Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 117 - Overrated OR Underrated: Fitness Edition

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

In this episode, Danny goes over a plethora of fitness and health topics and decides whether or not they are overrated or underrated!---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 am your host, Danny Matranga, and in today's episode, we are going to play a new game, a new feature here on the show called Overrated or Underrated. I'm going to field various topics from mostly fitness-related things and give you my opinion as to whether or not I believe these are overrated or underrated. First, guys, is my new coaching company, Core Coaching Method. This is the best place to go to work with me and my team of qualified coaches who have been training clients in person and online for years. These are highly educated,

certified individuals who have qualifications to coach in both fitness and nutrition who've worked with real clients just like you for years. You can work with myself as well. Everything that you hear on the podcast that you see in my content lives and breathes within our coaching program. We've got online nutrition coaching, online programming, and of course, the gold standard, which is total online coaching, where we will take a look at your lifestyle, nutrition, training, and tailoring everything to meet your goals. So you can check that out at corecoachingmethod.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram too, over at corecoachingmethod. Now, getting into your guys' questions, if you will, or I guess we

should say more of into what it is that you want to know is overrated and what may be underrated. So fielding from a variety of different topics in the fitness industry, the first is the Stairmaster. Okay, so is the Stairmaster overrated or underrated? And I think it's overrated, guys. It is often billed to women as a form of cardio or aerobic exercise that will help to develop the glutes. And while it probably uses more glutes than does, say, walking on an incline, walking on a treadmill, or using the elliptical, by virtue of the fact that the knee has to travel upward towards, let's say, the belly button, and the hip goes into a certain degree of flexion. That would, of course, require some action from the hip extensors, which in this case could be the glutes, to get out of. So on every step, in theory, you're using a bit more glute. However,

I don't think that the Stairmaster is an ideal way to stimulate the glutes, and it could be fatiguing. So if you're going to use it, I would use it at the end of your training sessions and you should be fine if you keep the bouts short. But if you're using it for a considerable amount of time before training legs, you might find that you actually end up fatiguing some of that tissue because of all the forms of cardio, I would say it's definitely one of, if not the most challenging. Now, as a means of pure caloric expenditure, it's hard to call it underrated or overrated. It's just more cardio. Minute per minute, it's probably better than something like a walk or even an incline walk, but it's certainly not better than something like rowing or even doing something like an assault bike or hit. So if you're going to use it as your preferred method of cardio, I can't call it underrated.

I can just say I think it falls kind of in alignment with the rest of the cardiovascular pieces of equipment you might use with regards to burning or expending calories. But it's a lot of overrated mumbo jumbo when we talk about developing the glutes or its ability to help you grow your glutes. I think it's just another form of cardio that you can do, and I like to leave it at that. Next is the dumbbell

sumo squat. And this is kind of an interesting one because I don't think we talk about it much, and I like to get into the theoretical and the nitty-gritty, the kind of coaching chalk talk, shop talk, if you will. And I'm going to say that it's underrated. But the reason I think it's underrated is because literally nobody does it. It's kind of a strange movement when done properly. It would mean, for those of you who are in the car or visualizing or just can't think of what I'm saying, a dumbbell sumo squat would be holding the dumbbell between your legs and squatting down in a sumo stance. Now, I don't necessarily love this for like anything beyond just training a different form of the squat.

Maybe you'll get a little bit more action in the adductors. You just don't see many people do it. And in a lot of ways, you can think of this or visualize this like a pitch shark or in some capacity, it's not unlike squatting and really emphasizing the end range of the movement, right? Because you're really picking up quite a bit of resistance towards the bottom of the squat with just the general impact the dumbbell is going to have traveling downward. I would not do this very often. I would not do this heavy. This would just be something that you might be able to make an argument for occasionally doing that you never really see getting done. And so it's probably right up there with something like a pit shark with regards to how it's actually applying lines

of tension to the tissue. And I don't hate the pit shark for occasional use. I don't think it's optimal for any one thing. But again, this is a movement that just nobody straight up does. If you're doing a dumbbell shortstop deadlift or a dumbbell sumo deadlift, that might be a little bit overkill or a little bit silly, but if you are doing a dumbbell sumo squat or even some form of, let's call it deficit dumbbell squat, where we're training and loading in a range that we don't often load and you're using it as a novel form of working deficit dumbbell squat, where we're training and loading in a range that we don't often load, and you're using it as a novel form of working in some squat variation, it's not going to hurt you. And nobody really does these, so I would say it's in some capacity underrated. But if you wanted to make an argument for like, okay, are we talking purely hypertrophy or performance?

