Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 121: 10 Commandments of Muscle Growth

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

In this episode, coach Danny reviews what he calls the "ten commandments" of muscle growth.---Thanks For Listening!---Check Out Our New Partner Elemental Labs!---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 By Shopping for Your Supplements At Legion and using the code “DANNY”Support the Show by Staying Hydrated with LMNTSupport the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga, and in today's episode, I'm going to go over what I like to call my 10 commandments for muscle growth. These are habits, these are behaviors, these are nuances, things you can implement pretty much immediately. So definitely stay tuned and listen to the entire episode because if you're listening to this on your way to the gym, even if you're listening to this at the gym, you'll be able to start implementing some of this stuff today to enhance the quality of your training outcomes in the long run. Before we get into that though,

I do want to make sure that I plug one of my show's sponsors. That is of course Legion Athletics. Legion is one of the best supplement companies in the world. It is my personal favorite. There are some good ones. There's a ton of bad ones. But what I like about Legion is very simple. Transparent labeling, clinically and evidence-based dosages when we talk about ingredients. So getting exactly what it is you need in the amounts that you need it, right? A lot of companies will do what's called pixie dusting, which is unfortunate, but it's something that's become very commonplace and they hide behind proprietary blends.

Pixie dusting is taking ingredients that are proven to be effective, adding them to your product, but not in the amounts needed for that actual benefit to be realized in a living person. And the reason that they do that is so that they can say it's in there, they can claim it's in there on the label, and they can make sure that they're getting the highest profit margin on their product because many of these ingredients, unfortunately, are pretty expensive. So Legion plays by what I would like to call a higher standard, making sure that everything in the product is dosed at the level that's been shown to be effective in the research. That's really important. And if you want to learn more,

all of the products actually have plenty of educational source material right there at legion.com. And you can check out using the promo code Danny to save 20% off your first order and earn double points every order after that. So getting into the 10 commandments of muscle growth. Number one actually has nothing to do with the gym or training at all. And this probably won't surprise you, but it's eating enough food. I think too many lifters try to build muscle at maintenance or in a deficit. And while it is possible, right, it is possible to build muscle at maintenance. It's very possible to build muscle in a deficit, but it's not ideal. And the longer you've been training, it's pretty fricking hard.

It's important to acknowledge that for many, many years, there was some, let's call it shoddy rhetoric going around that you needed to be in a surplus to build muscle and you could not build muscle in a deficit. And while there's some truth there, what it really plays out to be is that you build muscle best with additional calories available for training hard, for recovering, for increasing protein intake. We'll talk about much of this stuff as we go. But number one is to actually get yourself into a calorie surplus so you eat enough food to support hard training and recovering from that hard training. Not just the recovery of, oh, I'm hungry after I train, I need to get fuel in. No, eating enough carbs to make sure that

your glycogen stores are full, having enough protein to make sure that you are in that 0.7 to one grams per pound range that's so important for building muscle. Another thing that you need to do is you probably need to eat more frequently. Things like intermittent fasting and pushing your food all to one side of the day might be great for fat loss and for people with busy schedules, but they're not optimal for muscle growth. One of the things that's really important to do is actually partition your protein across like three to four servings, relatively speaking, right? So if you're going to

have three to four meals, right? And you're a bigger guy, you might have larger protein servings than like a smaller woman. But generally speaking, we're talking about three to four protein feeding spread across your day. You want to spread that food out evenly, be in a calorie surplus, right? Those are the two things that fall into this first box, which is tip one, of course, commandment one, eating enough. But there's a lot of nuances there. Too many lifters, I think, are trying to build muscle in a deficit or build muscle at maintenance when they might do well building muscle in a surplus. Now, how much of a surplus you ask, that's kind of an interesting question, and it depends on who you talk to.

