Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 113 - *5 LIES* The Fitness Industry LOVES + Q & A.

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

In this episode, Coach Danny goes over FIVE of the most frustrating fallacies pushed by the fitness/influencer industry and WHY they are harmful.Thanks For Listening!Grab the new Female Physique Advanced HERE!RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. In today's episode, we are going to talk about five lies the fitness industry insists on propagating and putting out there. And this isn't just the fitness industrial complex or the amalgamation of gyms, supplement companies, weight loss books. This also includes people like myself who have some degree of influence and some degree of platform and who choose to use that to talk about and sell fitness products and services. And I want to talk about a lot of the lies that get told,

or a lot of the ways in which I think people are deliberately ambiguous and not telling the truth. Because I think that deep down, that can cause quite a number of problems. Simply withholding information that would be valuable for people to know isn't a very good approach. And I think that it continues to allow some of the stigmas and misinformation that's so pervasive in our space to persist. But before we get into it, I just wanted to remind you that my new coaching company, Core Coaching Method, launched on Monday, July 26th. So if you're listening to this now, it's live. Applications are open to work with myself or any of the other coaches on the core coaching

team. We have an awesome stable of products from online coaching to online nutrition coaching to even one-time consults, whether that be a macronutrient consultation, figuring out what your macros are, a training or programming consultation to get your programming cleaned up to better suit your goals, or even a fitness business consultation where we'll sit down and review everything from your branding, what it is you're trying to accomplish in the fitness space, and helping you grow, whether that be as an in-person or online coach. You can check out Core Coaching Method at the link in the show notes for any of your fitness coaching needs. But last thing, guys, before we get going,

I want to read a couple reviews from you guys. I am always so amazed with the reviews you guys leave behind for the podcast. It really, really means a lot to me. And this one comes from Makeup by Desiree. And she says, hey, I had a big struggle not being sore in my glutes after my last leg day. My legs were always sore, but my glutes never were. I felt like they weren't growing or being used in my workout. After listening to your episode on the best exercises to grow your glutes, I decided to make a glute workout plan from the exercises you mentioned. And when I tell you or from it, and when I tell my glutes are sore, I mean it. Thank you for

sharing. And I can't wait to see my future group glue grow. Thanks to you. Can't stop recommending your podcast to my friends. Thank you, Desiree. I really appreciate the review. It means an awful lot and it really does help the podcast. This one comes from Kel Kiki and she says, I love listening to this podcast and hearing the basic truths of fitness and nutrition. There's so much misinformation in this arena, and I appreciate the straightforward, educated, and energetic message. It helps me navigate my own health and nutrition. I'm super interested in the hormone stuff, like PCOS, insulin, cyclical training topics. So good. Listen to this guy. Thanks, Danny. Thank you, Kel Kiki. I really do appreciate every single review. So if you're listening and you've yet to hit the subscribe button or you've yet to leave me a five-star rating and written review on iTunes, doing that really, really helps a lot.

is Female Physique 2, my new bodybuilding program for women, is live. Men can do this too, but what I find is women tend to be more interested in developing their glutes, quads, hamstrings, back, and shoulders. And that's what this program is really built around. It is a 12-week program with a two-week prep phase to start, followed by a four-week strength phase, a four-week moderate rep range hypertrophy phase, and a final two-week polishing high rep hypertrophy phase. It is the follow-up, the much-anticipated follow-up to my original female bodybuilding program, Female Physique.

This is Female Physique 2 Advanced. Both are available on corecoachingmethod.com or at the link in my bio. As individual programs or a bundle, I strongly recommend checking those out if you are going to the gym and you are looking to develop your physique, particularly in those areas. All right, guys. So getting into our list here, I think the number one lie that continues to

get peddled is it all boils down to hard work. And while I do think it is very, very true that dedication, commitment, and effort are a huge piece of the fitness puzzle. It always seems a little tone deaf when an influencer who's clearly on steroids or a female influencer who may or may not be on steroids, but has phenomenal genetics. And in many cases, these individuals don't have jobs. Their main source of income is driven by communicating the importance of the supplements they take or the cuteness of the clothes that they wear to the gym. And they say, hey, use my code. And that's how they make a living. There's nothing wrong with making a living that way. But to me, I think it's very tone deaf. And this is

somebody who works between 60 and 80 hours a week, managing core coaching method, managing the online clients that I have, managing the in-person clients that I have, managing the podcast that I have. I understand that my body in the fitness space is very much middle of the road mediocre. I don't have an exceptional physique. I never claim to have an exceptional physique. I'm proud of the amount of muscle that I have on my frame as somebody who's genetically middle of the road and a natural lifter. But I really dislike the messaging that it all boils down to hard work and dedication. And we never get the impact of