It's overrated because it doesn't have a lot of application there. So all of this stuff is subject to nuance, of course. Okay, next question. Essential amino acids, overrated or underrated? I'm going to say overrated. I think all amino acid supplements, with the exception of protein, are overrated. I will kind of say this until I'm blue in the face. Make sure that you're getting adequate daily protein across four meals if your goals are gaining muscle. If you do that, the case to be made for EAAs is slim to none. Maybe something could be said for its ability to help mitigate fatigue and enhance amino acid availability around the workout if you're having a hard time getting food in post-workout. Could it help with buffering fatigue potentially?

But I don't think they're a necessity. And I think for what you're going to pay for them, they're quite overrated because again, opportunity costs. What you're paying for those supplements, you can't use to buy other supplements. And not everybody has an unlimited budget. If you do, of course, fucking go for it. That's always the cop-out. Well, what if you don't mind paying for it? Then you don't fucking mind paying for it. Isn't that like pretty incredible, right? Like when questions like that come up, it drives me nuts because it's quite apparent if you don't mind paying for something and it's not going to help you, in all likelihood, most of these supplements are probably not going to hurt you, particularly those like that are amino acid related, but it's hard to make a case for these in a protein-equated diet. And the way that they're sold and marketed to fitness enthusiasts and hobbyists isn't dissimilar to what you might

see with BCAAs, which of the amino acid supplements are the most overrated. I think that EAAs are kind of like a fancy BCAA or a decent option for getting full-spectrum amino acid availability for people who don't like the taste of, say, whey or plant-based vegan proteins. But I don't think they're going to make a huge difference in your training. Fun fact, I actually experimented with some EAAs over the course of about a month. I could barely stomach them because the brand that I bought them for, I will not name the brand because I think that would be kind of, you know, a dig, was unbelievably over-sweetened. I think they used erythritol as the primary sweetener, which I don't normally have

any issues with or reservations about, but this, whatever it was, was so sweet. And it was honestly like one of the worst supplements I've ever had the displeasure of sipping on. I'm not a huge fan of things that are excessively sweet, and perhaps they had to excessively sweeten the product to hide the taste of the actual ingredients. That's hard to get away from when you're working with some things that just don't taste that great, and not all amino acids in there, like just freeform, taste phenomenal. Some taste better or worse than others. Some things have a naturally tart taste. Some things are bond to citrate or citric acid in order to make them taste a little bit more tart or use tart flavors to mask some of the, what I would describe as a kind of nasty

tastes that you'll find with a lot of these free form ingredients. So maybe that was their move, but these were honestly quite, quite bad. All right, next one, overrated or underrated mind-muscle connection. Let's say underrated. And the mind-muscle connection to me, described to somebody in the memification of describe it to me like I'm five, it's basically feeling the muscle that you're training while you're training the muscle and being able to quote-unquote shut out the noise or silence the haters from the muscles that you don't want to feel. So if I'm doing a cable pec fly, I would prefer to feel the fibers of my pec than the fibers of my anterior delt. If I'm doing a lat pulldown, I might prefer to feel my lats than my forearms and

my biceps. And a lot of this gets ironed out with just generally more efficient training, better technique. You know, the things that come with quote unquote skin in the game, the longer you've been lifting, the better you'll probably do at feeling the sensation. And while sensation itself isn't necessarily an indicator of doing something right or hypertrophy, being able to key into the muscle you're training and for no other reason than simply expressing whether or not you're creating contraction at the right tissue is really valuable. And I think that that's going to help you out in the long run with your training to be able to actually ask yourself, do I feel the target tissue working here to assess my execution of the movement on the fly. So I think there's value there. If you are not necessarily like a bodybuilder, I don't know if it becomes invaluable. I still think that there's value there. I still think that being able to feel what it is that you're working has value and application across pretty much every reason somebody would be lifting or exercising. All right, next one is workout

journals. And I'd say underrated again. Just, I tend to recommend writing your stuff down. Not everybody does. Not everybody cares. But, you know, a lot of you care a lot about your performance. And so I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to gather that data in an efficient way. For my clients at Core Coaching Method, everybody gets workout logs. And I encourage every client that's, you know, got the time or the energy to do it to print the log out and bring it with you to the gym in a training journal or a notebook or even just

