid fitness professional who teaches groups, trains clients and welcomes members at the door. Aimee describes a class she visited in Japan, where the instructor greeted more than a hundred participants by name and the experience continued over tea afterwards. They also discuss:

• how to make qualification levels meaningful to members
• why fitness departments are often under-resourced compared with operations and sales
• which operators are getting it right

The episode closes with Aimee's plan for a new talent pipeline built with colleges and employers, and her spotlight on a young founder in her team.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome and episode framing
01:06 Aimee's path from operator to supplier
02:06 Why the career path is broken for every stakeholder
03:59 Group fitness vs personal training: what should instructors be paid for?
05:15 New routes in: operator academies and awareness
06:39 Is entry too easy? Safety, quality and continuing education
08:13 Linking education to pay
09:46 Fair pay and the shift to coaching and mind-body formats
11:22 Fitness as a side hustle for Gen Z
13:03 Measuring the return on a great instructor
14:46 What happens when group exercise disappears
17:36 Personal trainers at the front of the class
19:27 Breaking down the silos: the hybrid fitness professional
21:12 Hospitality and the first welcome
23:01 Lessons from a Japanese health club
25:21 Making qualification levels visible to members
29:08 Choice across mid-market and boutique
30:08 Resourcing the fitness department
32:42 Employed and freelance markets
33:43 Flipping the resourcing ratio for retention
34:21 Operators getting it right
36:35 Boss of the world: building a new talent pipeline
39:00 A people industry in the age of AI
39:41 Connecting the dots
41:40 Spotlight on women doing great work
42:33 Close

Resources
Aimee Barry on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aimee-barry-94278128
The Collective: wearethecollective.world
More episodes: wearethecollective.world/podcast

In the first of two episodes on the fitness professional career path, part of The Collective's What Good Looks Like series, Jen Halsall plays boss of the world with Rosanna Tucker, founder and CEO of CoverMe, the workforce operating system built for health and fitness.

Rosanna has worked across the industry as a personal trainer, in sales, as a studio owner and now as a technology founder. She argues that the current system fails instructors, members and operators at once, and that the root cause is disconnection. Fitness professionals move between gyms, brands and roles with nothing that travels with them. Meanwhile, operators who can quote their cost per acquisition in seconds struggle to say who is teaching on Thursday.

Together they take apart the personal training model, from licence fees and commission-only pay to the sales playbooks that sent trainers to wait for members at the changing room door. Rosanna shares CoverMe's research into when members want personal training, which pointed to later in the membership than the traditional first fortnight. They also discuss:

• matching members to trainers by skill rather than availability
• why introductory sessions should be paid
• how a portable, skills-based profile could open up hybrid roles combining group exercise, personal training and new work in recovery, travel and healthcare

On group exercise, the conversation turns to cover gaps, the unpaid hours behind every 45-minute class, and what cancelled classes do to a member's sense of value. Jen proposes a KPI that links class attendance to customer lifetime value. The episode closes with Rosanna's end-to-end design for hiring and developing fitness professionals, and her spotlight on four women shaping the industry.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome and episode framing
00:57 Rosanna's path from personal trainer to tech founder
03:08 Who counts as a fitness professional?
05:09 The red flags: a disconnected career path
08:12 Hybrid roles and the gig economy of group exercise
11:11 The licence model, selling pressure and trainer churn
13:24 Operators can't optimise what they can't see
14:18 The legacy sales playbook
16:58 When should a trainer meet a new member?
21:31 Matching member needs to trainer skills
23:22 Defining personal training and the cost-cutting trap
27:10 Staff churn and competition from longevity and preventative health
28:48 Fixing PT pay in employed and licence models
30:49 Member choice, quality and ratings
33:29 The influence of the freelance team
34:45 Group exercise: cover gaps and invisible preparation
39:57 A KPI for the value of a class
40:39 The hidden cost of cancelled classes
43:24 Boss of the world: designing the role end to end
47:31 Spotlight on women doing great work
50:14 Close

Resources
CoverMe: covermeapp.co
The Collective: wearethecollective.world
More episodes: wearethecollective.world/podcast

Rhea Serna trained in management accounting and spent her early career in bookkeeping and tax. When remote working opened up in 2020 she started picking up operations, systems and communications alongside the admin she had been hired for, and ended up in strategy. She is now a core team member of The Collective, working across several time zones at once.

