Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 130: 5 Training Myths Sabotaging Your Gains!

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

In this episode, Danny outlines what he believes to be FIVE of the most persistent fitness myths sabotaging your gains!---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 there, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matringa. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about five persistent training myths that seem to stick around no matter how much we talk about them, no matter how much we unpack them, no matter what direction the literature seems to suggest we might want to go. These are things that just stick around. seems to suggest we might want to go. These are things that just stick around and I think we can begin to work through here with a nice conversation. And again, five things that I think are really going to help you. And these are five myths that I think really are sabotaging people's progress in the gym and really preventing

them from getting where they want to be. So let's unpack those today, starting here with number one. And the first myth we're going to talk about is the myth of no pain, no gain, as well as the myth that your workouts should never be challenging. So I want to talk about scaling and kind of grading how hard you're training. So the first myth sentiment here that I want to unpack is this idea kind of grading how hard you're training. So the first myth sentiment here that I want to unpack is this idea of no pain, no gain, which quite literally means to me and also to the people who I interface with who maybe are new to fitness. Maybe these are clients who are just getting into things, people who are working with my coaching company, core

coaching method, who have questions. You know, this is both my kind of nuanced 10 years in the industry view. And also what I'm hearing from people with feet on the ground who are new, when people think no pain, no gain, they think that their workouts need to be pretty damn hard all the time. And that the harder they are, the more challenging they are, the more painful or grueling they are, the more effective they are. So this is pretty much, this is, this is a dangerous way to approach fitness. And let me qualify it first by saying this hard training, well applied, you know, intelligent, intentful, challenging training done close to failure with good technique is pretty damn safe for people across almost every age range with a variety of different

contraindications to exercise or otherwise, right? A lot of people are able to train pretty damn hard. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're using how hard your workout is as the only metric to qualify whether or not you'll be getting progress, and if you're not punishing yourself and really and genuinely in pain, you're not going to be making progress, that opens the door for your training to get all kinds of sloppy, for you to overreach too often, for you to under-recover too often, right? Training to failure every set, training to the point where your technique breaks down and becomes inefficient and you're actually loading

the wrong tissues, purposefully selecting exercises that are maybe suboptimal but actually good at creating sensations of pain, that is not a very intelligent way to approach training in the long run. And so when I say the no pain, no gain myth is problematic, I don't want you to hear what I'm not saying. I quite actually agree with the notion that you need to train hard most of the time. I want most of the clients I work with to be within three reps of failure on the majority of the resistance training that they do, unless it's technique work, metabolite work, superset stuff done at higher rep ranges, isolation exercises oftentimes, rehabilitation settings oftentimes. But for people whose goals are fat loss, muscle gain, even strength gain, I want them to do work that is effortful and within

at least three reps of failure, usually two reps. Most of the clients I recommend work between RIRs of seven and nine on most sets, right? So I'm not saying never train to failure. Sometimes there is failure work in there and your sets should be challenging, but don't select and optimize for pain and displeasure in the gym in the long run. While I do think building some mental toughness and being able to push through things like that is beneficial. If that is how you build workouts, if that's what you're looking for constantly, I do think it will actually limit or put a ceiling on how much you can really accomplish in the long run. Now, on the other end, the idea that your

training should always be submaximal, that you should never train close to failure, you know, that you shouldn't train to failure at all. A lot of people actually think that. I found this to be rather surprising that there's never applications for failure training or that there's never applications for hard training. Everything should be submaximal. This might be very true with the general population, maybe the advanced nature population, but for most people, I think hard training is helpful so really what we're getting down to here is selecting training modalities that are deliberately painful it's always training to failure thinking that more pain literally the perception of greater pain is going to lead to better training outcomes is slightly foolish as is thinking that you will

constantly be able to make gains and progress, never pushing your limits. So let's move on to this second sabotaging methodology, if you will. And we're going to talk about what has long been referred to as the hypertrophy rep range. And so rep ranges, just so we're clear here, refer to essentially different brackets of the resistance training fatigue paradigm. Usually the one to five rep range or the first five reps somebody might do would generally be used for extremely heavy loading and building strength. As reps go from six to about 12 or eight to about 12, we're usually going to be using less weight. That has often been referred to as the hypertrophy rep range, 8 to 12. We'll talk more about this later. Some people say 6 to 12. And then anything north of 12, usually you'll see this bracketed off as 12 to 20 or 15 to 20. A lot of people think

