Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 124: 8 Telltale Signs You *NEED* Rest/Deload

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

In this episode, coach Danny outlines the 8 telltale signs you need to take a day or two off, recuperate, deload, or even step away from training-You aren’t that motivated to train anymoreYou are stiff/sore excessivelyYou aren’t making progress/going backwardYour mind is scattered at the gymYour morning HR is elevatedYou are constantly fatiguedYou are getting colds/flu more oftenYou are noticing sexual/reproductive issues*BONUS* Your irritability/mood is fluctuating---Thanks For Listening!---Grab the new Female Physique Advanced HERE!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!-----Support the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and today we're going to go over eight telltale signs that you are approaching overtraining, that it might be time for a rest day or even a deload. I get a lot of questions about how do I calibrate when I should deload, and we'll go over that before I go over the signs. But I think it's important to acknowledge that all of the gains you make are a function of how well you recover from your training. The harder you train, the more recovery you need. The longer you've been training, the harder you have to train to potentiate results.

That's why I often say you can only make the gains that you can recover from. And so for those of us who've been training for a lot longer, some of these strategies, being aware of some of these red flags are going to be really important. So stay tuned. But before we get started, I wanted to plug one of my favorite sponsors, Elemental Labs. Elemental Labs makes my favorite salt-based, sugar-free, 100% all-natural electrolytes. Electrolytes are phenomenal for helping with muscle contraction, right? Think sodium potassium. Think back to high school biology and the importance of the sodium potassium pump.

They help us stay hydrated, not only at the muscular level, but overall. And for those of us who train in hot or humid environments where we lose a lot of fluids to sweat, or we train early in the morning fasted where hydration might be a problem, having supplemental electrolytes is really, really valuable for your ability to get and stay hydrated, to make the most of your training, stay full during your cut, and just make sure you're getting all of the benefits of proper hydration. Elemental Labs and I teamed up so that you can try their signature electrolyte for free in every flavor by going to drinklmnt.com slash coach Danny. You get all of the flavors

delivered to you for free, just pay shipping. My favorites are the citrus salt and the mango chili. I also really like the raspberry and the watermelon, but go ahead, head over to drinklmnt.com slash coach Danny, get yourself some electrolytes. And without further ado, let's go into deloading, recovering, and eight signs that you need to take a rest day. So before we get into all of this stuff, we're going to break down what I like to call the stimulus adaptation principle, right? So with regards to resistance training, weightlifting is a stimulus. Building muscle, building strength are the adaptations to the stimulus, okay? So when you have a biological stimulus that acts on anything biological, right? But in this instance,

we're talking about muscle. Usually these stimuli are present in the form of stress. So stressors tend to create stimuli that require adaptation. That's one of the fundamental principles of biology, right? Survival of the fittest. Well, what are you surviving? Various stimuli that can impact your physiology, create changes that we hand down to generations, right? If you think about a camel, they're notorious for the big hump on their back. And colloquially, or let's just say, legend has it that the hump stores water to help the camel hold enough fluid to survive the hot, arid days of the desert. And, you know, evolution over time has made those humps more likely to store more water. That's partially true. What's untrue about it is that what's actually in the hump isn't water. What's in the hump is actually fat. And the fat is doing almost exactly what I just described,

but instead of helping with hydration, it helps particularly with fuel. Because just in the same way that water is pretty scarce in the desert, so is fuel. And the hump is mostly fat. And that fat helps the camel run its oxidative system. But over generations and generations and generations, these stressors applied to camels and the ancestors of camels have selected for those that are best at storing fat in their humps to evolve, to reproduce, and now you have camels with very large humps so that they have that mechanism. And the stress of the heat has these long-term genetic outcomes in these changes. And resistance training is happening on a much shorter scale, right? So the stress we're applying very acutely, not over generations. But those acute stresses require responses.