having good genetics or being enhanced or using steroids from these people. And I think there is a responsibility for influencers in particular to communicate in a transparent way the way in which their genetics have influenced the outcome of the physique that they have. I think that that's extremely important. And I also think it's really important to be transparent if you're using anabolic steroids

or any compound that's helping you stay lean or look shredded. Because one of the things that happens, and I can speak from experience here, is you kind of calibrate what it is you're looking to accomplish based on what you see. I remember I grew up in the age of what I would call the fake natty, which was at this point in the fitness industry, you'll see a lot of people being more transparent about using drugs. But I grew up where nobody ever disclosed that they took steroids. And I really believed that a lot of the guys who said they were natural were natural. And I thought that I could achieve that physique naturally. And I was working really hard. I was doing all of the workouts out of muscle and fitness. I was eating the diet, but my body wasn't looking that way. And I was really, really stumped. And what I found out is you can't train like you're on steroids when you're not on steroids. You can't recover like these guys when you're not on steroids.

And even if you do train that hard, and even if you do your best in the kitchen, you'll never look like them because one, genetically speaking, they already have phenomenal genetics. And then oftentimes they would enhance that with the use of performance enhancing drugs. And I do acknowledge that it is illegal to take anabolic steroids, at least here in the United States. I shouldn't say to take them, but to sell them. So, and I believe to buy them, but you're not going to see a lot of people rushing to be like, Hey, I take drugs. And I know that for some people that really would tarnish their brand and their image. So my expectations aren't that people just all of a sudden come clean and tell you all the drugs that they're taking.

But I think it's really, really tone deaf when you have influencers who take steroids or who have incredible genetics, usually women that have incredible genetics. It's not uncommon for women who have had body augmentation like Brazilian butt lifts or some type of liposuction to then turn around and sell glute growth programs. That stuff is so disingenuous and tone deaf because here's the thing. If you took a hundred people, you had them do the exact same program and the exact same diet, you'd have a hundred different outcomes because what you have is you have a hundred different sets of genetics. And while you might have some extremely similar outcomes and while doing a diet and a training

program that is effective is going to really, really help you, the outcomes are very different and they aren't influenced by things like genetics and drug use. And so one of the things that really bothers me, and that's why this is number one, is that we still haven't gotten a lot of transparency from people in the fitness space about how it is that drugs have influenced the development of their physique or how it is the genetics have influenced the development of their physique. I know several female influencers in the space who had tremendous bodies before they even started working out. They had wider hips, smaller waists, a lot of fat accumulating around the breast and the buttocks so that when they got more muscular and leaner, they had, you know, this killer

amazing physique and they certainly worked hard. They certainly ate right. However, I don't know if it's reasonable to then turn around and go, just do what I did and you'll look how I looked because you looked phenomenal. And genetically, you might've been predisposed to look phenomenal as it was. So I do think that being a little more transparent there is important, but it's not to say that hard work and dedication don't pay off. I think it's just to say, hey, we spend so much time talking about the controllables. We should be a little bit more open about the uncontrollables like genetics or, you know, some of the enhancement things that people do so that we can give people a better place to operate from when they're thinking about, okay, what's a reasonable goal for me? And I just think that that would go a really

long way. Number two, the fitness space continues to just communicate the importance of rampant supplement use. And while I do think some supplements are extremely good, I'm even partnered with a supplement company myself. I do think that most supplements on the market are completely useless or overkill. The ones that I recommend time and time again are fish oil, a multivitamin, a greens powder, a protein powder, and creatine. Supplemental electrolytes might also be a good idea, as are things like magnesium and zinc. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of nutritional supplements available on the market that are claiming to make an instant impact on your body composition. And no amount of evidence is going to stop supplement companies from pushing products that are cheap to produce and easy to sell at

high margins. And so we've seen products like L-glutamine or BCAAs or a lot of the fat burners that are on the market continue to just rake in the revenue, even though the evidence is quite clear. And that's because there are financial incentives for supplement companies to lie to you. And another thing, just because creatine works, just because protein powder is effective at increasing your intake of dietary protein, just because fish oils are a great way to get or any omega-3 supplement to increase the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, just because a multivitamin and a greens powder can cover your base, that doesn't mean that they're worth your money. Everything has an opportunity cost. And if you're breaking the bank every month to buy supplements,

which is something that I did when I was younger, I remember when I first got hired at 24 Hour Fitness and I was 18 and I moved out of my house and I spent all the money that I had on my personal training certification, I was so fucking broke. I'm talking like less than $500 in my bank account at all times.