that that's for building muscular endurance and that these seemingly arbitrary rep ranges are extremely good at eliciting these very specific adaptations. And I don't find that to be true in practice. I don't find that to be true in anecdote. And the research even shows that, you know, you can get quite a variety of, let's say, adaptation from training across the rep range. For example, you will build hypertrophy lifting three to four reps, or you can develop and build muscle lifting with three to four reps, or you can develop and build muscle lifting with three to four reps. Is it the optimal way to do it? Probably not, but there's still a hypertrophic signal. Hypertrophic stimuli are triggered or produced,

we should say, when you lift with heavy loads and mechanical tensions high. Maybe you don't get to eight to 12. You also can build a tremendous amount of strength there. If you train close enough to failure, high rep training north of 20 reps can be hypertrophic. The literature has actually shown that when you equate for training intensity, meaning if you train close enough to failure, both high reps and low reps can be very beneficial for hypertrophy, as can kind of moderate rep ranges. So the hypertrophy rep range specifically is something that I recommend our clients, my clients get away from, even if their goals are muscle building. I do think you should do a lot of your training in the eight to 12 rep range,

because I think that is the sweet spot where you can start to get a lot of mechanical tension. You can get a lot of muscle damage because generally sets are longer. So therefore you will have greater eccentric exposure or what I might call eccentric exposure, meaning that we know eccentric contractions or the actual lengthening portion of the range of motion is going to elicit hypertrophy. So extended eccentrics, if you wanted to build muscle optimally, paying attention to that eccentric would be of value. And so if you do five reps and every rep is one second down, one second up, that is 10 total seconds of work, but it's five seconds specifically of the eccentric. If you do eight to 12 reps, even at that one to one tempo, that's up to eight to 12 seconds of eccentrics. Additionally,

in that eight to 12 rep range, you kind of get the luxury of lifting with lighter loads. So in there, you can control the eccentric that much more. If you're doing that 1 to 5 rep range and using an extremely heavy load, it becomes much harder to create stability while having long eccentrics. Don't believe me? Go put your max squat on the bar and try to lower it as slowly as possible. You'll find it's usually more comfortable to cut the eccentric short, and especially when you're working with high, high loads that require a lot of concentric power too. So you'll extend the duration of your eccentrics

by using weights that are commonly used in that 8 to 12 rep range, which is oftentimes between 70 and 80, let's say 70 and 80% of your one to five rep range or your one rep max in general, right? You might, it's all on a gradient, but still. And then that high rep training, which might not be the best for creating mechanical tension and long-term strength, progressive overload. But what you will find is you get a lot of metabolite buildup and these lighter rep ranges lend themselves really well to things like isolation exercises. So these can be good for getting a pump, which while the pump is transient and not necessarily indicative of hypertrophy, I don't think it hurts. And you can still make those small progressions, you know, progressing from maybe 20 to 25 pound dumbbells on lateral raises for 12 to 15 reps instead of looking to progress

from like 30 to 32 and a half pound lateral raises on like a one to five rep thing. And also I find that people like to do a variety of different rep ranges because they like to select a variety of different exercises. And you might not want to do 15 to 20 rep barbell back squats because they're miserable. Maybe instead you'll do 15 to 20 rep heel elevated goblet squats. And if we know equating for intensity is going to elicit a lot of the same stuff at the end of the day, we know that if we're training close to failure, we can get enough hypertrophy at the end of the day. If we look at how the plethora of bodybuilders have trained over the course of many decades, natural or enhanced,

that they've used a variety of rep ranges, we don't need to pigeonhole ourselves into this 8 to 12 rep range because quite frankly, expanding into 15 to 20 reps or going below or having specific cycles even where you train for strength. This is something I do with a lot of my clients where we will run blocks at lower rep ranges with the goal of building strength and indirectly being able to push up volume in subsequent cycles of training that will allow us to accumulate more training volume, which is also associated with hypertrophy. Although I do think the higher quality of the volume, the more tension, mechanical tension you're creating with that volume, right? For every really good rep you do with really good technique, being mindful of the eccentric that ends with, you know, each subsequent rep getting you closer to failure. That's the money zone. You don't ever want to get to just full-blown