I am kind of in the school of thought that like 250 to 500 is the sweet spot. Some people say you should go more. Some people recommend going full dirty bulk. I tend to recommend a small surplus, especially for women. Once you get up into those mid two to high, like low 3000 calorie intake ranges, it can be pretty miserable for smaller women. It really just depends on your appetite level. And a lot of people I know when they try to bulk, they still try to eat what I would describe as mostly nutritious, quote unquote, healthy foods. So it can be really, really hard to hit those calories if your eating habits and behaviors have been centered around things like eating very little, eating very little carbs,

eating very little processed food, which for health might be ideal, but it might be really impractical to get to where you need to be calorically if your eating behaviors are aligned with quote-unquote eating healthy and quote-unquote eating clean. So eat a lot, eat enough to be in a surplus for sure, definitely get enough protein space to cross the day, get your carbs, don't be afraid of using some enjoyable foods thrown in there on occasion to help you hit your total calories. Commandment number two, you don't need to train more. You actually need to train better. Quality training before increasing the quantity of your training. Now, what do I mean by this? What is quality training? The first thing is technique and execution. And we can throw setup in here

because I think setup gets missed a lot. And just to define what setup is, if we're talking about, say, a machine like the leg extension, that might mean actually setting up the foot pad and the back position, the back plate, right, where you lean into for your height, not just jumping in and going. It might mean setting up your leg press for the right angle to best hit the quads, if that's your goal. It might mean setting up something more simple, like the squat rack for the right height so you can actually get in and out. Foot position on things like lunges, right? Arm path on things like cable flies or shoulder raises. So your setup is really, really important. And that has a lot to do more of with, I guess you could say, external factors, things like where the machines and where the pieces of those machines are positioned. So mastering that is really important because that's how we line up lines of tension with lines of pull from muscles. And when those two things are lined up, we're better applying stress to the tissues we want. And then of course we have things like execution, which is, is your technique actually good? Are you being conscientious when training about using the muscles you are trying to train?

The mind muscle connection kind of falls into the execution piece, right? Are you getting lazy? Right? A lot of people will kind of space out while they're training. They won't think about the target muscle. They won't think about the execution. Heaven forbid, maybe they're talking, right? This stuff isn't helpful if you're trying to maximize muscle growth. It doesn't hurt, but it's not helpful. It could hurt to be fucking around if your movement complexity is really high, right? And so, of course, additionally, within execution, we have being present, being mindful, having the mind-muscle connection, doing the exercise with proper form, is effort, right? Is that execution actually challenging? Is there sufficient stress being placed on the tissue that you're training to elicit muscle growth? So if growth's your number one goal,

it's pretty damn simple. You have to ask a little bit more of that tissue from a demand standpoint consistently over a very long time while giving it adequate nutritional stimulus to recover. So think about this. If I go into the gym and every day I do the same weight, but each time I do it, I train a little bit closer to failure, boom, that is money. And we'll talk more about proximity to failure as we go. If you go into the gym, you add a little bit more weight, you never increase the reps, boom, that's solid. If you keep the weight the same, you increase the sets, boom, that's solid. So how can we drive these multiple lines of progression simultaneously? It means you train smart. Maybe you follow a program like the ones on my website, corecoachingmethod.com, Female Physique Foundations,

Power Build Female Physique 2 Advanced, something that's going to ensure that those progressions are baked into your training. So you're actually logging something or you're keeping an eye on the sets and the rep increases. You just want to be getting better at the gym, in the gym, I should say, getting better in the gym over time by adding weight to the bar, by adding more volume, right? But you don't necessarily, necessarily need to train longer, need to train for more sessions, need to go all the way up to six, seven days a week, need to do double days. That's oftentimes counterintuitive. If you can cause damage to that tissue, damage is what's going to lead to repair and growth, by training really well and really smart and with really good technique and use less volume,

that's awesome because it gives you a longer runway. Okay, moving on to commandment number three. And you guys, if you've followed me for any length of time on Facebook, on social media like Instagram, on Twitter, you're pretty damn aware how I feel about sleep. I think sleep is huge for performance. It's also huge for stress management. It's huge for mental health, your metabolic health. The research on sleep has been around for quite some time and it's ever evolving. It's something that we're studying more and more, but it's something that didn't get talked about very recently, or I should say until very recently, particularly with regards to performance outcomes, body composition, strength. It didn't get mainstream clout until very recently. What we know about sleep with regards

to muscle growth. And a lot of this, you'll probably be able to, if you're sitting in the car, you'll probably be able to go, hmm, yeah, that's true anecdotally. Like I have seen this. So these are things that we've seen in the literature, but it's also probably true that you've seen these in your training. If you get less sleep, you probably will have reduced training outcomes. So think about the times you've gone to the gym to train on really, really low sleep and you're just dragging ass, right? Another thing, it's harder to stick to your nutritional protocol when you've had poor sleep. This is more likely true for people in a deficit. So this doesn't necessarily apply

to people who are in a surplus or whose goal it is to be in a surplus. But it is harder to make the right food decisions and decision-making in general when your sleep is bad. And so think about all the different things you have to do in order to position that protein where you want it, get enough calories. If you're low sleep, it's actually gonna impair you have to do in order to position that protein where you want it, get enough calories. If you're low sleep, it's actually going to impair your ability to do those things because

day-to-day tasks become that much more challenging. It impacts your memory, which might mean, hey, I missed a meal. In addition to the fact that most of the repair that you need going on at the skeletal level is going to happen best when you're not moving around, when you're literally sleeping. Then you talk about the things that help muscle growth indirectly, like hormones. Testosterone and growth hormone are huge, and they are mostly synthesized when we sleep. So that kind of stuff really, really matters. For men, missing out on just a little bit of sleep will cause your testosterone to plummet to near castrate levels, right? You can't miss sleep very often. And for women, you're not as dependent on testosterone,

but you can use it too for your own training advantages. You have it, just like men have estrogen. So not getting enough sleep's gonna cause dysregulation of your hormones, and a lot of those hormones play a small but impactful role in hypertrophy, strength, and body composition. So if you care about your muscle growth

and it's your primary goal in the gym, one of the best things you can do from a lifestyle standpoint away from the gym, right? Because a lot of what we have to do to make sure that we're make this landscape, this hypertrophy muscle building landscape is, you know, kept nice and neat and perfect. We have everything where we want it. We have everything in place. A lot of that stuff's going to happen outside of the gym. You can nail everything in there. You can train your ass off. You can be somebody, I have these clients who are just mental fucking warriors. They can put their head down and just go to work on a project, go to work on a workout. They are going to get it done. They're going to train hard no matter what, but they'll be burnt out because

they've got too much going on. And again, this is some of the stuff that we work on with. They've got a lot going on with kids, with work, with life. And so for you, you need to keep that sleep front of mind because it's how you, part of one of the most impactful ways we manage stressors and it's part of the recovery process. So you needed to recover from the training stress, but you also needed to step away from the real stress so that that stuff doesn't impact your training. Moving on to number four, getting into some of the more nuanced things. Let's call this reopening the anabolic window. And this is kind of a little bit of satire. The anabolic window was a once popular kind of training myth that's been debunked

that you needed to get protein in immediately following your workout or the anabolic window, anabolic is a biological term meaning growth basically, the anabolic window would shut. Meaning if you did not get your protein in post-workout, the protein that you need to feed your muscles, then the anabolic opportunity of that workout would be lost. You wouldn't gain muscle because you didn't get food in. Fast forward long enough that we actually get the opportunity to study this. It makes it out of the bodybuilding conventional wisdom world and into a lab somewhere where somebody says, hey, there's this thing that all these bodybuilders do. They eat immediately post-workout. Let's test it, comes to find out that if you get

enough protein across the day, it's not really that impactful if you have it immediately after your workout or immediately before your workout. But I think we should crack the anabolic window back open a little bit. And what I mean by that is this, just because it doesn't make a huge difference if your total calories and total macros are where they need to be to position that food around your workout. I think it can make a small difference. I've seen it make a small difference with my clients. And I think there's enough people who have built some pretty damn impressive physiques who stand by this that I think it's worth trying. And I mean cracking this anabolic window open, not just for protein, but for things like carbohydrate, right?

Because if you do train fasted, which a lot of these studies didn't have people train fasted because that's kind of suboptimal for muscle growth anyway, but let's say you train early in the morning. Then that anabolic window, quote unquote, really does matter. For muscle growth, it's really important to get a meal in after you train so that you can blunt the stress response, the cortisol spike, but also get the protein you need into your system, the amino acids going where they need to go, use carbs to spike insulin. Insulin is protein sparing. It protects against excessive muscle protein breakdown. All of those things happen when you're not fasted too.

And it doesn't hurt to have carbs about 90 minutes before you train. I actually like to have a little bit of glucose and a little bit of fructose. Those get to you via different transporters. So you might be able to uptake a hundred grams of carbs more quickly. If you split that into like 50 grams of glucose-based carbs and 50 grams of fructose-based carbs, they might become available as blood sugar at different rates. So you might have more stable energy. Hydrating before a workout is really, really important. Hydrating after a workout is important. If you can have amino acids available going into training, that's almost better. I think it was Kevin Tipton, or I want to say his name's Kevin, but Tipton, who's done a lot of protein research. Tipton found that if you were going to have a feeding of protein pre or

post-workout, that pre-workout was actually better. And so having carbs and protein within 90 minutes of training and carbs of protein within 60 to 90 minutes of training and carbs of protein within 60 to 90 minutes of finishing your training i think that's really valuable and look if you don't have the other shit from the big block eating enough food being in a surplus getting your macros right commandment one you don't you don't even get to focus on this this is commandment four you don't get to focus on this you earn the right by going through these in order right so eat enough food be in a surplus train hard and train smart. Make sure your sleep is good. There's a reason that these went in the order that they went in. 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. If you've mastered those behaviors and those eating habits, it doesn't hurt to get the food around your workout and it might help you get the most out of it if you find out where positioning food works best for you.

So moving on to number five, and this one is specifically put in here for women, and that is to supplement with creatine. is no ergogenic aid. These are supplements that can increase performance. That's been more studied. That's safer for healthy adult populations. That has little side effects. That's non-hormonal. That creatine monohydrate. Put it simple. Creatine is made out of amino acids. If you drink protein, if you drink amino acid supplements, EAAs, BCAAs, blah, blah, blah, you're exposing your body to almost everything that you'd be exposing it to if you put creatine in there. If you're willing to drink protein, if you're willing to take BCAAs, you know, I think you should be probably in a camp that would be willing to give creatine a try. There is a lot of creatine hesitancy with women because it has been a supplement used by young men to build strength and help them gain weight because with creatine supplementation, particularly

at high dosages, it's not uncommon to see increased water retention, but that's water retention happening in the muscle, which is fine. That's good. That helps you perform better. In addition to being safe for both men and women, I know that most men are taking it. I know that the hesitancy surrounding creatine consumption mostly exists within women and it's mostly spread by health misinformation or just a general lack of understanding as to how creatine works. Again, it's non-hormonal. Supplementing with it will help you recover better set to set. It will help you have better strength outcomes. It's even been shown to help with things like depression and cognitive health. So I look at creatine myself more as a health supplement,

something that I want to take with my fish oil. Not when I take my fish oil, but I put it in the same category as my fish oil, as my multivitamin, you know, things that I take. And I like to take Legion's Recharge. That's my favorite creatine on the market. I really like the strawberry lemonade. It's quite palatable. It's one of the few supplements that I don't just straight up chug. But it's important to acknowledge the impact creatine can have for a natural lifter. It's not going to be anything massive. It's not going to change your entire life, but it's probably the safest thing you could get your hands on that's going to markedly increase your performance. It's going to enhance your recovery. It's going to make your training

outcomes probably accelerate a little bit more quickly than if you're not taking creatine. And once you've reached creatine saturation and you have enough in your muscles to do the trick, you've taken it for, let's say, 20 to 30 days, you're going to start to see changes. It's not instantaneous. You don't just take creatine and feel like, oh my God, I can just go lift a truck. It's not a stimulant. It needs to saturate. So some people will do what's called a loading phase. I don't recommend doing a loading phase. I think it's kind of pointless. I think you should just take your time. If you have more questions about creatine, you can actually go to corecoachingmethod.com, check out my coaching website, head to the free guide, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and you'll see the creatine guide,

which is yours to download entirely for free. So you can learn about creatine supplementation, the various forms of creatine, what I recommend, what the research generally says about these different forms, and you can take it from there. Okay, so moving on to commandment number six, and we touched on this a little bit in commandment two, and that's train closer to failure. If your goal is muscle growth, of course training with good technique is important, or setup is important, and your set-to-set effort is important, but I also think it's important as a little cherry on top to include a little bit of training at or near failure, right? I don't think you need to train close to failure for all of your sets, meaning like you don't have to take every set to failure. You can stay well short of failure one, two, maybe even three reps away from failure.

But I think taking some work to failure here and there intermittently, maybe that's within the peak week of a set, meaning like, okay, so let's say you have a set of four weeks of programming at a time. You call these blocks. You call these chunks. You call these phases, right? A block of programming is four weeks. Maybe in week four before you deload and you move on to the next block

or before you transition to a block and you have lower volume for skill acquisition and stuff like that, lower intensity, you might peak it. You might make say, hey, I want you to train close to failure or take this exercise to failure, you know, a couple exercises in the third and fourth week of your blocks. I think that doing that over the long run, not necessarily doing it all the time, picking your spots, as I like to say, will help a lot because when you train closer to failure, you're sending, to put it simply, a very apparent signal to that tissue. You are building up a lot because when you train closer to failure, you're sending, to put it simply, a very apparent signal to that tissue. You are building up a lot of mechanical tension. There's probably going to be some muscle damage.

And there's various things that contribute to helping a muscle grow. Mechanical tension being a big one. Proximity to failure and muscle damage being one as well. Things like metabolic stress, which would be the buildup of things like lactate, hydrogen, creatine in the actual tissue. Those things might drive hypertrophy as well.

And so what do we do to get there? We might take higher rep sets closer to failure, do things like BFR. Your training has to get hard. That's, that's basically the summation here is your training at some point has to become challenging. And so number six is train closer to failure and generally make your set to set effort closer to quote unquote the hard range.

Number seven is make sure that you're feeling the muscles you're training. And this is more of a tip than it is a commandment, but it's a reminder. You should be keyed into the tissues that you're trying to hit. Do not go through the motions. If you're trying to train rear delts, make sure you feel your rear delts. If you're trying to train biceps, make sure that you feel your bicep. Sensation isn't what we're after here per se. We're really focusing on feeling the muscle, leveraging the mind-muscle connection, and using it as a litmus test for, hey, am I actually doing this right? This is a backdoor way of checking your execution, right? This is making sure that things are going according to plan, that you're creating tension and stability where you

need to so you can fire the muscle that you want to fire. If you're doing something and you go, oh, I don't feel it immediately in my quads. This isn't a quad exercise. That's not necessarily true, immediately in my quads. This isn't a quad exercise. That's not necessarily true, right? But if you're trying to do, let's say, leg press, and you're trying to bias your quads, and your feet are really high up on the platform, and maybe you stumbled a little bit in your setup and execution, if you're paying attention and you're using that mind-muscle connection, you might go, why do I feel this in my lower back and a little bit in my hamstrings? I better adjust my feet. Oh, there we go. Now I'm feeling the muscle that I'm trying to train. Boom. This is a habit that you want to get into if your goal is hypertrophy of paying very close attention to what's actually occurring at

the level of the muscle, focusing on it. Many bodybuilders swear by this. Some people say it's the only way to grow. There's no shortage of people who are selling you on the mind muscle connection. I think it's great for those reasons too, but it's a nice like I said Backdoor or it's a moat to prevent against doing something incorrectly and having going through the motions Inefficient volume you want to pay attention so that every rep you do Because all those reps take energy are effective reps Make sure that you get to the point where you're feeling those muscles working hard. If you're doing an exercise and you go, you know, I'm not feeling this, double check your execution. This is a great thing to put in place. Number eight,

reduce stress as best you can. If you're constantly stressed or you're constantly in a sympathetic state, you're going to struggle to build muscle growth or to build muscle to facilitate muscle growth. Geez, I'm getting tired. It's been a long day. I actually started with clients today at six. It's now 4 p.m. on the West Coast. This is the final thing I've got on my schedule today. But I wanted to bring this to you because I thought this would be a really enjoyable podcast. So anyway, reduce your stress. You end up in a sympathetic state when you're stressed all the time. And sympathetic states are the fight or flight state. The sympathetic state is the fight or flight state. The parasympathetic state is the rest and digest state. What have we talked about already? Food and recovery, particularly sleep. stressed all the time. You're always in a parasympathetic state. Cortisol is always running rampant. It's pretty hard to build muscle, right? Cortisol is catabolic. It's going to actually work against you building muscle. So do what you can to minimize your external stressors. Say this a lot.

There's a reason most professional bodybuilders don't have real jobs. And that's because it helps to be able to basically just post Instagram pictures and throw up discount codes. Do you train hard as fuck? Sure. Do you have to eat your little microwave meals? Sure. Yeah. It's, but it's not that hard, right? It's not being a single mom with three kids. And that's why you have to temper expectations, um, with certain clients. Something I find a lot is people come to me and they go, okay, well I want to have this bodybuilding lifestyle and I want to have this bodybuilding physique. And I go, okay, well that's really challenging to do. Um, when you have a lot of extra things going on, it's not impossible, but when these external stressors come in, it's going to inhibit your ability to

recover and train at the level required to build the best physique possible, the best physiques in the world. And so just keep an eye on your stress, pay attention to it. Number nine, track your lifts in the gym or hire a coach or coaching team like myself or core coaching method to keep an eye on your progress and just make sure that you're tracking a simple training journal thrown in your gym bag that you jot your weights down in is really, really easy to do. if you're not someone who's inclined to do a program like the ones available from my website or somebody who's not inclined to get a custom program built from the ground up from one of my coaches, at least log your shit, guys. It doesn't take that much time and you can always check back and be like, okay, where should I be? Or where was I a while ago? And make sure that you're making progress. The last tip, and this is again, super simple, super obvious. Be patient. Muscle growth is an extremely slow process. It happens really fast when you first start training. It's called newbie gains, or it's often referred to as

newbie gains. And this is basically your body being so sensitive to training that it's capable of building a lot of muscle and partitioning a lot of its energy towards the formation of larger skeletal muscle cells. It's going to help you build your muscle cells larger, but over time, those stressors become a little bit reduced as you get better at training. You have to continue to train harder and to train more over the course of your training career to get diminishing returns because muscle growth does cap. It doesn't cap per se. You could always keep building, but the rate at which you build goes down exponentially year after year, and that's totally okay. It's just an important reminder to be patient with the pursuit of building muscle,

particularly as a natural lifter. So to close, guys, let's review the 10 commandments of muscle growth, starting with number one, make sure that you're eating enough food, particularly protein and carbohydrate. And if you can, spread that out across the day. Number two, before you consider training more and putting more on your plate with regards to recovery, train better. Train with better execution, better setup, and better intent. Number three, sleep is everything. Get as much sleep as you can. Eight to nine hours is probably optimal. Any less than seven and you can. Eight to nine hours is probably optimal. Any less than seven and you can run into some problems with your performance and maybe even your hormone profile.

Number four, position some of your macros around your training. While the anabolic window has effectively been closed, I don't think it's a bad idea to have a little bit of protein and a little bit of carbs about 90 minutes before you train and about 60 to 90 minutes after you finish training from sources that are absorbed easily and aren't going to require a ton of digestive power, if you will. Number five, be sure you're supplementing with creatine. Number six, train closer to failure. Make sure that you're leveraging the power of mechanical tension and genuinely hard training. Number seven, try to feel the muscles that you're training or at least develop the

often sought after mind muscle connection. Number eight, stop stressing. Reduce your stress. Being in a sympathetic state all the time is not optimal for muscle growth. Number nine, hire a coach or at least log your workouts. Do something to make sure that you're making progress. Hold yourself accountable. And number 10, be patient, patient, patient. Muscle growth takes time, particularly the longer that you've been lifting. Thanks again, everybody, for listening in. This has been Coach Danny Matrengo of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. Every single one of you guys has made a huge difference in my ability to get this podcast out there by doing things like sharing it, leaving me reviews. We're almost at 200 reviews. I would love it if we could get to 200 reviews. So everything you've done so far has been amazingly helpful. Please don't stop. If you

haven't yet shared the podcast, if you haven't yet left a five-star rating and written review on the iTunes store, those are things that you could do for me that would be hugely beneficial. Tell me you did it on Instagram. Send me an email. I'll do everything I can to say thank you myself. I'm a busy guy, but all of you have helped me immensely in getting this out there. And it's something that I would love to continue to do, particularly with your help. I genuinely need it. The best way to get things out there, particularly with podcasts, is by genuine word of mouth.

Thank you all so much for tuning in. Again, Danny Matranga, dynamic dialogue podcasts, check everything out over at corecoachingmethod.com. We've got coaching programs, blogs, free guides, everything you need for your fitness journey.