And I would still, every month, put together $150 supplement order from bodybuilding.com with a bunch of stupid shit in it because I didn't know any better. And so I know that the supplement manufacturing business is going to be able to produce limitless amounts of supplements that are new and exciting and fun. And we want to try those things or we want to try new flavors. It's fun. It's unique. It's gamified. It's like, oh my gosh, what about this? What about that? It's like being a kid in a candy shop

when you first start dabbling with supplements. But what you'll find is the longer you've been in it, the more you start to realize that they don't make that big of a fucking difference. Some of the really effective ones are worth having in your routine on a pretty regular basis. But for the most part, if you were to walk into like a vitamin shop or a GNC,

most of that crap would not be worth your money. And I think it's really important that the fitness industry continues to the best of its ability to communicate that things like nutrition, training, lifestyle choices like sleep and hydration, as well as managing stress, play a much bigger role in your success in the fitness world or whatever your goals may be than supplements. Will that ever happen? I doubt it. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that quite frankly, most people who get into the supplement business get into the supplement business because the margins are pretty good and you can make good money. And so when you get into something because your primary goal is making money, it can get really sticky really fast. And so some things to be on the lookout for whenever you're purchasing supplements. Be on the lookout for proprietary blends. These are blends where you'll know what's in the actual product, but not the amounts of the ingredients in the product. These are usually denoted by a small little cross, and you'll see like, oh, it has L-citrulline. How much? And you look over to the right where you would normally see grams or milligrams, and you see a little cross.

That's their way of saying it's in here, but we're not going to disclose to you how much of it's in there. So number one, be on the lookout for proprietary blends. Another thing, and this again, hopefully doesn't sound tone deaf, just qualify the influencers or the people with influence who are pushing these products. Ask yourself, does this person seem like they're of high integrity? Is this person willing to communicate the effectiveness of the product? When I click through to the actual website of the company, do they have batch numbers? Do I actually get to see

the testing from each batch of product that's produced? Or perhaps do they have educational content available so I can understand the why behind the ingredients in the product? Be very skeptical when it comes to anything in the supplement space. I think that that's really, really important. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. and enjoy the rest of the episode. Number three, the stupid exercises that you see on social media to drive engagement.

This is a huge lie that the fitness industry will tell you. I cannot eat. I'm not gonna throw anybody under the bus, but I know a lot of people who go to the gym, film exercises they've never done before, film exercises they literally just made up so that they can post something new and exciting and so that they can post something that is likely to catch eyes and drive engagement. And they'll say things like, I'll reference an influencer here without using their name. It was fucking comical to me. I thought this

was so stupid when I saw this. And I'm generally pretty good on this. Like I think, hey, look, everybody deserves to, in my opinion, everybody deserves to have the opportunity to post content, to post content that they think is fun and enjoyable. And a lot of times we take things a little too seriously. But this person posted what they called isolateral dumbbell-only shoulder workout. And all this was, was single arm shoulder pressing, single arm upright rowing, single arm lateral raising, and single arm rear delts raising, and single arm shrugging.

So this was literally exercises you've seen a million times done with two arms, done with one arm. And all that does is make your fucking workout take twice as long. Maybe it increases the use of muscles in your core that help provide stability when you're waving your arms around on one side. I get it. But to me, this is some form of intellectual laziness and just looking to repackage basic shit because swipe workouts drive engagement. But the truth of the matter is, these influencers don't fucking do that shit.

And one of the big reasons I don't post a lot of my training is because I do really basic shit, the shit you'll see in my programs, like foundations, power build, female physique one and two. I'm doing the basics. It's what I'm doing with the clients that I work with in person. It's what I'm doing with the clients that I work with online. And trying to repackage things purely for the sake of engagement is fine. The example I gave is far from the most egregious. It's just the one that came to mind immediately. I see people making up movements that could actually be harmful if performed by somebody

who perhaps doesn't have the kinesthetic awareness to be able to handle maybe jumping up and down on shit. You see a lot of this stuff done in a plyometric fashion. So one of the lies we need to stop telling people is that things need to be new, novel, sexy, or exciting when it comes to the gym. The missing ingredient between where your physique is and where your physique is supposed to be or where you want your physique to be is almost never an exercise that you haven't heard of. It's almost always about effort and execution, which I know

kind of spits in the face of the first thing, just work harder, right? But if you have a good program and you're executing at a high level and you're training with good technique close to failure, you're going to grow. And if you're not growing, doing movements you've never done before because you saw them in a swipe workout is not going to make a difference. Number four, and this has become more recent, or this is something that I should say has arisen more recently, and it drives me up the wall. I think this one is extremely disingenuous and complete fucking horseshit. And that is the idea