In this episode she walks Jen Halsall de Wit through the system that keeps it all moving. She writes everything down. She breaks large pieces of work into smaller ones with room left to revise. She sorts a full list by deadline, by impact, and by who else is waiting on her before she touches anything.

She also shares the three questions she asks before taking on a task. Does this need to be done? Does it need to be done by me? Does it need to be done now?

Jen shares her own method for clearing a crowded head, and the two compare notes on what gets them from overwhelm back into function.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:47 From accounting to strategy
04:46 Staying organised without a perfect system
06:58 Urgent, important, or neither
10:01 Much too much muchness
11:59 Brain dumps: notebooks, voice notes and AI
14:01 What to drop, delay or delegate
16:08 Where to start on a very long list
19:08 Wellness, energy and being more than your output
22:06 The next chapter
23:24 Trusting that the dots connect
26:01 Collective spotlight

Connecting the Dots is the podcast from The Collective. New episodes every Tuesday.
https://www.wearethecollective.world/podcast

Connect with Rhea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rheagserna/

Thomas Weidlich is the founder of Noēsis, the Longevity Collective, a peer mastermind for people building in longevity. He returns to Connecting the Dots almost a year after his first appearance to talk about what the collective has become, what he has failed to hand over, and why he is putting 40 people in a room in Budapest with no stage and no keynote speakers.

The middle of the episode is powerful. Weidlich describes spending five days a week alone with his laptop, spiralling on problems he could not solve, and how long it took him to tell his own community that he was struggling with loneliness again. He talks about co-regulation, about what changed within days of asking for help, and about the rational case for speaking up when you are stuck.

He is equally direct about where Noēsis has fallen short. A year in, membership has grown from 12 to nearly 30, but he is still the main builder, the pricing model does not sustain him full time, and the shift from creation to co-creation has not happened. Jennifer Halsall de Wit pushes on why that handover is so difficult for founders.

The Unconference in Budapest is his answer to a different problem. Every conference attendee names the same highlight, and it is never the keynote. So Weidlich has removed the stage entirely. Day one builds connection, day two turns that into work on live problems, day three is designed for integration. A clinician working on trauma healing measurement will take nervous system readings at the start and the end. The cap is 40 people, and he explains why the number is both a design decision and a room size.

On trends, Weidlich points to longevity hospitality as one of the fastest growing sub-sectors, to biotech as the field most likely to deliver interventions that beat the basics, and to the social wellness movement that Othership helped start. He takes on the argument that longevity has already peaked and become a word emptied of meaning. He also makes the case for mental health as the next large opening, with somatic therapy as the bridge between brain and body.

The episode closes with a high frequency human. Weidlich names Melissa Loseke Ablett, a Noēsis member working on peptide regulation and trauma healing.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome back
01:00 A village of 300 and what came after
04:00 The empty space in longevity
06:00 What Noēsis means
07:55 What makes a community a community
12:30 Loneliness, anxiety and co-regulation
15:40 Asking for help when belonging is your business
17:50 Stay stuck or change
20:05 One year in: what has worked
22:40 Creation versus co-creation
27:40 The Unconference in Budapest
29:45 Designing for the in-betweens
33:35 Why the cap is 40
36:35 The conference business model
39:05 Who it is for and how to apply
42:20 Hospitality, biotech and the peak longevity debate
46:45 Making healthy living mainstream
49:20 Overestimating the size of the market
53:20 Designing for people who are not in the marketing
56:25 High frequency human: Melissa Loseke Ablett

Resources

The Unconference, Budapest, 21 to 24 January 2027: https://noesis-longevity.com/unconference

Thomas Weidlich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasweidlich/

Noesis, the Longevity Collective: https://noesis-longevity.com/

Charles Vogl, The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

About Connecting the Dots

Connecting the Dots is the podcast from The Collective, a network of independent consultants working across fitness, wellness, nutrition, technology and supplements. New episodes every Tuesday.