fold it up and throw it in your bag. But as you go, take a pen and fill out the training log so you can actually see your progressions week to week. I think that workout journals are really valuable for stuff like that. If you go to my programs, also available at shamelessplug, corecoachingmethod.com, you'll notice that they are too kind of designed in such a way that you can actually write your weights in just like you can with the online coaching logs. So across the 12 weeks of programming, you should see progressions week to week to week across each of the various blocks. Some have three, some have four, but regardless, across these blocks, if you fill

things out as you go, you can actually see some progress, which can be really, really motivating. And I find that most people aren't doing this. And if you want to go back a few episodes, I recorded an episode on what should be in your gym bag. And I actually talked a lot about this and why a training log is a really valuable tool to have in your gym bag. All right, next one is caffeine. And I would say caffeine is overrated. The acute performance enhancing impact of caffeine and its ability to help you kind of silence or quiet the fatigue, right? It helps with buffering fatigue or lowering, let's call it the perception of fatigue. That wears off. And so when you first have caffeine,

or let's say, let's use pre-workout here. I'm going to use pre-workout as an example and coffee for those of you who don't drink pre-workout. But the first time you had pre-workout or coffee, it, as the kids often say, hits different. Okay. And so the first hit of caffeine that you have is pretty powerful. And the way caffeine works is it binds to the same receptor in your brain as adenosine and adenosine when it builds up in the brain causes fatigue. Caffeine blunts the binding of adenosine and it can lead to feelings of alertness and really get you super hyped up. Um,

you know, and a lot of people really enjoy the feeling of being on caffeine and it gives you a lot of good energy. It gives you some drive. You really go for it. The problem is it wears off. You become tolerant. You need more and more and more. And caffeine and nicotine are quite similar. And they're both very addictive. We know the addictive impact that nicotine can have and how harmful things like cigarettes and chewing tobacco can be. And that nicotine plays a huge role in the addictive properties of those particular products. But caffeine has an addiction point too, in that you feel pretty terrible when you stop. And even though it kind

of stops hitting the way it used to after you use it for a prolonged amount of time, a lot of people literally need it to start their day. And they can't go through their day without stopping at Starbucks. I tell people all the time, America's number one drug dealer is Starbucks and nobody cares. Not that caffeine has the negative implications of drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine or heroin, things that can destroy your life or even alcohol for that matter, if you suffer from an addiction to these substances. But caffeine is a very normalized addiction, or at the very least, a very normalized habit in the Western world, where people will every day get a massive amount of caffeine in the form of coffee, pre-workout,

paying energy drinks, monsters, or any combination of energy drinks, coffee, teas, and pre-workouts. of energy drinks, coffee, teas, and pre-workouts. 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 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. So for whatever reason, we've really normalized excessive intakes of caffeine. And in many ways, we've glorified pre-workout in the fitness industry as a rite of passage. You got to have your dry scoop. You got to kick back your pre before every session, even to the point now where we have stimulant-free pre-workouts because people are starting to just begin to understand the

potential negative implications of having too many supplements on things like anxiety or stress or sleep, right? Too much caffeine can definitely amplify a lot of those things. But we've habituated pre-workout. So we have to have the pre. So now you have stimulant-free pre-workout, which does have the ergogenic aids. Those would be, of course, the compounds that increase performance, like let's call them beta-alanine. Maybe some have creatine, some have L-citrulline. And the one that I like is Legion's Stim Free Pulse, which is their non-caffeinated pre-workout. I actually like a pre-workout without caffeine.

I think that there's value there because again, I'm speaking from experience when I say I enjoy the habituation of a stimulant-free pre-workout because I used to take pre-workout for so long. However, I also like the inclusion of ergogenic aids and I like to know what's in the product. If you guys want to support the show, Totally Organic ad read, you love to see it, you can do me a favor. Let's go. And head on over to legion.com,

shop through the variety of different sports supplements that they have over there, and use the code DANNY when you check out to save 20% on your first order and get double points on all orders after that. The points add up and you can use them to save on future orders. It's really, really cool. So moving on to your next question, guys, we have wrist wraps overrated or underrated. Again, I feel like there's a trend here. Underrated. The reason that I think these are under, I feel like we've done more underrateds than overrated.

And maybe that's just because I'm in a positive mood. Because if you caught me on a shitty day, I'd be like, overrated, overrated. Everything's bad. I hate everything. But this is something that I would say is more underrated for women than men. And here's why.

