Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 138: 5 Biggest Fitness Mistakes I’ve Made + Solutions & Q and A

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

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Welcome in everybody to the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, episode 139, we are going to be going over what I believe are the five biggest mistakes that I've made in my fitness career. Now, this isn't my professional fitness career. I thought that that was an important caveat. This is my own fitness, not the fitness of my clients. So this is my legitimate, let's call it career or tenure as a fitness fanatic, somebody with goals, somebody who wants to accomplish stuff in the gym, dating way back to when I very first started working out. I'm going to go over all of what I believe to be my biggest mistakes. There are five specific mistakes that we're going to go

over. Uh, and I think you guys will learn a ton from this stuff. So, uh, I do think that transparency is important. I'm not one to be like, Oh my gosh, look at me. I'm so authentic and vulnerable. I make mistakes too. I hope that at this point that is quite obvious. I'm not trying to stand up on my soapbox, but I do think it's very, very helpful. Whether you're somebody who's a novice lifter listening, you're just getting started on approaching your fitness or you're a coach and you work with other clients to hear, you know, where people have failed along the way. I've been doing this for a long time, so I have made no shortage of mistakes, but I have distilled this down to what I believe to be the most important and probably actionable mistakes to share with an audience as diverse as this one. Before we get started,

I wanted to share some reviews though from our fantastic listeners, just like you. Every single review you guys leave makes a huge difference. So if you're just listening for the first time and you haven't subscribed yet, please do. But if you've been listening for a while and enjoying kind of what I'm putting out there, leaving a five-star rating and review on the iTunes store is about the most helpful thing you can do for any podcaster. One to two minutes of your time leaving a genuine short one to two paragraph written review with a five-star rating really helps more people find the podcast. But I wanted to share a review from X Laura Grace. X, she says, I randomly found Danny and his Instagram page somewhere in either 2018 or 19, and I've been following along for quite some time.

He's so truthful to the point and completely no BS with his content. I'm super happy that he has a podcast that I can listen to while I'm doing laundry and other tasks. I enjoy learning through other people talking and taking notes from what they're teaching. If you already have a few podcasts you follow and listen to,

add Danny to your arsenal. You won't regret it. Laura, thank you so much. These kinds of reviews really make a big difference, but hearing anything you guys have to say positive about my content on Instagram, on the various podcasting apps, even dating back to some of the work I've done on YouTube, that stuff's always really, really encouraging and it goes a long way. One more review. This one is from Cole Mom. She says,

dynamic dialogue is a great listen, a little bit of pop culture to keep you in the loop of current events and a lot of knowledge bombs on various topics to help you with your fitness quest. Danny is well-spoken and provides a lot of insight looking forward to future episodes. So both of those reviews were phenomenal, deeply, deeply appreciated by yours truly, and they do help the podcast grow. So if you guys want to leave a rating or five-star review and you're listening on iTunes, simply scroll down to the bottom of the show page. You'll find the area where you can leave a review, and that would help me out a ton. Without further ado, let's get into the five biggest mistakes I have made in my fitness career.

And again, this is not as a personal trainer. Some of that stuff might come up. But the first mistake I made, and this was the earliest mistake I made in my weightlifting career, was trying to do too many things at once with my programming. So I was introduced to resistance training when I was about 17 as a way to build some size as a pretty short athlete so that I would be sturdier, more injury prone and able to get more minutes in the various sports that I was playing. You know, being smaller and competing with guys who were older than me and generally larger than me was challenging, particularly in sports like basketball.

But one of the things that weightlifting does for young athletes is it can really level the playing field because what you don't have genetically, you can make up for a little bit by enhancing your athletic abilities through weightlifting. But you see, my goal wasn't just to become a better athlete. I also wanted to build more muscle and get stupid strong. And for a while, just doing weightlifting as a complete novice did all three. Every time I would go into the gym, I'd get stronger and stronger and stronger, and I'd get more muscular and more muscular and more muscular and more explosive. Because when you first start weightlifting, the adaptations pour in pretty quickly. But after you've done it

for a long time, which we're fast forwarding now to say my freshman year of college. So let's say I've been lifting for maybe two years at this point. Once you've been training for a long time, trying to do a million things at once almost becomes counterproductive. Your body is less sensitive to various resistance stimuli or various adaptation outputs. So if you go to the gym to work on your explosiveness, you'll gain a lot in the first year or two, and you can expect diminishing marginal returns every year after that. The same is likely true of your endurance,

your strength, your hypertrophy. All of these things will happen more quickly the more sensitive you are to the stimuli that drive said adaptations, and then over your training career, you'll get a little bit less and less and less. That's why lifters who are focused on bodybuilding don't build the same amount of muscle the first year they train as they do in year 10. In fact, you'll build almost as much muscle in your first one or two years of training as you will throughout the

entirety of the remaining course of your lifting career. You'll gain a lot of muscle in those first one, two, three years. And that's why so many guys after they've lifted for three, four years, start considering taking things like steroids because they're not reaching their genetic potential yet. They still have a long way to go, but they're frustrated because the gains start coming much more slowly and you have to be much more diligent. You have to be much more programmed. You have to be much more systematized in how you approach your training. And I made the mistake early on of trying to kind of recapture the ability to just get stronger, just get faster and just get bigger by going to the gym and doing powerlifting and bodybuilding and explosive training all in the

same workouts. I was trying to do too many things at once. I wasn't willing to relinquish the high intensity, slow powerlifting work that ate up half my workout to focus more on bodybuilding. I wasn't willing to give up the bodybuilding work in my programming to focus more on explosive training and powerlifting. And I wasn't willing to give up the power training or explosive training I was doing to really dedicate myself to more of a power building hybrid approach. I was doing a really shitty job of all three for at least a year or two before I realized, hey, I'm probably better off just picking which one of these things I want to work on for either a training block at a time, an entire training season at a time,