All episodes: https://www.wearethecollective.world/podcast

A doctor can lose her licence for answering a question she is not qualified to answer. On a gym floor, the same answer costs nothing until someone gets hurt.

Dr Ritva Mettänen is an obesity medicine doctor and the founder of the Obesity Coaching Academy. She has been watching conversations happen between trainers and clients that would end a medical career, and she thinks this industry is sitting on a liability waiting to happen.

In this episode we start with the rules inside medicine, because most of us have never seen them up close, and then work out what they should look like for a fitness professional on the gym floor. Ritva walks through the three filters that define scope of practice and why you always work to the narrowest one. She describes the code of conduct as a silent book of rules she carries everywhere, even when nobody is watching. She explains what sits permanently outside a trainer's scope, what opens up as training deepens, and the six rules she would write for this industry, including the no shame rule and a hard boundary around what a member tells you in a session.

She also shares what happened when her own personal trainer told her that starting a weight loss medication was cheating, and what she now sees handed to women in perimenopause who are losing weight quickly on a GLP-1.

For operators, the closing stretch is a practical list. Write the scope down. Have every member of staff read it and sign it. Train everyone who speaks to a member, including the front desk. Build a referral network with real names in it. Document the training with dates. Check what your insurance actually covers.

Chapters

(00:00) A liability waiting to happen
(01:37) Scope of practice through three filters
(04:06) The code of conduct doctors carry
(05:52) How do you learn to know what you don't know
(10:36) Saying I don't know out loud, in practice
(12:30) What sits outside a trainer's scope, always
(15:07) Supplements, hormones and clinical literacy
(15:53) What opens up as training deepens
(17:05) Rent a friend, and the broken chain
(20:32) No profession, no standards, no scope
(22:23) Six rules for a fitness code of conduct
(28:31) When her own trainer called it cheating
(30:55) Keto, perimenopause and bone loss
(33:31) Nutritional dogma on the gym floor
(35:44) What an operator needs in place
(38:44) Insurance, documentation and the paper trail
(42:25) Wearables, claims and public consequence
(44:14) IVs, contrast therapy and recovery
(45:40) Defining the lane, and the upside

Resources

The whitepaper, publishing Thursday 24 September
What Good Looks Like: Designing the Fitness Experience for Obesity and GLP-1 Journeys. A strategic guide for fitness operators designing for members living with obesity and using GLP-1 medications. Co-created by obesity physician Dr Ritva Mettänen, behavioural scientist Dr Lou Atkinson and Jennifer Halsall. Covers the member journey from discovery to retention: the message, the space, the people and the model, plus an operator readiness checklist. Add your email and we will send it to you on the day it publishes.
https://www.wearethecollective.world/what-good-looks-like-glp-1

Ritva at the Health and Fitness Association European Congress, Friday 25 September, 12:15 to 12:45
Prescriptive Exercise and the Integration of Fitness Into Healthcare Models, with Anton Severin, VP Research, Health and Fitness Association. How Sweden, Finland and Spain are integrating exercise prescription into healthcare, and what standards, competencies and partnerships fitness providers need to deliver healthcare level outcomes.

Get in touch with Ritva
Obesity Coaching Academy: https://ocaofficial.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritva-mett%C3%A4nen-md-21b3a6188/
Her article on the same subject: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-would-lose-my-license-advice-your-trainers-give-day-mett%C3%A4nen-md-qgeff/

Connecting the Dots
All episodes: https://www.wearethecollective.world/podcast

Moritz Wessely studied law for four years knowing he would never practise. Then COVID took him out for eighteen months, and the doctors told him chronic was his new baseline. He refused it, went looking for another answer, and found the gut microbiome. The protocol that brought him back became the company he now runs.