sloppy reps. I'm just purely chasing volume. Every rep is not created equal. So do keep that in mind. But again, break free of the chains of thinking all of your hypertrophy work only happens when you hit that magical 8 to 12 rep range. That's just not true. All right, number three, and this isn't a myth, but this is something that I would say has been bastardized, and that is the idea of genetically weak muscle groups. So you've probably heard me on this podcast many times harp on influencers for not being transparent enough about their genetics. I do think that genetics,

probably outside of your training and nutrition, certainly all the things you do not have control of, genetics, right, are the biggest, let's say, predictor of what you're going to end up looking like. So I tell people all the time, genetics set your ceiling, meaning you take two people who do the exact same training routine, have the exact same diet, the exact same lifestyle. One of them will likely have a better physique, better performance, easier fat loss, you name it, than the other due to a lot of indiscriminate genetic variability

that just happens from person to person. There are a lot of us who have genetically small waists or genetically large glutes or genetically small calves, you name it. However, and the reason I often want to bring up genetics, the notion that some muscle development like calves for example is purely capped by genetics um or that you know genetics for body fatness while still very much up in the air might not play a role in body fat loss are kind of silly and so what you'll see a lot of people say is oh genetics don't matter for weight loss yeah they they actually fucking do and it's a lot of those very same people who will say like oh genetics don't matter for weight loss. Yeah, they actually fucking do. And it's a lot of those very same people who will say like, oh, genetics don't matter for fat loss. You know, calorie deficit doesn't care about genetics. That's true. This is true. There's a lot of

various genetic predispositions that might make weight loss more or less easy that are deeper than just physiology. They might be genetic predispositions for food behavior, genetic predispositions for pleasure response. There's a lot of nuance there. And so we don't want to throw genetics out completely. And in the same thing, we might want to loosen our grip in that same vein. I should say we might want to loosen our grip on the idea that genetics are setting hard limits on how much muscle we can and can't develop. 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. Well, it certainly helps to have good muscle building genetics. I think we need to have more nuanced discussion about, hey, if you genetically have weak calves, why do you position all of your calf training at the end of your workout? If you know genetics are present and that you're fighting an uphill battle, why position all that training at the end? Or why not try to exhaust all of the options for maximally stressing that muscle? And I'm sure many of you have if you've encountered a muscle group that you think is genetically inferior to some of your others. But the thing is, we all have genetic potential to build musculature in pretty much

every muscle. And what that ceiling is, yeah, it might be influenced by our genetics, but there is no hard line. This muscle only grows as a result of genetics. That's pure hogwash. And I hear that a lot. So when we talk about genetics, I do think it's important to acknowledge that genetics play a larger role in our training response, right? Then just how they impact our physiology, right? There's more to genetics than just, Oh, well, my dad was super buff and my mom was super fat or blah, blah, blah. There are a lot of genetic variations. There's a lot of things that need to be brought to the table when we talk about genetics, but genetics don't set your body weight. They also, you know, play a role in how we lose weight, how we behave around food, etc. And genetics do not set how much muscle you can gain, although some musculature will be more or less,

let's say, sensitive to hypertrophy, depending on your genetics. And if you are genetically fortunate enough to have parents who had quite a bit of musculature, you'll probably be the sum of those two. And on the other end, if you have parents who are, let's say, quite small and not very musculature or not very muscular, don't have a lot of development of their musculature, and maybe they trained or not, but even if they did, you know, if they didn't have, let's say, the same outcomes as the previous set of parents I referenced, you could probably expect to be smaller. And so a more nuanced discussion about how genetics influence training, I think, is warranted, and we often just pass the buck on it. There's a lot of different schools of thought as to whether or not spot targeting might be possible with some new research. But the Ameno Henselmans was the guy that I saw recently talking about this. But I still believe that the general body of literature is very much conclusive in that you cannot really spot target fat loss enough to meaningfully lose fat in one area. Products, I find, perpetuate this the most.

The productization of certain things are what continues to perpetuate this stuff. Waist trainers being the most obvious example, right? We look at something that quite literally promises to help you trim up the size of your waist by helping you liquidate fat from an area by compressing it or by rubbing gels on it, right? There are plenty of spot fat reducing creams. There are plenty of influencers who, you know, promote exercises that are good for losing fat or toning, quote-unquote, toning certain areas when really fat loss occurs all over the body. So, you know, no amount of sit-ups is going to meaningfully enhance the amount of body fat you lose from your midsection,

even though you're rapidly and viciously contracting the musculature underneath that particular patch of fat. What seems to happen, and it's logical because this is how our body works, is when you enter into a calorie deficit, and the physiological machinery inside of you, the stuff that is responsible for keeping you going when you're not eating enough, right? Because a deficit is eating below your total daily energy expenditure. So if you're in a deficit, you're eating less, you're taking in less energy than you need to run your brain, your kidneys, your muscles, your fat cells even use energy, your bones, right? Your cognitive processes, your non-exercise

activity thermogenesis, things like what I'm doing right now, tapping my feet to the ground, all of your activity, right? Your total daily energy expenditure encompasses a lot of things, including your thermic effect of feeding, the actual mechanisms that break down food, that takes energy. So if you don't eat enough to meet those needs, your body has a choice. Okay. I'm either going to have to start shutting things down, which if the energy deficit is so stark, right? So great. It will shut down things like the reproductive system quite quickly. We see this more often with women and specifically women who are dealing with something called relative energy deficiency syndrome. But that's not a conversation for today. We did an episode with Lyle McDonald

a while back. Go check that out. But basically, your body has a choice. I'm going to either stop functioning the way I need to to survive, or I can start to actually liquidate energy from the places it's stored all over my body. And yeah, muscle could be an energy store, but it's really inefficient. And yeah, carbs like glycogen and circulating blood sugar are often invited to the party too. But the longer you are in that deficit, the more your body will kind of focus on getting energy from the most available source, which is body fat, right? We know that when we ingest dietary fat, it has more calories per gram than dietary carbohydrate and dietary protein. And this has a lot to do with the fact that fats are hyper-efficient at storing chemical energy. Think about this. When you put a piece of toast

on an open flame, it will burn. When you put a piece of meat on an open flame, it will cook slowly. When you pour oil on an open flame, it will explode into a vicious, fiery flame of energy. When you spray oil on flame, it does the same thing. There is a lot of chemical energy stored in fats. So it makes a lot of sense for a body to start to liquidate that stuff first. And unfortunately, we can't choose where that comes from, no matter how much we contract the muscle underneath. At least we don't have any reason to believe that this is the case. Another thing that just somewhat makes me giggle about waist training is it's a tight piece of fabric that you wear around your midsection. That's not very different from the majority of clothing sold to women. They're tight lycra fabric that go around and contour

your thighs, your glutes, right? Talking about yoga pants and shorts. But if a waist trainer that was compressive around your midsection caused body fat loss and a shrinking effect, do you think anybody, any woman who was, you know, out to grow her glutes would be wearing tight fabric around them? I wouldn't. I'd be wearing the loosest, baggiest shorts they sold.

I wouldn't want anything compressing the tissue I wanted to develop. And I know a lot of young women whose primary fitness goal is growing their glutes. I work with a number of them. And so I just think we have to look at this practically. No amount of compression, in my opinion, is going to lead to meaningful reductions in fat. It will lead to increased sweat rate because there's less breathability for that skin. It's hard to thermoregulate when you have a ton of tight shit on, especially if you're rubbing these creams or oils

on your body and then wrapping them. So just take it all with a grain of salt there. I don't think that's a very practical way to look at training. And I think spot targeting or even the hope that spot targeting might occur holds people back quite a bit. And the last and final training myth is that you should consult your activity tracker as

a barometer of your workout quality or your nutrition needs. And so we're talking about things like Fitbits, Apple Watches, these different activity trackers that are really good at estimating heart rate. They're really good at quantifying steps, both of which I think are reasons that you might want to wear these. Wearable technology has a lot of useful features that many of us enjoy, including keeping us closer to friends and family

through communication via text and email, as well as helping us meet a variety of different work functions, listen to music, stay on top of things, right? We become more and more integrated with technology every day. And if we didn't, companies wouldn't be focusing so hard on making different wearables. But the fact of the matter is people love their tech and they love their data. So seeing that stuff might be motivating for some people to even get to the gym, seeing how many calories they

supposedly burned. Monitoring your steps could be helpful in the formation of long-term movement habits that could lead to fat loss. However, the caloric expenditure reading on these devices, per a 2017 review from the Stanford School of Medicine, can vary by anywhere from a 27% overestimation from the most accurate activity watcher or tracker to a 93% overestimation from the most inaccurate activity tracker. So a lot of these are inaccurate. The best one was still 27% off. This was technology from almost four years ago now. However, I will say, uh, I still don't think some of the newer activity trackers like Aura or Whoop are leaps and bounds ahead. I still think that as far as wearable technology is concerned, wearable technology's ability to estimate caloric expenditure is spotty at best. technology uh it's kind of designed to suck us in it wouldn't surprise me if some of these algorithms not nefariously aimed to you know quantify things a little bit high but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason they over are so often overestimating these caloric expenditure metrics

is because it's better to overestimate for user interface and for uh user enjoyment than it is to underestimate nobody wants to be like, oh shit, I only burned fucking 70 calories. Like if people were over underestimating by 23 to 93%, I think you'd see a lot less people wearing these things at the gym. Let me put it to you like that. So what a lot of people do is they try to run the score up like it's a fucking video game. And they go like, you know know what the higher i can get my score on this right the greater the actual uh number if i can level up here that's going to be good for me and that's how i want to quantify my workout like i want that number to get as high as

possible oh i hit a thousand that's good oh i hit 850 that's good i'm going to go to the gym for an hour and try to get this number up as high as possible. I don't think that that's a good barometer for long-term training outcomes. And I think that people see this stuff a lot because people will share it to their Instagram stories. Look how many calories I burn. Look how good I'm doing. And I don't think that's a particularly good idea. Additionally, I think consulting your activity trackers for food-specific data, even consulting food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal for food-specific data can be tricky. Because if you're trying to gauge how much you should eat back after exercise and you have

something overestimating, that math's going to have a hard time lining up. And with regards to fitness or food, like journal-style tracking apps like MyFitnessPal, their caloric recommendations, right? Not their readings, but their recommendations. Like let's say you consulted MyFitnessPal for your macros because it will give you macros and you consulted Fitbit and Apple Watch for your caloric expenditure readings. I think that the consistent inaccuracies between activity trackers and the consistent, let's call them, sometimes they can be off. We'll say that. We'll say that sometimes MyFitnessPal's initial caloric prescriptions and macro prescriptions can be

off, specifically for people training for optimal body composition. You combine those two things, your targets might be a little bit off and not really calibrated the way you want. So those are five myths or ideas that seem to persist and won't go away. Again, those are that no pain and no gain is the only way to gauge workout progress, which isn't true. It's also not true that you should never train hard. Rep ranges, right? Specifically a hypertrophy rep range, but mostly, you know, the fact that there is a firm strength rep range, a firm endurance rep range, and this is the only rep range in which you can build hypertrophy. These things aren't particularly true.

If we had to look at one rep range in particular that had the most consistent outcomes, I would say it's that lower rep range and its most consistent outcome is driving strength. But the hypertrophy rep range by and large, I find is a myth. But if your goals are hypertrophy, I do think due to a variety of different factors, doing between eight and 12 reps for the majority of your training

is still extremely practical. Number three is that, you know, you have some genetic weight set point or some genetic cap on your muscle building. I don't think that's entirely true. We need a more nuanced view of how we look at genetics and training. Number four, spot targeting. That ain't going to happen for you. Hate to say it. And number five, the reliance and the accuracy of some of the different tech we use to quantify our exercise. So guys, hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, be sure to leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes. Written reviews are the best. They help other people find the podcast. Also, if you'd be so kind, share this to your Instagram story and tag me so I can say thanks.