12 Week Transformation

12-WEEK HUMAN UPGRADE COURSE 

As a group of trainers we have quite a few decades of experience of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to health, fitness and performance. Let’s just say we’ve been around the training, nutrition and coaching block… a few times. 

Over the last 11 years of helping people achieve results at The Yard and doing our yearly transformation challenge we’ve had the time to reflect and evaluate what works and what doesn’t, what separates those who get and keep results and those who don’t.  

It’s become glaringly obvious that transformation challenges, following super strict diets aren’t the best. Yes they may be great for helping people drop body fat quickly and yes they can set the rare individual up for long term success, but honestly almost everyone who manages to lose a lot of fat, puts it back on within a few months of their challenge. 

You see when you do a challenge chasing as fast fat loss as possible your relationship with food becomes too black and white, you’re either dieting or not dieting. Approaching food like this creates a warped eating psychology that leads to an endless physique yoyo which is very unbalanced and unhealthy. This negative relationship with food can all ultimately lead to the idea of trying to get in shape becoming a stressor, exacerbating the whole situation.

So if a very restrictive rapid challenge style approach doesn’t work for long term sustainable results… what does? 

We’ve learnt that sorting out your relationship with food by systematically improving your eating behaviors bit by bit works best. Learning and slowly adopting eating behaviors that allow you to eat healthier foods in the right amount in a step-by-step fashion is the way to go. By doing this you allow healthy yet realistic eating to ultimately become a lifestyle, which long term is obviously the best way to approach eating for health, performance, aesthetics and sustainable results.

Changing your eating behaviors, educating yourself about healthy nutrition and following a personalized dietary approach that allows you to keep adherence to that way of eating can lead to you getting the results you want and actually keeping them!

But even if you changed your eating habits there’s a big chance you wouldn’t truly succeed in your quest to a leaner, healthier, upgraded you! Why? Well because eating healthy is only one aspect that you need to improve when it comes to your health and fitness results. 

You’ve probably heard the saying “you are what you eat” sure… but you are also a product of “how you think”. Thoughts become actions, then habits and ultimately the way you live your life out.

Mindset and your headspace probably play the biggest role in terms of what you are able to achieve or not. You have to work on your mental game if you want to succeed. Just like you need to improve bad eating habits, you need to address the bad mental habits, the thinking and words that can be detrimental to your results. Just like with nutrition changing one’s mental approach is best done by improving your mental approach bit by bit step by step.

Wait but there’s more…

You’ll get a long way improving your mindset and eating but you’ll get so much further if you also take the time to strategically improve your training approach. Just like the black and white mentality perpetuated through “challenge” style dieting can destroy your long-term relationship with food, it can have the exact same effect on your relationship with training. Developing an all or nothing inconsistent relationship with exercise is common. The goal should be to allow training to become something you enjoy as part of your lifestyle, finding the right balance of enough, but not too much!

It goes without saying that the way you train plays a huge role in terms of your health and vitality. But there’s more to the equation when it comes to strength, fitness and physique changes. You have to understand and manage recovery. Over our years we’ve realized that most people tend to actually get their “dosing” wrong and do not benefit as much as the can from training because of their “more is better” approach. Yes, if you hardly train, more is usually better, but for a lot of people who train regularly, more is actually often worse as they add more stress to their systems than they are actually capable of recovering and benefiting from. You need to become aware of your recovery capabilities managing stress and recovery, especially in the fast paced, pressure bubble of Johannesburg!

As you can see real results involve multiple facets. If you truly want to get meaningful long-lasting results during your health and fitness journey you need to holistically work on all the components that impact it. All the components work together and you can’t leave one out. 

Because of this we have decided to no longer do body transformation challenges. We have upgraded our approach as we look to bring you a more complete and effective way to really get and keep results. 

Instead of a 12-week transformation challenge we will now be doing a 12-WEEK HUMAN UPGRADE COURSE. The course will help educate you as you develop lasting habits and behavior changes in all 4 of the key components we’ve mentioned. 

The course has been developed to help you improve in the 4 key areas:

THINK – Improving your mental game

EAT – Developing healthy eating behaviors and a long term individual nutrition strategy 

TRAIN – Developing effective training behaviors and the right relationship with exercise

RECOVER – Managing recovery and stress correctly 

WHAT DOES THE COURSE INCLUDE:

-Unlimited group training sessions

-Easy to digest weekly teachings via email

-Weekly tasks to implement via email

-Bi-weekly trainer check-ins and assessments in person