Start-up Guide
Welcome, and we are so excited you are here! Give yourself a self-high five for taking the first steps in owning your life. We wanted to provide you with a solid place to start your journeys, and hopefully, a resource that you can reference back when you have questions. Let's get started!
DDPY’s Three Pillars
DDPY is designed with the understanding that physical and mental well-being work together, equally, to create long-lasting improvement. Keeping these in mind throughout the challenge will set you up for success! In order to have the most success in this challenge, we want to highlight three important principles guiding our program:
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FITNESS
DDPY Workouts combine yoga positions, sports rehab therapy, old-school calisthenics, and dynamic resistance. Yes, we're way more than just Yoga! Our workouts strengthen muscles, ligaments, and tendons while stabilizing core muscles, increasing flexibility, agility, and balance. All this while delivering a great cardio workout with minimal joint impact.
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NUTRITION
We believe no transformation is complete or sustainable without a balanced eating lifestyle. We offer guidance that will help you commit to healthy eating habits and food combinations that work for you. Commitment is the key! After all, the most effective healthy diet for you is always the one that's easiest to stick with for the long haul.
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MINDSET
When it comes to achieving your fitness goals, mindset is key. It can help you stay motivated, push through challenges, and maintain a positive outlook. Whether it's shifting your focus from weight loss to overall health or embracing the process rather than just the end result, a mindset change can increase your chances of success.
Getting Started
Now that we covered our core focuses for the challenge, how do you get started? The best place to start is the DDPY App! If you are a new user, the User Guide section is a great resource for app navigation, workout and nutrition basics. Plus, this is one of the places you will find DDP's favorite section: THE LIST!
Start with “The List"
The List provides lots of helpful resources and education on all things mindset, food and goal setting, getting you ready for the change that will happen in your life. All the information was personally curated by Diamond Dallas Page himself, specially for the challenge, there are two sections we want to focus on getting done as soon as you start DDPY: determining your WHY and completing your SMACKDOWN goals.
Personal Inspiration
Why did you decide to start DDPY and Own Your Life? Write it down and keep your “Why?” close so you can read it every time your commitment needs a spark. There’s no better way to give yourself a kick in the pants than remembering the most important reason you committed to a healthier life. Finding your “Why?” can help keep you accountable and its a good thing to reference when you need some extra inspiration.
Pro tip! Video your “Why?”
A powerful new way our DDPY community has been able to document their “Why?” is by recording a short video with them sharing and explaining their Why! It's a great way to document where you started in your journey and to really get to tell YOUR story.
Don’t Just Think It. Ink it!
After writing down (or recording) your Why, list out everything you want to achieve on your DDPY journey. Writing your goals down can help keep you on the path of success, make them less scary. Just think SMACK! Make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Realistic, and Achievable, then Keep going!
Writing down your goals helps you clarify what you want to achieve and why it's important to you. It also serves as a roadmap to keep you focused and motivated, and it allows you to track your progress and celebrate your wins along the way. Finally, it helps you stay accountable to yourself and your commitments. Overall, writing down your goals is a powerful tool for achieving success and personal growth.
Documentation
Documenting your journey from start to finish is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Looking back at where you came from is a powerful motivation to maintain healthy fitness and nutrition habits for the rest of your life.
At the end of the challenge, you will need to turn in video and picture documentation of your journey. For your final submission, we will ask for your best 6-month beginning and end comparison pictures and for a 3-minute video summarizing your journey. Document as much as possible of your journey! You will need these when getting all your materials ready for submission.
Pictures
You will need to take your 6 staring pictures, as a way to have a baseline of your progress. Trust us, you will want to have these! And if you are nervous about this step, just remember what DDP likes to say "What makes a really good after? A really sh**ty before!" So don't worry about where you are now, just about where your journey will take you.
Use these examples of good documentation from our very own instructor Josh Nair as reference:
Front
Side
Standing Fold Forward
Catcher
Seated Fold Forward
Round House
Tips for getting your best 6 pictures:
Things to do:
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When taking pictures remember "T to T": Take pictures from Top of the head to Tips of the toes.
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Have a clean background. Even if you can't avoid furniture and have to make a small space work, make sure the space behind you isn't distracting or pulls focus
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Consistent lighting between pictures is amazing, so try to make your lighting look similar in your before and after if you can!
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Taking pictures in the same/similar locations for your before and afters is a great way to show progress.
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Have someone else take your pictures or set up a way to take them yourself with either a photo timer in a propped location or a tripod.
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DDP LOVES seeing people take their 6 pictures with a newspaper in frame. It helps us easily timestamp and verify the start date of your challenge. It's not required, but who doesn't want to do what Dallas recommends for success?!
Things not to do:
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Try not to take pictures where your whole body is not visible. We need to see your body from the top of your head to the tip of your toes.
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Try not to have pictures with messy or distracting backgrounds. Keep it simple and clean.
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Have dim lighting makes it hard to see you. We want to clearly see your starting point and so will you!
Videos
At the end of your six months, you will need to create and turn in a video summarizing your journey. This 3-minute video can have anything you’d like related to your journey! It can be a vlog sharing your thoughts, you working towards achieving one of your big goals, a compilation of your progress with videos and pictures, basically, anything you feel helps tell your story.
Some Questions you might want to ask yourself:
How has DDPY and the Challenge changed your life, big or small?
What goals have you been able to accomplish through the challenge
What are your goals once the challenge is over?
What were some of the challenges you faced along the way
How did you overcome those challenges?
What have you learned about yourself throughout this journey?
Examples
Here are some amazing examples from our previous champs! These highlight how different videos can showcase different journeys, and how there is no one way to tell your story!
Important Extra Tips
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Please make sure you are backing up all your footage to an online cloud storage (like Google Drive, iCloud, etc.). You will collect lots of pictures and videos throughout this process. Your phone, or however you are documenting, will get full if you don’t have enough storage. At the end of the challenge, we might ask you for extra documentation, and this is when we will need to see all you’ve got! Also, technical difficulties happen. You don't want to have your documentation deleted from your devices on accident, so back it up!
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You will have so much footage, you might not know what to do with it. So keep it organized. Upload to YouTube as you go in unlisted playlists, or keep it in a cloud storage service where you can easily share file links with us. You will be so happy you did this come submission time!
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This is the time to show off your amazing documentation and what you’ve been working on throughout your 6 months! Your video doesn’t have to be professionally edited, we just want to see your authenticity and hard work.
Community
To get the best out of your challenge, join our DDPY 2024 Positively Unstoppable Challenge Facebook Group! You will meet like minded people who GET IT, and are right there with you. You’ll also meet people that have already been in your shoes, like our previous Champs. They are an invaluable wealth of knowledge, and there to help every step of the way! You’ll also get participate in private small group Zoom calls, and attend group exclusive Facebook Live Event with Diamond Dallas Page himself! You will not wanna miss all exclusive content we create for our challenge participants in the group!
If you want to check out what the bigger DDPY community is up to, check out the community run DDPYoga group! A group of almost 80,000 people, growing stronger every day!
Becoming a part of our online DDPY community is one of the best way stay motivated on your fitness journey. The community is a support system where members can share their experiences, receive and share advice, and encourage each other to stay on track towards their fitness goals. An one of the biggest benefits of joining the DDP online community is the sense of accountability it provides, as members often share their progress and hold each other accountable for staying committed in their journeys. The sense of community is like no other you’ll experience anywhere else!