I find that wrist wraps are much more common with male lifters who tend to do things like pull-ups, heavy deadlifts, heavy rows more frequently, and they've determined pretty quickly that a limitation on grip strength is no bueno, and occasionally male lifters will do things to improve their grip strength, but oftentimes they'll rely on straps. One of the things I found with my female clients that's quite common is they'll come up to me and go, I need to work on my grip. And I go, why? What are you doing? Like rock climbing or something? And they go, well, I can't hold the

bar when I do lunges or split squats or Romanian deadlifts. And I go, oh, well, why don't you just get some wrist straps? Or, you know, in this case, I think I said wraps, but I meant straps. Why don't you get some wrist straps to help you hold or better hold the bar? And they go, well, doesn't that kind of, you know, like not fix the problem? And I love it because it's such a proactive, positive way to look at it. I'm like, you're right. It doesn't fix the problem. But is the goal grip strength or is the goal hypertrophy of your target muscles? And they go, well, hypertrophy, I really want to grow my glutes. So I got to be able to lunge and I got to be able to do things like RDLs and hold the weight. And so guys, you see in these instances, being able to actually use wraps to increase your grip

strength can allow the stronger muscles to fatigue. Because I heard somebody say this the other day, and I thought it was great. And I'm bummed that I don't remember who it was, but they said, the muscle that fatigues first is what you're training. And I was like, wow, that's really cool because of course we're trying to train close to fatigue or even on occasion, on rare occasion to or beyond fatigue when we're training for hypertrophy. So if you're doing a lat pull down and your arms fatigue before your lats, you're probably giving the greatest training stimulus or applying the greatest training stimulus to your arms. You're still applying it to your lats, but not so much. And then you have things like deadlifts

or Romanian deadlifts or lunges where the grip might give out much before large muscles like the glutes, hamstrings, right? And then, or quads if we're doing lunges. It's very hard to apply a stimulus to those muscles that are so large, they probably require a substantial amount of weight if you can't hold that weight. So particularly for females, I have found in my experience coaching, wrist straps, or a lot of people will call them wraps, are really, really effective. Okay, next question, or next overrated, underrated, barbell squats. I say that the barbell squat is overrated and the reason that I think it's overrated This is a common trope in the fitness space now

Because everybody thinks you have to do it. It represents some rite of passage It's one of the big three bro, like, you know bench squats and deads and I remember when I was first getting into The fitness scene. I was first getting into the fitness scene, I was very into powerlifting. And one of the things that's interesting about powerlifting and kind of the subculture or microculture of powerlifting is it really revolves around the kind of deitization or glorification of the bench and the squat and the dead, because that's what these lifters have to do. They have to perform really well on the bench, the squat, and the deadlift. And bodybuilders like to bench, squat, and deadlift because benching is an effective way to build your pecs. It's probably

not as effective as things like dumbbell benching or machine pressing, but it works, right? Deadlifting has been a staple in the routine of many bodybuilders. Some stay away from it, but it's certainly been used by bodybuilders across eras as a way to develop the posterior chain, often being highlighted as a way to develop the back. I think most people who understand biomechanics would say that most of the back muscles are working in an isometric fashion there, and they're not going to be eliciting the greatest hypertrophy response, but the proof is in the pudding and the anecdote when it comes to the deadlift's ability to contribute to a world-class physique. And the same can be said of the barbell squat.

The problem is when you start applying these movements as must-dos to general population lifters who might have mobility limitations or even structural limitations. For example, being extremely tall or having horrible ankle mobilities. Ankle mobilities? Both of your ankles? There you go. Having poorilities, both of your ankles, there you go, having poor mobility in both of your ankles, finally, might actually limit your ability to squat. And so you don't want to make a barbell squat the primary exercise you use to develop your quads if it's one that you do poorly and you can't load well. So then the barbell squat becomes inefficient. If you're trying to select a squat movement that doesn't

require a lot of external stability for a novice trainee, the barbell squat probably isn't the option. If you're trying to use the squat as an opportunity to simply just groove or grease the groove, if you will, on a movement that people tend to do a lot for a super deconditioned person, a bodyweight squat or even a goblet squat is going to return probably 99 out of 100 times better than a barbell squat because most of the people who walk into the gym have no business doing a barbell squat. Is it a nice benchmark to reach occasionally for people who are super deconditioned and never lifted before? Yes. Is it a good movement for developing your legs if you're a bodybuilder? Yes. Is it a good movement for developing strength if you're an athlete? Yes. Is it a good movement for developing your legs if you're a bodybuilder? Yes. Is it a good movement for developing strength if you're an athlete? Yes. Is it a movement that absolutely everybody has to do in the way that it's been kind of pushed out over the course of the years? Absolutely not. Not in my opinion anyway. Rounding it out, guys,

