Aspiring fitness coach takes on million-kilo weight challenge for Movember

Joey Jones, 30, from Murrayfield in Edinburgh, hopes to lift 1,277,125kg which he said is the estimated combined weight of all men who killed themselves in the UK between 2021 and 2023.

He is aiming to raise £6,870 from this challenge, to take his overall total to £10,000 for Movember, a charity which raises awareness and funds for men’s mental health, suicide prevention and prostate and testicular cancer, and marks 21 years this November.

Mr Jones was inspired to take on the challenge to honour the men who died and to overcome his mental health issues after he was sexually assaulted 10 years ago in South Africa where he was pursuing a rugby career.

“For 10 years I’ve struggled with mental health off the back of being sexually assaulted when I was 20 years old,” he told the PA news agency.

“I’ve always struggled with it. I’ve been trying to find a way through, trying to find a way to turn that difficult situation, difficult thing in my life, into something positive.”

Mr Jones will use five different exercises – the 100kg deadlift, 80kg squat, 70kg bench press, 60kg bent over row and 40kg push press – as he tries to complete 20,040 reps during the month.

He will train every day apart from three rest days across the month, and on the final day of November he will attempt a triple marathon covering 26.2 miles each on a ski ergometer, a rowing machine and a bike.

Mr Jones collected data from the Office for National Statistics and the National Records of Scotland to find out how many men died by suicide between 2021 and 2023.

He combined these numbers with statistics from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency for 2022.

“My world is in the gym, so I thought, how can I bring those statistics into into my world? I had the idea of, ‘What if all those men were stood on the scale together? How much would they weigh?’,” he said.

“I wanted to stop wasting my time, and the depression and mental health problems I’ve had and the trauma I’d be dealing with, it just consumed the last 10 years of my life,” he said.

“I thought, I need to act on this and not let the past define me any more.”

Mr Jones said he did not speak about his experience of sexual assault until seven years after the incident and in 2021 opened up to his girlfriend at the time.

He said she encouraged him to talk about the incident with his family.

“Slowly but surely, through Movember, it massively helped my own mental health because I was trying to raise money and awareness, but also naturally opening up about my own mental health for the first time to a wider audience,” he said.

“My life considerably changed from that first conversation I had with with my ex-girlfriend.

“The first words are always the hardest, but once you manage to find the courage and confidence to speak about your mental health… that darkness just becomes lighter.”

He hopes sharing his story will help men living with mental health issues to have their “first conversation”.

“I want to become the person that I knew I would have needed 10 years ago,” he said.

“Being a young lad and seeing someone post a story about that, to come out and be so open and vulnerable, would have had such an impact on me.

“For anyone who is struggling out there, you’re not alone. I hope if people hear my story that will give them some encouragement of where they can get to by just having that first conversation.”

To support Mr Jones, visit: https://uk.movember.com/mospace/14314381