How I Transformed My Life: The Story Behind Transformation Fit

In this powerful and deeply personal episode, Transformation Fit founder Josh reveals the pivotal experiences that led him from teenage rebellion, mental health struggles, and prison, to becoming an award-winning fitness entrepreneur. Josh candidly shares how fitness, mentorship, and mindset shifts completely transformed his life, providing listeners with actionable insights on overcoming adversity, harnessing accountability, and finding life-changing mentors.

Structured Show Notes:

• Introduction: Understanding why I started Transformation Fit.
• Early Struggles: How losing sports led to escalating trouble and mental health challenges.
• Rock Bottom: Arrest, imprisonment, and the critical turning point.
• The Transformative Process: How training, meditation, and psychological tools reshaped my mindset.
• Life After Prison: First mentor, apprenticeship, and the importance of belief.
• Building Transformation Fit: Achieving national recognition and training over 1000 clients.
• Key Lessons: Why you'll never feel ready, the benefits of embracing risk, and the undeniable power of mentorship and coaching.

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Transcript

Hey guys, welcome back to episode two of the podcast. Today we're going to cover a question which gets asked quite frequently and has been asked hundreds of times since I started transformation fit around 10 years ago. And that is what made you open a gym in the first place. And I guess to fully understand the motivations, we'd have to go back to when I was growing up. I was always a sporty kid. I was into football and athletics, but around about the age, I would say around 13, I started going off the rails. I was always fairly naughty, I would say school didn't really fit me and my personality, unfortunately. It's not that I was daft or anything like that. It's just that I didn't get much mental stimulation from sitting in a room all day being spoken to. And I guess that started to take a turn for the worse around age 13 because I started to become a lot more disruptive around that age. Hormones, et cetera. I think that all played apart. But ultimately I stopped playing sports. I stopped competing and I think that that exacerbated the issues that I was experiencing back then. You can't see the wood for the trees sometimes when you're going through a bit of a crazy period, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can definitely pinpoint that time when I stopped playing sports, exercising and those issues that I was experiencing getting worse. This continued throughout my teen years. I was always getting suspended from school, getting into trouble. I got my first criminal record when I was around 13, I believe. And later on there was around about an 18 month period where I got expelled from school. I enrolled onto a college cost post-16, quit that. It was having lots of issues at home through being a naughty boy and ultimately got arrested twice during that period of time as well. And I ultimately paid for the pay the price for this reckless period because around about age 18, I spent some time in prison and this was all due to the fact that I couldn't manage my mental health appropriately. And I wasn't kind of sat around getting anxious or depressed, although those symptoms were definitely theretime. It was more just dysfunction. I would see red quite often. I had a mentality where it was everybody else's fault and I didn't accept responsibility for things myself. And that ultimately culminated in me uh getting arrested for getting in a drunken fight in town. I think it was like the second time I'd ever been out in town and uh getting arrested for that and later on being sentenced two time in prison forat. So, as you can imagine, that was obviously a very stressful period of time, not just for me. It's probably worse for my family, my mum specifically as well, as you can imagine. But what happened to me once I got over the initial, oh, this isn't my fault, this is unfair, period, which probably lasted about two or three weeks, I would say, in into my prison sentence. Once I got over that initial response and I started to accept responsibility for probably the first time in my life, I started to look at ways that I could improve not just my mental state, but also my physical state as well. And I was always super skinny when I was a teenager and the first thing that I thought was right, I'm going to go to the gym. So I started going to the gym. I started exercising on a regular basis because I was sent to prison for what would be classified as a violent offense for having a fight. I also qualified for it was like a psychology and the management course and that was fantastic. They gave me a process which taught me how to take the automatic thoughts, which I would normally experience, accept them as true and then instantly react on those forts as if they were true. They taught me a process of how to acknowledge the automatic thought that popped up in my head and journal how that made me feel journal what reaction I did after that automatic for, and then what I could have done differently. And that process was transformative. That, alongside the training, I started to experience and dabble with meditation. I also started reading books. That whole period of time, I was able to completely transform my mindset and coming out of that, you know, a difficult period in my life, I'd never felt so good about myself. And when you come out of prison, you have to sign up at a place called probation. It's kind of like they check in on you on a weekly basis. You have to go and see them. You have to talk about what you want to do with your life, your career, et cetera. And it's a way of integrating you back into society. Through that probation service, I was able to enroll onto a level two fitness instructor course. I wanted to share the power of exercise with other people and learn more about that for my own benefit as well. and they are also able to get me some work experience at a local gym and that allowed me to meet my first mentor. And this gym was the warehouse gym in Leicester. There's a guy there called Lynton, who owned that gym. He took me on when I came out of prison, gave me an apprenticeship, taught me a lot about training and he really pushed me out of my comfort zone to be able to go and strive for things and he made me do things that I didn't think I could do and he must have seen something in me which I couldn't quite see in myself. and over a number of years of training, learning from him and him introducing me to other people who could help benefit me, I was able to gain a lot of skills. We won awards at the National Fitness Awards. I started working with clients. I trained athletes, I learned from some really successful people in the industry and ultimately I became a self-employed personal trainer around about age 19 and things took off pretty quickly to be fair. Within a couple of years of doing that, I was able to open the gym with the help of Lynton, my mentor. He gave me the belief that I could go and do it. And I went and done it. I didn't feel ready to do it, but he believed in me and I thought well, if he thinks I can do it, then I must be able to do it. So I went along and I did it and that was back in 2015 so that's almost 10 years ago now. and there's a lot of that's happened since that point, right? We've hired multiple members of staff. When I check my CRM this morning, we trained over a thousand people in the gym joining that time from professional athletes all the way up to Grandmas in their 80s, who have had multiple spinal surgeries. And I'm very proud to say that we've got a really successful team and we've helped change their lives of so many people. And that's been incredibly rewarding for me. It's something that I take a lot of pride in, but I'm still ambitious and I'm still hopeful for the future and there's been a lot of lessons that have been learned over that time, right? I think that some of the key lessons which may or may not be a benefit to you listening to this now, would be you'll never feel ready to start. If you're thinking about making a big change in your life, you're thinking about transforming your life. I don't think you'll ever feel ready to start. And the parents who are listening to this will understand this as well because I don't think you're fully prepared ever to have a child as well. But you do it, you learn on the job and you learn quickly. and I think that sometimes having a bit of jeopardy, having a bit of risk gets the best out of people. And I would say that's definitely true for me. Jeopardy and risk get the best out of me for sure. It helps me to operate at a higher level, so sometimes that accountability, that risk, putting that pressure on yourself, that can help you get the best out of yourself. And I guess the final lesson would be the power of mentors. I've had many mentors over my life and my career. We speak about Lynton, who took me on when I first came out of prison. There was a guy called Mike Sweeney, who taught me pretty much everything I knew about nutrition around about eight to ten years ago. That accelerated my results, but I was able to go to my clients as a guy called Nicky Sehgal, who mentored me with my business and taught me about sales and how to open the studio. And there's been many, many more. But if you're listening to this and you're struggling with achieving a goal right now, finding a mentor, somebody who can expedite that process of getting from A to B can be truly transformative and I'm a massive believer in coaching. I'm a massive believer in mentorship. So that would be my final lesson to you guys. Can you find yourself a mentor that can help you get from where you are now to where you want to be? That'll be it for today, guys. Take care and I'll speak to you soon.

• Fitness transformation
• Mental health and exercise
• Overcoming adversity
• Personal growth podcast
• Fitness mentorship
• Entrepreneur journey
• Mindset coaching
• Leicester gym
• Transformation Fit podcast
• Fitness entrepreneurship