we have the question of four sets as opposed to three sets. Is it overrated or underrated? I'm going to say that doing more volume in general is overrated. The first thing you should be focusing on is doing higher quality repetitions, training closer to failure with better execution or with more explosiveness, all of course, depending on what it is that your goal is. But my opinion is that before you start adding more volume, you start doing better volume. And so if going from three sets to four sets is going to really help you practice a movement and do it better, you might want to do that. But if you do four shitty sets, I can almost guarantee they'll be less effective than three

really good sets. So I would start quantifying things in terms of quality before I started adding in a bunch of quantity. And that's the assumption that I make with the clients that I work with is I'm going to give you more volume or more training intensity across a training block under the caveat with the expectation that you're probably going to do better as we go. And if you're not doing better, we don't add more unless we're adding more of a lower intensity so you can actually improve the movement. So I think you can add as you go for sure. But I think if you're stuck before you start thinking about, can I add

more volume? Make sure that the execution is right. And I think that's really, really important. I heard just now that Mac Jones, the Patriots quarterback is wearing number 50, but I think that was just a practice thing. But if he's wearing number 50 at the quarterback position, I think I'll lose it. I know this isn't a football podcast, but it's just a hilarious number to see a quarterback where most of you probably don't care at all. But to me, it's kind of funny. Okay. Overrated or underrated calories burned. Okay. If you know me, you know that I think that this is overrated gauging your workouts by the numbers of calories, the number of calories that you burn, I think is a little silly.

It seems to me a little bit short-sighted because the number one reason to exercise isn't caloric expenditure, right? The number one reason to exercise is because it's fundamentally really fucking good for pretty much every organ system in your body. It's beneficial for your hormones, your endocrine system. It's beneficial for your bones, your skeletal system. It's beneficial for your mind, okay, your nervous system. It's tremendous for your muscles, your muscular system. It really just goes and goes and goes. Calories burned is great for keeping and maintaining a healthy body weight or losing body fat if you are at a, let's call it, unhealthy body weight.

But if that's the only metric you have for a good workout, you'll have a hard time making progress beyond just, like I said, expending more calories. If you want metrics to track in the gym, caloric expenditure doesn't even crack my top five. I'd rather know, are you lifting more weight? Are you doing more sets? Shit, let's use your lifting technique as a metric that we can gauge progress.

Are you making progress in your technique and the way that you can perform the movements? Are you able to do more work in less time, right? You can even look at aerobic adaptations, not using obviously caloric expenditure as some type of aerobic metric, but let's look at your aerobic adaptations, right? Are you running better? Are you running faster? This is, of course, if you had aerobic-based goals. What if your goals are mobility, right? There's so many different things that we can track that making caloric expenditure the king, even if your goal is fat loss, is a little silly because even the person who burns the most will totally fail if they're the person who also eats the most. Your ability to manage your caloric expenditure through nutrition

is so, or your caloric, let's call it your energy balance through nutrition, is much more powerful than it is through simply burning calories. I also think this can become a little bit of a slippery slope in the same way that some people often say tracking calories in MyFitnessPal is neurotic and can become obsessive. I think that tracking your calories burned can in the same way. I think that most people don burned can in the same way. I think that most people don't run into that problem, but I do think that the hype around how many calories you burned

is a metric of gaining that workout. Gaging that workout's ability to impact your gains or your progress is kind of silly. Instead, focus on things like, are you getting stronger? Are you getting better at lifting? Are you seeing changes in your physique? There's so many better things to track. Okay, guys, that does it for the first episode of the overrated underrated portion of the dynamic dialogue podcast, kind of a test, a dry run here. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did send me a DM on Instagram or an email, Danny at corecoachingmethod.com. So I can get that feedback. I'd love to hear what, if you'd like to see more of this stuff on the show, if you have not yet to do me a favor, leave me a five-star rating or review on iTunes. Written reviews are best. Be sure that you save it and share that to your

Instagram story so we can help more people. The best way for podcasts to grow is with authentic, organic growth and reviews. And you guys have been so good at helping me with that. I only hope that you can continue to do so. And for those of you who are new, please hit subscribe. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll see you on the next one.