And the response that we're after, hopefully, when we're resistance training is that our muscles are going to grow back bigger and stronger. But in order for that to occur, right, much in the same way that in order for camels to be able to persist, they have to reproduce, they have to hand these adaptations down. you have to recover. So you have to recover from whatever the stressor is. And in resistance training, the recovery is usually nutritional and lifestyle related. Are you getting enough protein and carbohydrate to recover? Are you getting adequate calories to actually hold onto muscle and potentiate these changes? And are you getting enough sleep so that physiologically things are the way they need to be? And the longer you've been training, the harder you've been training, the more you need to really understand these recovery principles. And so as a general rule

of thumb, if you're training progressively, you can take a deload or an opportunity to train at reduced volume and reduced intensity so that you don't burn out, right? So that psychologically, you get to take a break from heavy, hard, demanding training every four to eight weeks. And I think this really just depends on how you train, the way in which your body responds to training, how long you can subjectively go before hitting burnout, right? Everybody's different, but I do think that working in a deload where you do very similar movements to the ones that you've been doing, very similar training to the training you've been doing, and reduced volume and reduced intensity is really important. And I also recommend that

serious lifters take a week off at least once a year. If you look at the Mr. Olympia bodybuilder competitors, it's not uncommon for those guys to take an entire week, two, three, four, even five weeks off after their big competition season so that they can really just detach and unwind. They don't lose much muscle because maybe they train a little bit here and there, but they're certainly not focused on dieting. A lot of them step away from training. It's just a good opportunity to get away from it. And I think for the mental benefit, or I think there's mental benefits to that too for those of us who've been training for years and years and years. But for those of us who haven't and we want to make the most of our recovery, it's really important to schedule those deloads ahead so that we don't run into the red flags that we're about to talk about here pretty soon. Now, as to how you should handle rest days or how you should handle recovery, I do think there are some things that you need to keep an eye out for. And I'm actually going to go over eight signs that I think are very, very clear that you need to take one to two days off of your training to focus on your recovery, your sleep, your hydration, your nutrition,

give your joints, soft tissues, and nervous system the chance to chill out and then attack it strong after a couple days, a day or a couple days away. And that first sign is that you have lost the motivation and desire to train. Now, I'll be honest, not everybody loves training as much as people like myself who are personal trainers and fitness enthusiasts. In fact, some people drag themselves to the gym every damn day

and hate every second of it, but they understand that the benefits outweigh the cons of the temporary hatred of the movements that they're doing. And I totally, totally, totally have so much admiration for that. But for a lot of us, we're pretty motivated to get in there. And I think that that motivation is a really good barometer. And when you start to feel that motivation fading, when you start to be like, man, I don't want to be here on my phone the whole time in between workouts, I'm really dogging it. I'm only doing the stuff I like. Oh, I almost didn't go today. And I'm normally more motivated than this. That can be a really good indicator that you're reaching a place where you just need to step away. Not so that you can't, not because exercise and movement aren't still

important, right? But because there are some benefits to using your motivation and your willingness, desire, readiness. You use the adjective here, your passion for training, right? You do need that. I don't think you need it every day. I often say that if you only train or only act when you're motivated, you won't get very far. And that's very true. But if you generally have a certain level of motivation and you notice that after weeks and weeks of hard training, that motivation is faltering or dipping or trending downward, that's oftentimes the first indication that it's time to step away. We often will see the psychological things before we see some of the physiological things. So moving on to the second sign that you should take some more rest

or even a full rest day or rest week, deload. Number two, this one is physiological, which is an increased in stiffness, soreness, all of these things, right? So if you're somebody who trains really, really hard and you implement a lot of novel movements, or you train with a lot of eccentrics, or you train close to or beyond failure, you're probably sore quite a bit. But if you train the way that most people train, you probably get sore here and there,

but not all the time. And if you all of a sudden have a string of days where you're very stiff or sore, and the soreness just won't subside, and your nutrition's okay, your sleep's okay, you're just sore and the soreness just won't subside and your nutrition's okay, your sleep's okay. You're just really feeling the soreness and the pains of training and maybe even your movement quality is suffering because you're just feeling generally stiff and beat down. I think there's some value in taking some time away. This is a concept that I've actually borrowed

from the NFL. And if you look at the NFL, they have practice reports. And on these practice reports, particularly practice injury reports, you'll see DNP. And DNP means did not practice. And a lot of times you'll see DNP knee, or you'll see DNP elbow, or DNP wrist. And these are players who didn't practice, did not practice, because of these injuries. But for veteran players, or star players, or players who take a lot of snaps in game, you'll often see DNP rest. And often what you're just seeing there is coaches going, hey, this is a really productive player, somebody who just doesn't need to do this today. Their body needed that rest. And in the NBA, another way, I borrowed something similar from the NBA, they do load management. And load management

is just basically looking at, okay, this is our star player. These are players who are really important to our team cohesion, the scheme that we're running, the way that we play. And we can give these guys a game or two off here against subpar teams that we think maybe we can beat without them. Or by looking at the standings, maybe it's not so important, or we're actually scheduling these days in advance. We only want these players to log so much total stress on their body across the season and load management can help with injury reduction. And so why, why this stuff matters to you is you need to kind of think of your body like an athlete. I want you to think of your body like, Hey, you know, if I feel that I need that day, I am both the coach and the

athlete here. And I give my clients or yeah, I give my clients days off all the time. In fact, I had a few clients last week who got sick. Thankfully, none of them had COVID, but about three of my clients last week and going into this week got some kind of sickness or illness, whether it was traveling or just stress. And a lot of them were very stressed from different things that had happened in their life and they got sick. And the first thing I told them in our email correspondence was, hey, let's take this day by day. If you feel like you need rest, like we're going to give you the rest. And we'll talk a little bit more about the sickness as we go.

But you got to be the coach here. And you got to acknowledge every once in a while is more than okay to give yourself that rest day, particularly if you are training hard and training in a productive manner. All right, number three, this is the big one. This is the ultimate red flag. And that is that you aren't making progress or you're actually going backwards. So if you're finding that you can't hit lifts you used to be able to hit, or you're actually going backwards and you're, like I said, your sleep, your stress and your nutrition are in check. And this is happening on multiple occasions. It's not just a strange one-off. And again, for women, I think it's important to acknowledge the caveat that where you're at in your menstrual cycle can really matter here. So

if you have just, let's say you've just started your period and you're in the very beginning of your menstrual cycle, I could understand that you might see a performance dip. But and you're in the very beginning of your menstrual cycle, I could understand that you might see a performance dip. But if you're in those first 14 days into ovulation and even into the first day of that follicular phase, or sorry, into that luteal phase before you get to PMS, things should be pretty stable. And if you're always just tanked and you can't make progress and you're going backwards and you're not in those really progesterone spiked, um, parts of your training where training can take a dip almost on schedule, you need to readdress things and look at your stress because in general,

you shouldn't be going backwards. It's okay to find sticking points or have a hard time. Like, Oh my God, I just can't, I just cannot pull 405 on deadlifts. I can get up to 390, but I'm having a hard time. Okay. Sometimes we hit sticking points on big lifts that are hard for people who are maybe power lifters or volume things that might be hard for things like bodybuilders. But if you are consistently finding that you're hitting a wall or even going backwards in your performance metrics, your KPIs, your key performance indicators, the things that

you're looking at, whether it's your body composition, your aerobic performance, how you're doing in the gym, if those are stagnant or going backwards, it might be time to take a break. Because remember, there's something that occurs in resistance training and with our adaptation to imposed physical demands known as supercompensation. And what happens is we stress the body, stress the body, stress the body, stress it to a point where we actually have not stressed it before. We see a dip. And then after recovery, during that stress adaptation, boom, we spike up to new gains, new levels. And that's called supercompensation. And so oftentimes you might actually be on the edge of that super compensation if you would just give yourself the

ability to rest and recover but that's really hard for people to do and so pay attention to those kpis pay attention to your performance 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. Number four, you just are totally scattered at the gym. You are totally all over the place. Mentally, you can't focus on what you're doing. I'm sure you've been there. I've

been there too. And quite frankly, a lot of this has to do with just plain balance. If you've got so much shit on your plate because you're trying to fit in a job, maybe a side hustle, maybe kids, maybe two jobs, maybe jobs in school. I know a lot of you guys are students. And working out, it might just be too much so that the added stress of getting to the gym and having all of these different things on your to-do list is bogging you down and killing your focus and really like spiking your anxiety. And that'll infect and leak into your training. And so if you've got a million things on your mind and you've got shit to handle, like I said, you are the coach here. You're the coach and the athlete.

If you need to give yourself a day off the gym to get your life in order, to quote unquote, make your bed, as Jordan Peterson would say, I'm so 50-50 on him too. It's really interesting. I don't love him. I don't hate him.

There's certain things I really enjoy about him. There's certain things that I don't. As far as like pop psychology goes, I don't think he falls into that category, but there's certain elements of the way he breaks down the world that bother me. But anyway, this was a Jordan Peterson conversation. It's just, look, if you need to take time to get your life in order because things are chaotic and hectic, you can put a pause in your training. Missing a day or two is not a bad thing, especially if you've already been dealing with some of the other things on this list. It might be overdue in the first place. Number five, this is a really cool physiological

one, and that is that your morning heart rate is elevated. So it's not too challenging to take your morning heart rate. You can simply set a timer for a minute and then take your pulse, either your radial pulse or just taking the pulse from your neck and count how many heartbeats that you have in that minute. And if you get a baseline on a couple rest days, after a couple rest days, what your morning heart rate is, you can actually assess your heart rate every morning. And if you see that morning heart rate climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, that's usually a good indicator that it might be time for a break or to incorporate things that are more recuperative and are going to help you recover.

Some people use devices like WH whoop or HRV devices. Whoop, I believe, does do HRV. I think Oura Ring does HRV as well. And HRV means heart rate variability. So elevated morning heart rate is like what I call the poor man's HRV. Some of these devices will give you both metrics. I find that an elevated morning heart rate for me is generally a good time that I should cool it, take a day or two to recover. It's usually one day for me. I do schedule rest days every single week. So I train between four and five days a week.

But depending on what else I have going on, whether it's travel, whether it's onboarding a lot of new clients, whether it's opening the new gym. Okay, there's a accidental spoiler. Well, let's just leave it there, but there's some very cool things coming down the pipeline for me and core coaching method, my coaching company. So stay tuned on that. But if you find that your morning heart rate is consistently elevated, that is not ideal and that's problematic. And it's very easy to assess. You can also get things that read morning heart rate very, very quickly. Okay, number six, outside of the gym, you are constantly fatigued.

You suffer from chronic fatigue. You wake up and you feel exhausted. You feel exhausted throughout your entire workday. You don't feel refreshed after your training. You actually feel more tired going into and coming out of training, right? If any of these things sound familiar, you might be approaching a overtraining range or a place where a deload would be smart or at least a rest day or two would be good. Healthy, fit, active people who are well

nourished, right? If you're in a deficit, that's going to tip the scale here, skew the choices we make here because of course, if you're energy deficient, it's going to make it that much harder. The choices we make here, because of course, if you're energy deficient, it's going to make it that much harder. But it's important to acknowledge here, if you are experiencing levels of fatigue that are atypical, backing off the resistance training, or at least the intense resistance training, might be a good idea. Number seven, and this is a really big indicator here for things like overtraining syndrome, but that's you're getting more persistent colds and flus. Obviously we need to be particularly important with this right now and how we, how we assess how we're feeling with the pandemic, right? Like if you're feeling sick, you probably shouldn't

be going to the gym at all period, because if you have COVID and you're going to the gym, like, I hate to say it, you're kind of a shit bag. Like, I mean, I get it. You could make the argument that, Hey, if they were concerned about getting COVID, they should be vaccinated. And, uh, I agree with that, but there's a lot of people who are having a hard time getting out of their own way on this one, or they, they have some belief system in place that they're not willing to sacrifice, or they don't want to admit, um, that a stance they took previously was, it was the incorrect stance. And so if you're feeling sick, like ever don't go to the gym. I used to tell people this all the time. If you got a head cold or you got a light cough, or you got a little stomach bug, don't go to the gym. I used to tell people this all the time. If you got a head cold or you got a light cough or you got a little stomach bug, don't go to the gym. That's the best

way to spread that shit. Especially stuff that spread easily on stuff on shared contact. Like I know COVID is kind of up in the air about how easily it spread, um, on physical contact. And if I'm not mistaken, like actually touching stuff is't nearly as transmissible as some of the respiratory stuff, but other bugs and flus and colds are very, very transmissible due to surface contact. And if you're coming in sick, you're just spreading that to every poor sucker who went to the gym, who is maybe just getting in a rhythm. They were just feeling good. You do not want to do that. But if you've noticed that you are persistently getting sick or having more bugs, let's call them bugs, a lot of times our immune system is going to take a dip when we're hyper-stressed

and our allostatic load is too high. And for fit, healthy people, we don't always come down with the most intense stuff. And again, I'm not talking about COVID. I'm not an expert there at all. You shouldn't listen to anything I say about it, truthfully. But if you're getting little head colds, little tummy bugs more regularly, and you're training your ass off and you're constantly going to the gym,

you might need to take a few days to allow some of those other systems to come back online because we all have stressful lives and your biology can only partition so much energy so many places. And if you're totally fried from the amount of work stress you have, life stress you have, training stress you have, nutritional stressors you have,

your immune system and oftentimes your reproductive system will take a hit. That's why men's libidos and testosterone often tends to tank when they're massively overtrained. Same thing with women. You can see things like relative energy deficiency syndrome or REDS where you lose menstruation when you're massively overtrained. And that takes me to number eight, which is you are seeing hormonal dysfunction, particularly for women. So this is a big one for women. If your period or menstrual cycle has become irregular, or you've missed a period, or it's chronically coming late,

or you haven't gotten it in a while, and you're chronically eating a low calorie intake, or you're training really, really hard multiple times a day, or seven days a week, you've got to make a choice there. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your body. Everybody has different reasons that they go to the gym and exercise, but if you've lost your menstrual cycle because of overexercising and because of, you know, being in an energy deficit for too long, that could potentially have long-term ramifications for your health. And your menstrual cycle is a pretty good barometer for how you're doing with your total health. You know, going back to the camel and the whole survival of the fittest things, usually organisms that aren't reproducing, there's a reason for that. So like women do lose the ability to have children after a certain age.

Men don't for whatever reason, right? But if you're young and healthy and you just all of a sudden as a man can't get an erection or all of a sudden as a woman, you lose your menstrual cycle. These are very, very potentially problematic things. And in many cases, it might be your body's way of saying, hey, you're too stressed to reproduce. And if you're malnourished and overworked and hyper stressed, that might not be the best thing for the survival of the species because you might be working on your fitness, but you might not be quote unquote survival of the fittest because you might be one of the most fried burnt

out people. And so that's it guys. Those are the eight reasons I got a bonus one for you, which is number nine. And that actually is your mood. And so keep an eye on your mood. If you're more irritable or all over the place, you're really volatile. Um, that can be a good sign that you're overstressed and maybe overtraining. So, and again, that can come from a million other things, but if you can't place where it's coming from, your training could be one of those things. So eight signs to keep an eye out for, or let's say nine, because we threw the bonus one in there, nine signs to keep an eye peeled for that will kind of key you into taking a rest day or taking a deload. Number one, you've lost the motivation to train. You don't have to be motivated to train all the time, but it is important to be motivated to train all the time,

but it is important to be able to be excited about what you're working on. Okay, number two, you're constantly stiff and sore. Number three, you're not making any progress. You're hitting sticking points more frequently and you're even going backwards. Number four, your mind is all over the place at the gym. You're having a really hard time focusing. Whether or not that's due to being simply overtrained or being pulled in multiple different directions as we often are, addressing that by taking some time away from the gym is never a bad idea. Number five, your morning heart rate is elevated on a pretty consistent basis from baseline. Maybe two or three days of seeing an elevated heart rate and I might want to start making some changes. Number six, you are

constantly fatigued and running out of changes. Number six, you are constantly fatigued and running out of gas. Number seven, you've noticed that your immune system has taken a hit. You're getting colds and flus more frequently. They're persisting longer and lingering longer. Number eight, your hormones or some of the indicators of your hormones, like your menstrual cycle or your erections are taking a hit, right? Your sexual performance is dipping. And number nine, you're irritable and showing mood fluctuations. So guys, hopefully that answers your questions. Practically speaking, I think if you want to take one to two rest days a week at minimum, that's great. You can go outside and walk, get some sun,

do some meditation, do some yoga. Those are all quote-unquote active rest activities. You don't need to go on a run. You don't need to do intense mobility work. You don't need to hit a light arm day. And every four to eight, 12 weeks of hard training, you might want to take a deload where you just get in there a few times, work on some light compounds and some technique work. And I tend to recommend a week off a year for people who are training really, really seriously. Hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. If you haven't yet, do me a favor.

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it totally makes my day. So I want to thank you all so much for helping me, and your continued support means the world to me. That's the second episode for this week. If I can get it to you and I'm hoping to continue on this two time a week frequency, but I am getting pretty darn excited for football season. The football season is upon us. So hopefully you and your team have good luck as of recording this at September 9th opening night. I'm looking forward to the Cowboys game, watching them play the Buccaneers. I think the Buccaneers

are going to stomp them. I'm not a Cowboys fan. I'm a Rams fan, Cowboys game, watching them play the Buccaneers. I think the Buccaneers are going to stomp them. I'm not a Cowboys fan. I'm a Rams fan. But hopefully we have a good football season. Hopefully we have a good fall. And I can't wait to talk to you guys next time.