In this episode Jen and Moritz get into what the microbiome does beyond digestion, why it is the most individual system in the body, and why two people in the same family can share as little as five per cent of theirs. Moritz explains how Precision Biome treats the microbiome as a data problem rather than a biology one, what the direct to consumer testing industry gets wrong, and why so many high performers with optimised sleep, training and nutrition still hit a wall at four in the afternoon.

There is also a wider conversation running underneath it about what all the optimising is for. Moritz makes the case that better sleep and faster recovery are the means, and that a life lived in flow and aligned with purpose is the end.

The episode closes with two questions submitted by the Collective community: where the microbiome sits in muscle building and healthy ageing, and how much chronic inflammation starts in the gut. Both answers stand on their own as short masterclasses.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome and introduction
00:45 Connect the dots: from law school to microbiome therapies
03:35 Entrepreneurship as a creative act
05:12 Rebels, radicals and building rather than breaking
05:45 Precision Biome and Ravan: what is what
05:53 Long COVID, and refusing chronic as a baseline
07:31 Finding the gut microbiome by accident
10:00 Old wine in new bottles: what long COVID renamed
11:11 Standing on the shoulders of giants: the advisor and the algorithms
12:01 Why your microbiome is more personal than your DNA
13:36 How long recovery took, and what stability looks like
14:46 Digestive health and microbiome health are different things
16:35 What the protocol changes day to day
18:20 How you know what good looks like for one individual gut
19:40 Maintenance when the system regulates itself
21:40 Treating the microbiome as a data problem
25:02 Where the business operates and who it serves
26:44 The high performers who were hitting a ceiling
30:26 Chronic stress as the number one microbiome killer
32:05 Optimisation as a means to an end
35:00 What the Ravan process looks like step by step
37:37 Testing at home, and cooking for two people with different needs
39:15 Pricing, three month cycles and retesting
41:09 Inside the gut testing industry: 16S, shotgun and lab quality
43:30 Why standard reference ranges mislead
46:20 Community question: muscle, sarcopenia and healthy ageing
50:00 Community question: inflammation, the gut barrier and tight junctions
54:26 The next twelve to eighteen months
56:00 Collective spotlight
58:29 Leaning into complexity

ALSO WORTH A LOOK

Dr Andrea Gartenbach, physician working in longevity and lifestyle medicine, adviser to Precision Biome and a personal mentor to Moritz. Moritz describes her as someone who can light up a room and give people their belief in themselves back, alongside the protocol work she does for CEOs and high net worth clients internationally.

Sham Jaff, independent journalist and the writer behind the What Happened Last Week newsletter. Moritz calls it the single source of news he consumes, for the way it holds a balanced and multifaceted picture of global events in a moment when very few outlets manage it.

LINKS

Ravan: https://joinravan.co
Moritz Wessely on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moritz-wessely/
More episodes: https://wearethecollective.world/podcast

Lisa Greenbaum started as a competitive dancer, drifted for a couple of years after university, then got pulled onto a Body Flow training by a group fitness manager who would not take no for an answer. Yoga arrived properly a few years later, when a philosophy text landed in her lap the same season her dad was diagnosed with cancer.

Twenty five years on she is an award winning educator, a certified yoga therapist and the founder of Sangha Yoga Collective, a school built so anyone curious about yoga can take a bite or take the whole whale.

This one is for operators. There is a lot of yoga out there and it is hard to tell what is good from what is not. Lisa walks through how to bring yoga into a club properly, how to hire for it, how to schedule it, and why the recovery programming most operators are pricing up in equipment may already be standing in their studio. We also get into trauma informed training against yoga therapy, why philosophy is the most underrated part of any teacher training, and what Yoga Alliance accreditation does and does not tell you.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: 𝗯𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝗴𝗮 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗹𝘆

1. Hire the way you hire everyone else. Watch them teach. Check where the certification came from, then read the school's curriculum rather than the logo. Check references.
2. Read the curriculum against the eight limbs. Yamas and niyamas, asana, pranayama, and the four limbs covering meditation. Most schools load almost everything onto asana and advanced postures your members will never use.
3. Complement the schedule you already have. If every class on the timetable is high output, the yoga slot is where recovery lives.
4. Programme to the time of day. Strong practice in the morning, down regulating in the evening. A power class at eight at night works against the reason people booked it.
5. Stop calling all of it yoga. Naming every class yoga is like naming every class gym workout. Put the practice on the schedule: yin, restorative, pranayama, meditation.
6. Keep yoga and Pilates apart. Both are excellent, the breath work is not the same thing, and filing them together as mind body tends to lose you one of them.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗟𝗶𝘀𝗮

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagreenbaum/
Sangha Yoga Collective: https://sanghayogacollective.com
Beyond the Pose, pre-order and events: https://sanghayogacollective.com/beyond-the-pose/
Retreats: https://sanghayogacollective.com/yoga-retreats/

𝗔𝗹𝘀𝗼 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸

Beyond the Pose, from Lotus Books and Human Kinetics, out October 2026.
Othership, the Toronto sauna and cold plunge brand.
Believe Safari, running the Kenya retreat.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀

02:26 Welcome
03:48 Connect the dots: from competitive dance to yoga
06:19 The philosophy book that arrived at the worst time
10:57 Designing a school around the person
13:53 The full offering: 200 hour, 300 hour, therapeutic
17:21 The accessibility problem with pricing
21:50 Retreats, and who they are for
28:33 Kenya, safari and a giraffe conservation
30:20 Boss of the world: a club chain wants yoga
32:20 The three step hiring test
33:37 Work out, or work in
34:48 Recovery is already on your schedule
35:20 Ayurveda and programming by time of day
37:42 Yoga is not Pilates
39:17 What yoga is, past asana
43:30 Democratising recovery without the equipment
45:49 Trauma informed and yoga therapy, drawn apart
48:56 Talking about it, holding it in the body
54:19 Telling one 200 hour school from another
59:42 Patanjali, the kleshas and the anxiety spiral
01:02:25 Yoga Alliance and what accreditation is worth
01:05:22 Beyond the Pose
01:08:00 Collective spotlight: Paula Comfort

𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗛𝗢 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗻.

Joanne Groves started out as an actress and has spent the last 30 years working every part of the gym floor. She is a master trainer, educator and one of the industry's most persistent challengers of myth and pseudoscience. Today she builds education for trainers and helps clubs around the world build better businesses.

This conversation is about the people we ask to make everyone else healthier, and what happens when they run out. We define what burnout is and what it is not, why disengagement is the breadcrumb trail that leads to it, and how to spot the early signs in yourself and in your team.

Joanne walks through two real cases. One where curiosity in a room full of staff solved a rota problem nobody had felt safe raising. One where a manager listened for three weeks, then asked for one more client, and lost his best trainer along with her book of clients.

We also sit with the uncomfortable part. Fitness professionals hold all the information and still do not apply it to themselves. Joanne and Jen unpack the role model expectation the industry built on aesthetics, why it has never been a wellness model, and what it costs the people carrying it.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀

00:00 Welcome and why this conversation matters
01:14 A mouse on stage and a sewing machine business
02:41 From drama school to the gym floor
05:01 The moment certainty fell apart
06:12 Fitness as a live behaviour experiment
08:30 How prevalent is burnout in fitness
09:54 Disengagement, and what the data shows
11:37 One in four, and how it shows up on the floor
12:21 What burnout is, and what it is not
14:13 Why Sweden treats it differently
14:54 What fills the cup
17:26 Threshold, emotion and the six seconds after
20:35 Autonomy and the feeling of not being heard
22:52 The shift swap that changed everything
25:23 Building safety when trust is not there yet
27:38 The trainer everyone relied on
29:52 The boundary she could not hold, and what it cost
32:44 Why coaches do not take their own advice
36:27 The role model trap and the industry that built it
40:01 Language, expectations and the stories we tell
42:17 Doing the work on boundaries
44:10 Listening as a trained skill
47:23 The quiet quitter
48:24 Shout-outs

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗝𝗼𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲

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