An aspiring fitness trainer is aiming to lift over a million kilos in a month to raise money for Movember.

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

He aims to raise £6,870 from the challenge to take his grand total to £10,000 for Movember, a charity which raises funds for men’s mental health, suicide prevention and prostate and testicular cancer and turns 21 in November.

Mr Jones was inspired to take up the challenge to honor the men who died and 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 struggled with my mental health because I was sexually assaulted in my 20s,” he told the PA news agency.

“I’ve always struggled with that. I was trying to find a way, 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 – 100kg deadlift, 80kg squat, 70kg bench press, 60kg bent over row and 40kg push press – as he tries to complete 20,040 repetitions during the month .

He will train every day except for three rest days during the month, and on the last day of November he will attempt a triple marathon covering 42.2 miles each on a ski ergometer, a rowing machine and a bicycle .

Mr Jones collected data from the Office for National Statistics and the National Records of Scotland to find out how many men took their own lives between 2021 and 2023.

He combined these figures with the Statistics and Research Agency of Northern Ireland statistics for 2022.

“My world is in the gym, so I thought, how can I bring those stats into my world? The idea came to me: “What if all those men stood on the scale together? How much would it weigh?'” he said.

“I wanted to stop wasting time, and the depression and the mental health issues that I had and the trauma that I would go through, it just consumed the last 10 years of my life,” he said.

“I thought I had to act on it and not let the past define me anymore.”

Mr Jones said he did not speak about his experience of sexual assault until seven years after the incident and that in 2021 he 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 helped my own mental health immensely as I was trying to raise money and awareness but also naturally open up about my own mental health to a wider audience for the first time,” he said.

“My life has changed considerably since the first conversation I had with my ex-girlfriend.

“The first words are always the hardest, but once you can find the courage and confidence to talk about your mental health… that darkness becomes easier.”

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

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

“Being a young person and seeing someone post a story about it, coming out and being so open and vulnerable, would have had such an impact on me.

“For anyone out there struggling, you are not alone. I hope that if people hear my story, it will encourage them to where they can go just by having that first conversation.”