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Former Lioness Jill Scott is one of England’s most decorated football players. The former midfielder had a long and successful stint at Manchester City and represented her country 161 times, contributing to many title victories. The most memorable came in 2022, when she helped lead the Lionesses to Euro glory.
Scott retired from professional football shortly afterwards. Since then, she has become a successful broadcaster and pundit, opened a coffee shop in Manchester and won I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
The shift has come with its challenges, however. “You have to rediscover your purpose, really,” Scott says. “For however many years I was Jill Scott the footballer, and then that goes and you’re only 35 and thinking, ‘Well, this is too early to retire, what am I going to do?’ Sometimes looking on social media you can feel as if you’re doing nothing compared to everyone else.”
But Scott, now 39, is hardly sitting around. Most recently, she has turned her attention to a very British health issue: burying our heads in the sand until something goes wrong. We all know prevention is better than cure, but new research from Holland & Barrett shows that more than half of us admit they listen to their body only when something feels off.
“To me, that’s crazy,” says Scott. “But it’s so easy to wait until something becomes a problem. We all lead such busy lives, and it’s easy to just put things on the back burner. I’ve learnt many lessons during my career, but one of the most important is that if I look after my body now, it’ll stay well for longer. The first step is always good nutrition and movement, even if that means going for an afternoon walk or starting with one minute of running followed by one minute of walking.”
This little-by-little approach seems to have served Scott well as she has adjusted to a new way of life outside the disciplined confines of professional football. Establishing a regular exercise regime has been a rude awakening after years of intense training. “I feel like I had to apologise to the whole nation for being like, ‘Why don’t people go to the gym and look after themselves?’” she says. “When people are working in full-time jobs and have to look after kids, it’s just so difficult to prioritise your health.”
The key to a sustainable fitness plan, Scott says, is maintaining that gradual mindset. “It’s best to think, ‘You know what, I’ll try to do a couple of things this week.’ Then if that’s going well, maybe I’ll add something else to it. You can’t go from not having a good diet or exercising to being a new person tomorrow. If you try that, I guarantee you’ll do it for two weeks then you’ll just go back to how you were.”
As for her own regime, Scott is taking a “bit of a rest” after completing a Sport Relief challenge in June. She raised more than £470,000 by running and cycling 388 miles from Wembley Stadium to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light. “It was the first time I’d learned to cycle properly, so I’m going to keep that up, plus a couple of runs a week,” she says. “I have a few niggly injuries from football, so I have to be a bit careful with running, but that’s where you can bring in alternative training.”
The benefits of exercise go beyond the physical, of course. “I’ve realised how much good sport was doing for me, mentally as well as physically,” says Scott. “Since retiring, I realised how much I overthink. When I was playing, I was so busy and exercising, it would stop it from happening. If you’ve got anything on your mind, something as simple as getting out for a run lets you think it through and you come back feeling better.” It’s hard to think of a simpler case for prevention over cure than this.
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