or even an entire training year. And I wish I could go back to that second and third year that I was training and really dedicate myself to one particular discipline. This is something I do much better currently. And I'm not saying that concurrent training isn't possible, right? I'm not saying that in any way, shape or form. I train a lot of clients. In fact, I actually just recently shared on my Instagram a client who I'm working with. Her name is Courtney. She's phenomenal. She's a mom and she's very, very busy with her children, but she's extremely dedicated to her exercise. And we originally started working together for strength development, general fitness, and preparing for a race. And she demolished that race. She absolutely crushed it. She got PRs on

most of her splits. And this was while doing a lot of resistance training. There are definitely, definitely going to be scenarios where there's plenty of room for overlap. What I'm talking about specifically though, is once you have really honed in on what you want to accomplish. So say, for example, you want to really focus on developing your musculature, you want to be a bodybuilder. Well, you might be better off doing more bodybuilding work than cardio or by then by doing a bunch of powerlifting. If you want to work on powerlifting, you're going to have to do more of that. And so just being really clear, getting down to the nitty gritty, what am I going to want to accomplish here? And how can I focus most of my energy in the gym towards those outputs?

Like even fat loss, right? Like all activity is going to help. But if you're trying to do too much to the point where you're actively like just dying all the time and you're in these like binge restrict cycles because you're doing too many different things, that can be actually really problematic, whether that be with nutrition or training. So one of the things you might be better off doing is just saying, hey, I'm going to lift three to four times a week, keep it simple, okay? And I'm going to let my nutrition do the

work. So one of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my lifting career was trying to do too many things at once, whether that was in the gym with my training, trying to build muscle and get shredded at the same time or stay shredded by trying to build and gain pain instead of going through proper bulking cycles. If all of the shit you're trying to do at one time isn't congruent, it doesn't line up together, oftentimes you'll end up with a lot of friction, a lot of spinning of the wheels, and a lot of inefficiency. And I work with a number of clients who have reached a point in their own training where they're like, I actually know what I'm doing is counterproductive, but I can't stop because it's become my habit. It's become my fixation. And like, I know that to lose body fat, I need to stop with these, you know, hyper restrictive diets that lead to binging. Or I know if I want to build

muscle, I can't just be in a deficit all the time, but I struggle with breaking from my patterns. And so trying to do too many things at once and being a kind of slave or prisoner to your fixations, neuroses and patterns is one of the mistakes that I have made for sure. And it's something that I see a lot with my clients. And so one of the best ways, one of the best solutions, one of the best things you can do to overcome this is almost what I'm doing right here, where you're just kind of coming clean, not like some, you know, confession, if you will, but just the opportunity to verbalize it, whether you're talking to a friend, a training partner, another iron warrior, somebody who loves to lift, somebody who's another fitness fanatic,

just say, oh my gosh, I do this thing and it's holding me back. And so, you know, I want to fix it. Or another thing you can do is hire a coach, hire somebody to. And so, you know, I want to fix it. Or another thing you can do is hire a coach, hire somebody to come in and say, look, I'm going to save you from your own bullshit. I'm going to save you from the inefficiencies of your training, your habits, your patterns. I'm going to put something together for you. All you got to do is follow it and stick with it. If you look at it, I look at it. We both are going to know this, what you should be doing. And I think more often than not, when people bring in a coach, they outsource some of that, uh, stress. They outsource some of the,

a lot of people are just like, I know what I need to do. I just have a hard time getting myself to do it and I'm not accountable. So sometimes outsourcing some of that accountability can really help, but getting out of your own way, getting somebody on your team whose job it is to be like, look, this is what you should be doing based on your goals. Can you do it is a lot better than just spinning your wheels. Number two is actually a direct continuation is not hiring a coach. When I first started working out, I worked out in high school with our quote unquote strength and conditioning coach who bless his heart, didn't really know anything about strength and conditioning. It was just basically supervising us while we did ridiculously challenging probably over training

level lifts for our sport build a lot of character though and i loved every second of it but i really really wish it wasn't something that was financially in the cards uh that my parents had connected me with a good personal trainer at that point i think i would have been much better off with an in-person personal trainer and online coaching wasn't really a thing, but I did a bunch of stupid shit when I first started lifting. Like I remember early on doing flat bench, flat barbell bench, flat incline bench, or sorry, incline barbell bench, flat barbell bench, decline barbell bench, super setting all three of those things with their dumbbell fly counterpart. So I would do incline flies with barbell incline press, flat flies with barbell flat press,

decline flies with decline barbell press, which is so unbelievably stupid when you think about it. When I look back at what I used to do, I'm like, oh my God, that's actually hilarious that that's what my teenage brain came up with because I was like, hey, all I have to do is go in there and annihilate my chest, arms, and back from every angle. I don't need to train legs. I do that. I already have legs. I do a lot of walking. I had these hilarious justifications for training like a complete idiot bro. And I really think I could have avoided a lot of that if my parents were in a position financially to maybe set me up with a personal trainer who could have been like, hey, look, you're going to do a bunch of dumb shit for a really long time. Here's how to cut those corners.

And I think bringing a coach on early in your fitness career can be really valuable because they're going to give you a lot of education. But what you're really paying them for, you're paying them for accountability support and saving you from the bullshit i wasted at least and i mentioned this on point one i wasted the first several years of my training and when i think about it i was going to the gym six days a week for two hours so that's about 12 hours a week so that comes out to 624 hours a year that I was spending in the gym. And like, let's just, for the sake of things, let's give that a time value. