Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 123: The *TEN* Most Common Fitness Questions Answered!

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

In this episode, coach Danny answers the TEN most commonly asked questions about fitness, nutrition, fat loss, and more!---Thanks For Listening!---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 into another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, we're going to take a look at what I believe to be the 10 most commonly asked fitness questions. These are questions that I've gotten for the decade plus I've spent in the fitness industry. And I get these questions more often than any other question. When I survey my audience on various social media platforms. Depending on where you're at in your fitness journey, some of this stuff may seem a little bit obvious, but we're really going to break it down and go into detail. So there's going to be a lot of questions answered, but also a lot of nuance and a lot of layers added to the discussion. So whether

you're a hobbyist, enthusiast, or even a coach, you'll be able to better communicate some of the fundamentals of fitness and debunk some of these myths and answer some of these really common questions. Before we get into the episode though, I want to read a few reviews from you guys here at home. Every single one of you that listens to the podcast that's been kind enough to subscribe or even leave me a rating or five-star review has been integral to the growth of the audience that I have and the growth of the podcast as a whole. Whether you're sharing podcast episodes on Instagram, sharing it by word of mouth, or leaving me reviews like the ones I'm

about to share, all of that stuff makes a huge, huge difference. But the most impactful thing for sure are written reviews through the iTunes store. So this review comes from Mitch Servi, and they say, Danny's podcast is very interesting and quite helpful. People like me, a fitness enthusiast, send in questions, and Danny does such a good job at breaking them down and providing science-based answers, throwing in some things he has learned from his experience as a coach. His podcast episodes are not too long or hard to follow. Love listening to them on my daily walk.

Mitch, thanks a ton for the review. And the next review comes from Um Suleman, and they say, I love the quality content that Danny M produces produces and he really knows his stuff. Keep bringing it, Danny. I'm an older woman in the industry and after a traumatic accident, I found myself relying on much of good information and often I don't find someone so well-informed that applies to me. And your answer, oh, and you always answer my questions. Thanks. So this is somebody who's involved in the Q&A. So anyway, guys, I want to do a better job of interacting with you, the listenership of

this podcast. And one of the best ways for me to do that is by sharing your review. So if you haven't left a review yet, please do so. And you might find that it gets featured on a future episode of the podcast. Before we get into the 10 most common fitness questions, I've got to keep the bills paid. So I'm going to plug my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. Core Coaching Method is the brainchild of the 10 years I've spent coaching real clients from competitive bodybuilders all the way to soccer moms. I feel like at this point in my career, I've trained just about every type of client,

and that was why I created Core Coaching Method. I wanted to create a coaching suite for anyone and everyone, whether they want one-on-one online coaching, online nutrition coaching, Zoom coaching in their home. Maybe this is for novices or people who want the element of a one-on-one personal trainer or even in-person personal training local to my Sonoma County community. Core Coaching Method has coaching offerings for everybody. I have openings on my client roster currently, as do the coaches who work with me in my coaching company. So if you're looking to take your fitness, nutrition, performance, body composition habits to a place that they have yet to be, to reach new heights, to, you know, conquer what has perhaps at one point seemed unconquerable, things that you might be stuck on,

working with a professional who's qualified, certified, and has experience in the space is a phenomenal way to do that. Myself and all of my team members over at Core Coaching Method are happy to assist you. So you can head over to corecoachingmethod.com and check out the coaching tab. We have a lot of other things there too, like blogs and free guides, but you can check out the coaching tab, apply for coaching, so many different options, see what's best for you. Getting into the 10 most commonly asked fitness questions. And the first is, can I lose fat while building muscle? Or can you lose muscle, or can you lose fat and build muscle at the same time? The answer to this question is yes, but I think it's important that we unpack it a little bit because there's certainly some nuance here.

How much muscle you can build and how much fat you can lose has a lot to do with where your starting point is. For example, if you've never lifted weights before, you'll build muscle much more quickly than if you've been lifting weights for your entire life. lifting weights for your entire life. Additionally, with regards to fat loss, the more body fat you have to lose, the more quickly you will lose it in the same deficit, right? Relative to somebody who is quite a bit leaner. So when we talk about people who are wanting to build muscle while simultaneously losing fat, a lot of times we call this re-comping. We have to look at first, how long has this individual been resistance training and eating in a calorie deficit or around maintenance? And so what you'll often see with people who have not trained, and this is something that will show up much more so in practice than it probably will in

literature, and I would see this all the time when I was working in big box gyms, and I still see it now when I take on clients who are relatively new or who have gone through a period of detraining, they haven't trained in a while, the likelihood of achieving recomposition effects is much greater. So for newer lifters, people who are detrained, you'll have a much greater likelihood of building quite a bit of muscle. If you've been training, like I mentioned earlier, for about 10 years, it takes a lot of effort to build very little muscle. And you might nutritionally need to be in a calorie surplus or at least at maintenance to build muscle when you've been lifting for a long time because it requires quite a bit of training

stimulus as well as nutritional stimulus to potentiate new tissue to grow. But for newbies or people who haven't been training, any resistance training stimulus is likely to potentiate quite a bit of muscle growth. You're going to gain more muscle in your first year training than any year following or any subsequent year. This is, of course, assuming that you're not training like a complete idiot or training in a way that has little to no hypertrophic stimulus. But let's say you're training smart. That first year is really, really going to be impactful for your gains. And what I've seen is people who are eating at a surplus or even at maintenance or even at a surplus, we'll see some strong body compositional changes.

People who lift weights or start lifting weights and are in a calorie deficit will grow a lot more muscle than people who have been lifting weights for a long time in a calorie deficit. So the best way to look at this is to ask yourself, okay, if I've been lifting for let's say two to three years and I'm really interested in losing fat, my best bet is to continue to lift weights and be in a calorie deficit. Probably won't build that much muscle, but it will help me maintain muscle while I lose fat. If I've been lifting for two to three years and my goal is to build muscle maximally, I want to optimize the amount of tissue I grow, it makes very little sense to be at maintenance or deficit. You probably will need some nutritional assistance. You'll need to be in a small surplus.

But if you're totally new and you're just getting started, you can achieve some pretty strong recompositioning effects eating at maintenance or eating at a deficit because your body's going to be so sensitive to that muscle building stimulus that comes from weight training that you're likely to build quite a bit of muscle. Now, will that hold up in the long run? And can you just continue to do this stuff forever and ever? Absolutely not. At some point, your training is going to reach a point of diminishing marginal returns, which isn't to say it's going to become completely ineffective, but rather your training is going to reach a point at which you can't just show up to the gym and lollygag your way to gains, right? I think back to what I used to do when I first got started. Everything made me make gains.

But now the longer that I've been training, the better decisions I have to make tighter. I have to follow my programming to squeeze just a little more juice out of that lemon, if you will. Right. Because at first everything is going to help with gain. So the first question, can you build muscle while losing fat? The answer is yes, but it very much depends on how long you've been training, what your nutrition looks like coming into it, right? And how sensitized you are to a resistance training stimulus. So if you've been training for a while, but took some time off, you'd probably be more likely to achieve recompositioning effects than had you just continued lifting. Moving on to question number two, do high reps tone and low reps bulk?

So the answer to this question is no, but let's define a few things first. Let's define what high reps are. I would say that high repetition ranges are reps north of 12. So let's say sets of 12, sets of 15. Nobody ever does sets of 13 or 14, right? Sets of 12, sets of 15, sets of 20, and anything north of 20 would be considered high reps. What would be defined as low reps? I usually say anything less than six. I tend to say six, eights, and tens are moderate rep ranges. Twelves, fifteens, twenties are those higher rep ranges. One, singles, doubles, triples,

sets of four, sets of five, sets of six are generally lower. Now, when you lift in a higher repetition range, you'll almost always use less weight than when you're lifting in a lower repetition range. When you do heavy, loaded compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, rows, presses, you'll find it's likely easier when you're doing those exercises heavy to stay in low to moderate rep ranges. For example, high rep heavy deadlifts is not super enjoyable, nor is it super safe for most people. When you're training isolated exercises closer to failure with lighter weights, those generally tend to lend themselves better to higher rep ranges, 12, 15, 20. So think things like bicep curls, rope extensions, lateral raises, cable crossovers. There's so many options here, right? A lot of your core training that's

done with body weight will be higher repetition range depending on how you train. So both of these things, right? Both these high rep ranges and these low rep ranges have potential to build muscle. How do they build muscle when they're so different? Well, it has to do with the proximity to failure, right? So we're going to create a lot of mechanical tension when we lift heavy, and we're going to create a lot of mechanical tension when we train close to failure. We're also going to create a lot of metabolic stimulus for growth when we train at higher rep ranges. So there's a few different things that can really drive muscle growth. The first and most important is mechanical tension. Okay, mechanical tension is simply

applying tension to the right tissues through ranges of motion, through contractile ranges, contracting the muscle concentrically, eccentrically, isometrically with load, progressing that load over time, progressive overload rate. That's how I would define mechanical tension. Second is muscle damage. Muscle damage usually occurs when we're lifting heavy weights. It occurs during eccentric periods. It occurs when we train to or beyond failure. And the last one is metabolic stress, which usually occurs at higher rep ranges when we build up things like hydrogen, creatine, and lactate from the contraction of muscles over and over and over and over again. So all three of those things are going to lead to muscle growth. And that would lead me

to believe that both high reps and low reps have potential for muscle growth. And we've seen this in the literature too. So long as we're getting close enough to failure with high or low reps, we're going to achieve some muscle growth. Now, let's define the word tone because the question I'm often asked are, do high reps create a toned physique while lower reps create a bulky physique? There's some, let's say, traditional training tendencies. There's your alliteration for the day, TTT. Your traditional training tendencies, I found, for men, they tend to like to train a little bit heavier, and women tend to be more comfortable training at a little bit higher reps, in large part because of some of the misinformation around words like tone. And if you're not sure what I mean by misinformation around words like tone, I strongly recommend queuing up the episode I recorded before this about misinformation in the fitness space. We talk all about this.

But basically, tone is a fake word. Tone refers to the athletic female-style physique that is commonly associated with female athletes, female bodybuilders, etc., looking very lean and semi-muscular without looking insanely ripped and insanely lean and overly muscular. Bulky is often used to describe a more masculine appearance

or a more muscular appearance where muscles are fuller, they're larger, particularly in the shoulders, arms, and upper back. It's usually used to describe musculature that is typically more masculine in nature. But neither one of these things is going to, high reps or low reps, neither one of these things is going to, high reps or low reps, neither one of these things is going to contribute more or less to muscle growth

so long as you're progressing and draining close to failure. Both of these styles of lifting have potential to do both. So I think that this persists because women who generally, when they're muscular and lean, will look more what we generally refer to as tone, have a tendency to lift at higher rep ranges. Men who, when they're muscular and fairly lean, have a tendency to look bulky, might be more likely to lift at lower rep ranges. That's where

this idea comes from. And I think that's why this idea sticks around. But if you took a woman and you had her eat the same amount of calories she was eating previously and had her lift heavier, and you took a man and you had him lifting a little bit lighter, but eating the same calories he was previously, I don't think he would achieve a toned physique and the woman would then achieve a quote unquote bulky physique, right? So I say when people ask, do high reps tone? The answer is no. High reps have potential to build muscles so long as they're close to failure. And remember, tone is a bogus marketing term. And do lower heavy reps bulk? No.

But heavier reps, generally done in lower rep ranges, might be closer to failure. So they do have a tendency to help with muscle building. And if you want to be conscientious about the amount of muscle you're building as a woman, you can always remember that muscle growth is a very slow process. It doesn't happen overnight and you always have the ability to pump the brakes. So number three, can I drink a protein shake every day or are protein shakes healthy? So I generally say yes to this question because I look at protein shakes more of a, as a food than I do a supplement.

Whey protein shakes are generally just dehydrated milk that's gone through a little bit of processing to remove some of the milk fat. And then we have plant-based proteins, which are basically just pulverized plant parts that yield quite a bit of protein. And I don't think either of these things is inherently unhealthy. I don't think they're bad. Some of them are sweetened artificially, sure. Some of them have things like gums. Sure. But I don't think those things are bad in small dosages. And I also think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of people are using a protein shake to replace what might otherwise be a meal full of who knows what, right? Because the traditional Western diet or the sad diet,

the standard American diet is all over the place and oftentimes loaded with hyper palatable, low nutrient density foods. So a quick shake that goes down really easy and yields a ton of a really important macronutrient and protein, I think is really, really important and has a lot of utility. Do you need to take one every day? No, that's actually a question that almost made the list, which is, can I build muscle without taking protein? Absolutely. I tend to recommend getting most of your protein from whole foods. But as somebody who enjoys a protein shake, I shouldn't say enjoy, who has a protein shake about five days a week, because it's hard for me to get my daily protein in with my schedule, I understand how practical these things are in the long run. So the answer to,

can I drink a protein shake every day, tends to be yes. And when I'm asked, are protein shakes healthy, I usually say, compared to what most people would replace those calories with, yes. If you're talking about using a protein shake in place of things like whole foods and entire meals that contain multiple different macronutrient groups and micronutrients, then probably not. But it won't hurt you to have a protein shake on a fairly regular basis if you're an otherwise healthy adult. 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. Question number four. How many days a week should I work out? This is a really common question. And my answer, silly as it may seem, is usually more than one, but less than seven. And so that means somewhere between two to six. And how you decide how many days you want to lift really comes down to your schedule. So I'm going to go through a few hypothetical situations and hypothetical clients and pick the best split for them. So let's say Susie comes to me and Susie has three kids. She's super busy. She's a professional. She has her own career, three kids,

constantly driving them to and from places and working. And I say, Susie, how many hours a week do you have to work out? She says two. I might recommend that she do two total body exercises. Okay. Uh, total body workouts. I should say that train the entirety of the body. Things that are push, pull, squat, lunge, hinge, mostly compound movements done twice weekly. So again, we're looking at somebody who has a lot of stress, a lot of things on their plate, and focusing on making sure that this person is getting two resistance training stimuli a week that are global, meaning they're training as many muscle groups through a lot of different ranges of motion. All right, then let's use Kenny as an example. So Kenny comes in and Kenny is a construction worker and he has a lot of physical stress on his plate. And he says, I have about

three times a week that I can get to the gym before I go to work. I might also recommend at three times a week that you stick with that total body frequency. If you have a specific muscle group or area that you want to develop, I might recommend doing an upper body day, a lower body day, and then a day dedicated to those muscle groups you want to develop. Okay, so then we're going to go to Sharon. Sharon has four days a week that she can get to the gym. Now, if you can get to the gym four days a week, that really opens up the playbook as to what we can do. The less you can make it in, the fewer number of sessions you can do, the more I tend to

lean towards total body training. That way we can implement the priority principle, the frequency principle, right? Everything's a priority when you can only train twice a week. And frequency is really important when you can only train twice a week. You don't want to just train a muscle group once a week if you can get to two. So if we're getting to that four time a week workout where you can get four in, I generally recommend upper-lower splits, meaning a full day for upper, a full day for lower. And assuming you have four days, you're going to follow that up with another upper body and another lower body day. My female physique programs, my power build program,

and my foundations program are all four-day splits with that optional fifth day that tends to be built around, and for example, for female physique, it's glutes, back, lats, delts type stuff that just sprinkles a little extra volume in on those areas people most want to develop. When we get to the five and six-day-a a week split, that's where we start to deploy more specialized tactics. So for five days a week, you could do upper, lower, push, pull, leg.

You could do five days a week total body with things sprinkled around accordingly. You could do push, pull, leg, upper, lower. You could do upper, lower, upper, lower, lagging body part day. When you get to six days a week, it's generally push, pull, leg, push, pull, leg. Push days are usually chest and delts and triceps. Pull days are usually back muscles and biceps and leg days are exactly what they sound like. And if you're totally new to training, I might recommend starting off with two to three total body days. After six to 12 months, working to let's go four days a week, up or lower. After about a year of doing that, you could probably then progress to something a little bit more advanced, like five to six days

a week body part specific training. But I tend to recommend getting the low hanging fruit because when you're new, you're going to grow from anything and you don't need to hyper specify so early with regards to how your split goes. Okay, so number five, should I lift weights or do cardio for fat loss? My answer is both, but if you only had, let's say, six hours a week to dedicate to exercise, I might do four and a half hours for weights and an hour and a half for cardio. I think that if you are looking to lose fat, at least 75% of your exercise time should be spent resistance training. Not because it's better for fat loss per se, but it's better for the long-term metabolic outcomes,

meaning you will maintain your muscle. You will have the physique you want when you lose the fat. It will help regulate things like hormones that oftentimes get skewed when we're in calorie deficits for too long. Doing a ton of cardio is probably the best way to lose weight fast, but you will likely lose a bunch of muscle if you're not, you know, sending that resistance training stimulus and you're not getting adequate protein. I do think it has a place for a variety of different reasons. Obviously, cardiovascular exercise is great for your cardiovascular system. And I think independent of fat loss, that's something we need to remember is that cardio has tremendous utility for enhancing your health and your wellness.

So being sure that you're doing enough for the health of your heart, your arteries and your lungs is important. But if it becomes so much of your exercise routine, let's say it's 50, 60%, it's going to inhibit your ability to build or maintain muscle. And if your goal is to lose body fat, you want to have that muscle. It will help the physique that is left over after the fat is gone look quite a bit better. And as far as metabolism goes, losing excessive amounts of muscle is never ideal and will probably enhance the rate at which metabolic adaptations or negative adaptations to dieting kick in. So be sure to maintain your muscle. And I think that when it comes to doing fat loss specific programming, you want to do more weights than you do cardio.

All right, number six, what is the best diet? So the answer here is very simple. There is no best diet. There are some best practices though. If health and wellness are something that you're focused on, you should eat mostly whole foods, minimally processed foods, avoid fast food, and focus on getting a lot of cruciferous vegetables, a lot of greens, a lot of fruits. Those are the things that are generally associated with longevity. So lots of whole foods, probably a good balance of protein,

carbs, and fats, things that are very nutrient dense and load up on the plant matter. If your goal is muscle building, you're going to want to be in a diet that allows you to be in a high protein calorie surplus. Okay. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. If your goal is fat loss, you wanna be in a high protein calorie deficit. There's a lot of diets that do that. Keto is an example of a diet that when you, let's say you're not tracking calories, but you take like Mary Muffintop down in accounting

and Mary Muffintop's raving about how she's losing all this weight in keto. Going back to the standard American diet, the SAD diet, it's so rich in carbohydrate when you do a diet like keto where you have to cut out carbs you're going to cut out 60 maybe 70 percent of the foods that you are eating and that's going to reduce your calorie intake and what can you eat when you're on keto lots of protein and lots of vegetables those things will keep you full and help hopefully help keep you in a deficit that's why so many people do well initially with a ketogenic diet

with regards to fat loss and weight loss, because you're removing so many options from the table that your caloric intake is really constrained to things that are mostly keto friendly, which tend to be meats, cheeses. It's so strange to me that the keto diet is like cheese, butter, and bacon, like people think cheese, butter, bacon, but it's like lean meats, oftentimes low sugar dairy, lots of vegetables, things like cheese, bacon, butter, probably not the best. But what I'm getting at here is the keto diet, uh, structurally allows for high protein, high veggies, and removes a lot of those high calorie foods. So sometimes that works well.

I'm not saying it's sustainable because a lot of people really struggle to sustain a ketogenic diet for a long time, which is why I would never call it the best. But if your goal is fat loss, the best diet is likely going to be the one that includes a lot of nutritious fruits and vegetables, a lot of protein, and helps you stay in a deficit. So truth be told, there really is no best diet. There's only best nutritional practices. And one of the better nutritional practices I think we can all implement is remembering that food is social and food is part of being human. We like to enjoy food with each other. So diets that are overly restrictive and constrain what you can eat, where you can eat, how you can eat,

tend not to be the best for sustainability purposes. Okay, number seven. Should I stretch before or after I train? I tend to recommend stretching after you train because your tissue is already warm. Static stretching or stretching in the way that you might if you're, let's say, stretching your hamstrings by laying on your back and reaching for your toes or stretching your quads by standing up and reaching behind you and grabbing the bridge of your foot, right? Pulling your heel towards your butt. Those static stretches are best done, I think, post-training for two reasons. One, your tissue is likely to be tighter after contractile exercise, and two, it's already warm and ready to be lengthened. An additional benefit might be that stretching can be relaxing, and it might help you get into

a parasympathetic state, which is better for recovery. As to what muscle preparatory work you should do prior to training, I would recommend things like low-level aerobic work to actually elevate your core body temperature and quote-unquote get the blood flowing, right? That's beneficial for contraction. Your muscles contract better at above 98.6 degrees, so literally warming up will help. Some tissue preparatory work. So if you have tight tissues or restricted tissues or things that are chronically agitating you, that might be where you want to do some targeted stretching or even some foam rolling or let's call it tissue-specific work, okay? And then you might want to do some things specific to what you're doing that day.

So your warm-ups tend to be very specific, much more specific than simply just stretching. If you're going to squat, you might want to do some squats with the naked bar, getting your hip external rotators going with a band, and maybe even some box jumps to achieve some post-activation potentiation. You're going to do a glute-focused workout, right? You might want to warm up on the treadmill, and some people like to do what they call glute activation. I don't think it's necessary, but some people like to get their glutes going, get their head right, get their mind-muscle connection established. I don't think it's necessary, but there's a lot of different things you want at your disposal when you're warming up beyond just static stretching. Now,

if static stretching helps you get in the zone, helps you get warmed up, I'm all for it. I just think you will get better adaptations to your static stretching work if you do it when you're already warm and you do it at the end of your workout. Okay, number eight, do carbs make you fat? No, carbs do not make you fat. Too many calories makes you fat. In America, going back to the standard Western diet or standard American diet, many of our high calorie food choices are rich in carbohydrates. So if you think about the foods that Americans love to eat, hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, pizza, tacos, you name it, cakes, pastries, you name it. Often the foods that people say, oh, I can't eat that. I got to stay away from that are all gain weight. And they go, well,

that has carbs, that has carbs, that has carbs. Well, yes. And all of these options also have quite a bit of dietary fat and therefore they're very rich in calories. There are a lot of carbohydrate rich foods that are low in calories. For example, fruits, whole grains, those things, right? Like legumes even. All of those things yield a tremendous amount of carbohydrate and some fiber, but they're not nearly as high in calories because there's not many associative grams of fat,

and fat has nine calories per grams to carbs, four calories per gram. And so something you'll often hear referenced by people in the fitness space is nobody ever got fat eating too much fruit. Now, if you're eating so much fruit that your caloric intake is trending towards a surplus, you're going to gain fat, but because fruit doesn't have any fat, right? You're getting almost all except for avocados. I think avocados is a fruit. Could be wrong on that. Independent fact checkers, please make sure I'm good. But carbohydrate from fruit, you're getting mostly fruit, mostly water, mostly fiber. So it's going to be much more filling by weight than a processed food or a food that contains

fat and carbohydrates. So no carbs do not make you fat. Too many calories makes you fat. Number nine, is diet soda better than regular soda? This answer is no slash it depends. So I think that diet soda is a fine option for people who are looking to have something sweet that is calorie free. If you are somebody who is skeptical of artificial sweeteners like aspartame or sucralose, I personally am not one of the people who is skeptical about those, but I have learned from navigating the pandemic that once people have established ideas about particular compounds or things that are occurring in food, occurring in vaccines, occurring in whatever, usually they have become pretty entrenched in what they think about those things.

If you don't like the idea of artificial sweeteners, regardless of what the research says about their safety in humans and the dosages, etc., there are other diet soda-type products like LaCroix or Bubbly or Zevia that are either naturally sweetened or sweetened with things like Stevia. And so I think when we compare those to sodas, which often have 40 plus grams of sugar per can, sugar we do know can be problematic at higher dosages in humans. It can exacerbate quite a number of issues, but it's also, you know, we're talking about 160 calories in a 40 gram of sugar soda. So I would say that in general, sodas higher in sugar are worse for your health because they contain quite a bit of sugar. And we know that high amounts of sugar can be bad

and they contain a lot of calories with almost zero satiating effect. So if I wanted to enjoy a soda or a carbonated sweetened beverage, I would generally aim for a diet option so that I could have more flexibility with the rest of the decisions I make throughout the day. Now, if you don't like the taste of diet soda, there's nothing wrong with fitting a 40 gram of sugar regular soda into your nutrition plan. Like I mentioned previously, carbs and the sugar in soda is a carb won't make you fat so long as your calories are equated. And if you're being mindful of your sugar intake, I think a little bit of sugar is fine. So number 10, can you spot reduce body fat? The answer to this question as it stands right now is no. You will hear a little bit of back

and forth from different people who've looked at different research, particularly people in the anecdotal world who rely on things like waist trainers, et cetera. But generally, I don't think you can spot reduced body fat. If you could, somebody out there would be a multi, multi, multi-millionaire on the supplement, on the product, on the workout plan that allowed you to do it. And one of the things that I always laugh about for people who swear by waist trainers is we're talking about a tight, constrictive fabric that is very, very similar to things like yoga pants, where most women want body fat around their glutes. And if in fact, compression alone was enough to help body fat stores be mobilized

in those areas, then people would want the loosest fitting clothing possible around their butt. So there you have it, guys. Those are the 10 most commonly asked fitness questions. Can you build muscle while losing fat? The answer is yes, but it depends on how long you've been training, your current training status, and your nutritional status. Number two, do high reps tone and do low reps bulk? The answer is no. All reps close to failure will help you build muscle. It has a lot to, what your physique ends up looking like, whether it's quote unquote toned or quote unquote bulky, has a lot to do with your gender or your biological sex, your hormones, as well as your genetic predisposition for building muscle. Number three, can I drink a protein shake every

day? Yes. Number four, how many days a week should I work out? This totally depends on how often you can get to the gym with your other stressors and with your schedule, but usually between two to six. If you want to optimize muscle, I say four to six. Should I lift weights or do cardio for fat loss? The answer is both, but lift more weights. Number six, what is the best diet? This totally depends. We don't have best diets.

We have best practices. Number seven, should I stretch before or after I train? I generally recommend stretching after dynamic warmup before. Number eight, do carbs make you fat? No, they do not. Too many calories makes you fat. Number nine is diet soda better than regular soda. The answer again here is it depends. And number 10, can you spot reduced body fat? The answer here is no. So that will do it for this episode of the podcast. You guys, thanks so much for tuning in again. If haven't, leave me a five-star

rating and review on iTunes. Hit that subscribe button. Share this to your Instagram story. Let's start debunking the myths in the fitness space. Whether it's people who are just starting to get in shape or people who are already serious but want to make sure they're not wasting their time, misinformation and bullshit is a real problem in our space. And sharing good information like this can make a huge difference. If you have any critiques for me or you have anything you'd like to see on an upcoming episode of the podcast, feel free to shoot me a message on Instagram or send me an email at danny at corecoachingmethod.com.

If you want to support the podcast, you can support by shopping through the links in the show notes with our partners, Legion Athletics. They make some of the best supplements. Elemental Labs, who makes my favorite, absolute favorite electrolyte. Or going over to coercoachingmethod.com for your programming or coaching needs. Thanks so much for tuning in and have a great day.