that you can actually determine the way that your body fat is stored. And I don't think people are claiming that, but I've seen a lot of programs announced that say, Get slim thicky with me. Get slim thick with me. Get thicky. with me, get sticky, sticky, sticky. What the fuck are you trying to sell? Are you really telling people that if they do your program,

they're going to store body fat in the lower half the way that you do? That ma'am is genetics. And that goes back to my second point, which is our first point, which is lying about the influence of genetics. Some women are going to have a genetic predisposition to store a ton of fat on their ass. Good for them. That's amazing. Guess what? Most women don't. Doing your shitty program isn't going to make me store any more fat around my glutes just because you get to do that and just because you were genetically blessed there. And then turning around and selling your program as slim thick. Like as far as I'm aware, and I'm more than willing to look this up so that I can get a good definition of what exactly it is to be slim thick. But if you type slim thick into Google,

the first thing that you are going to see is slim, thick workout. That is terrifying. But then we go to the actual definition from Urban Dictionary, the act of being visibly slender in the abdominal region, yet having thick legs and or buttocks. So small waist, but thick and potentially having some fat around the lower body. That is called body fat or predisposition of where your body fat is going to end up. And that is influenced mostly by things like hormones and genetics, very minimally by training, if at all by training. So why somebody would go out of their way to call a program slim thick or get slim thick with me or get thick with me or all of that shit to me seems disingenuous. How about reframing that as here's the program that I do to get the body that I have. Have fun with that. Good luck.

Hopefully you enjoy it because clearly my expertise matters to you, but I'm not going to claim that you're going to have my body, nor am I going to claim that somehow by completing this arbitrary 12-week program loaded with garbage and bandwork, you're going to magically store all of the fat around your ass like I do because I'm genetically gifted and I'm a genetic anomaly. That kind of shit drives me fucking nuts.

And I do understand that I have become a little bit hot today. I have come a little bit unglued from perhaps my more measured way of communicating, but I am really passionate about this stuff because I think it's a huge problem. And I think it contributes to the amount of misinformation in our space because people really go around thinking, oh, if I eat plant-based, I'll get slim, thicky. Oh, if I do slim, thicky program, I'll get slim, thicky. No, if you lift weights and monitor your nutrition for years and

years and years, you'll likely develop a really good physique. But as to whether or not that will be the quote unquote slim, thick look is going to be influenced a lot by your genetics and your hormones and things outside of your control. So that shouldn't be your target. And setting that up as a target to me is really disingenuous. Number five, the idea that people on Instagram who post their physiques a lot, stay lean year round. I remember the first time I went to a fitness expo and I saw a fitness personality who I thought looked phenomenal on magazine covers, but I was shocked at how small they looked in person. I couldn't believe it. At first I was

like, well, is there a possibility that they just look small because they're, you know, really, you know, well hidden in the shirt that they have on or, or is it, you know, that they're far away. And as I got closer and closer to this person in person, because you had to stand in a line to get some supplements, this is some shit I used to do that again, I'm speaking from experience with all this. I realized that this person wasn't just in general, very big. And then I started to see a lot of the fitness personalities that I'd seen on the internet or on muscle and fiction or flex magazine, because those were things that I frequented as a young adult. And I realized that not all of them looked the way they looked on the magazine covers. Don't get me wrong. Some of them were phenomenal freaks of nature.

Many of them were competing. When I think about when I would go to the Mr. Olympia, there would never be anyone competing on the Olympia stage that you saw ready to compete that weekend that didn't look fucking phenomenal in person. I remember I used to always go to the meet the Olympians. It was on usually Thursday or Friday night where you would go to the Meet the Olympians. It was on usually Thursday or Friday night where you would go to the Orleans Hotel and they would have everything set up in the Orleans Arena in the shape of a big circle or semi-circle. And you could go from one end to the other. And usually

they'd put Kai Greene on one side and Phil Heath on the other, Jay Cutler on one side and Phil Heath on the other. They'd put the two biggest guys on opposite ends. And they'd also have other personalities like Steve Cook when he competed back in the Mr. Olympia, Jeremy Buendia before everything that happened with his reputation. A lot of these people were there and every time you'd see them, they totally looked phenomenal. But you, because again, they were about to compete. But a lot of the people that were there just as personalities and maybe they weren't competing, you'd be like, wow, why do you look so much less impressive? And it's because they only post to the pictures on Instagram where they look the most impressive and they're the most lean and they're the most on

drugs. And that is something that does not get communicated, which is that these people do not look that way all year round. In fact, they take the majority of their pictures and videos during their competing season and oftentimes they'll repurpose it. And so there's very little transparency there, and that can be pretty darn frustrating. Okay guys, so that does it for five lies that I think the fitness industry needs to stop telling. And just to reframe that and kind of package it smoothly, the first one is that hard work does in fact matter, but so do things like genetics and steroid use. And we need to be a little bit less tone deaf in how we communicate that.

Number two, supplements are not as important as the fitness industry loves to communicate. Number three, exercises that are done because they're cool or unique are not necessarily more effective. Number four, you cannot copy or achieve the genetic predisposition for body fat storage in certain areas that your favorite influencer has just by training the way they train and number five not

everybody stays all year lean all year round so moving on to some q and a's this is from kawaii katrina she asks biggest differences between female physique one and female physique two. So female physique one is three, four week blocks, and it has a larger focus on higher repetition range work and hip thrusting in particular, as well as quite a bit more lunging. Female physique two is a four week as four specific blocks, a two week block, and then a four week block, another four week block and another two week block. And it has a little bit more hip extension based work like Romanian deadlifting has a little bit more squatting. It's a little bit more of a strength based program. So they both go together really, really well. But those are the two primary differences. There's also a little bit more information related to the menstrual cycle and how that pertains to training

in female physique too. Both are great and both are available on the website as a bundle. Number two comes from Morgan Garber and she says, what's the best exercise for quad dominant women wanting to build their hamstrings? So remember the quads are predominantly used for knee extension. The hamstrings are predominantly used for knee flexion and hip extension. So when you think knee flexion, think of the lying hamstring curl, where your knee is flexing, just like your elbow flexes in a bicep curl. And for hip extension, think about the RDL, right? That's a big time hip extension movement. So which of these movements that are going to train the hamstrings, primary goal, hip flexion, primary goal, hip extension, that aren't going to require a lot of knee flexion and knee extension, or I should say knee extension. That's the quads main goal

or quads main function. So squats, a lot of hip flexion, but we also get a lot of knee flexion. So it's going to be balanced. Probably going to get a little glutes and we're probably going to get a little bit of quads. We don't want that. What about lunges? Well, we get a lot of hip flexion, but there we go again. We're getting a lot of knee flexion. Okay. So maybe not lunges. What about the RDL? Well, that's pretty much all hip flexion. So that's going to be good because that's going to get a lot of hamstrings and that's not going to get a lot of quad. What about glute focus, low back extensions or 45-degree extensions? There's another one.

Almost no quad, a lot of hip extension, so we're getting some hammy. The isolated hamstring curl machine from a lying position or from a seated position, both of those are phenomenal. So if you really want to develop your hamstrings, you want to be looking at isolated knee flexion and the compound movements that most address hip extension.

Hopefully that helps. Next question from Al, A underscore Lex underscore go underscore adventure. So A Lex go adventure. Thoughts on F45 and Orange Theory. I talked about this on a podcast that I did with Jordan Lips that was quite recent actually, one or two episodes ago. I don't hate them as an introduction to some form of training. I don't hate them because they

provide community, but I do not think that they are an effective long-term training program. I don't think that they incorporate a lot of high quality movements. I think they're in a lot of ways, very random and they're a little too cardio based for my liking. I tend to want my clients programs to predominantly revolve around resistance training. So this question is from Powersmid and that is how to get into the in-person coaching space. And it might not be the sexiest answer, but I still think that going and getting a job at a big box gym, like a 24-hour fitness, is a good way to get your feet wet and get some experience. You probably won't be paid well. You'll probably be asked to do things that you don't particularly love.

But I think experience goes a really long way. And going ahead and getting yourself some experience is a really good idea. So I would find a mentor or find a gym that you could work at where you can really hone your craft and where they might actually make it a little easier for you to get clients in front of yourself. But the number one thing you probably need to do is get yourself certified and licensed so you have some ability of protection and some social proof to say, hey, I'm not just some schmuck who likes to exercise. I actually have a certification. just some schmuck who likes to exercise, I actually have a certification. The last question comes from Anne Reeks 1018, and that is squat workarounds for taller lifters. Barbell squats can be tough for taller lifters. So I really like things like goblet squats or hex bar deadlifts as

knee flexion based exercises that tend to be a little bit easier for taller individuals. Those are my go to 99 times out of 100. And when in doubt, go to the Bulgarian split squat. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Don't forget, if you haven't already, hit that subscribe button.

Please head on over to corecoachingmethod.com and peruse the variety of eBooks, free guides, and coaching services I have to offer over there. And if you have yet to leave me a review on either Podbean or the iTunes store, that would be phenomenal if you would do that. Thank you so much for following along and stay tuned for the next episode.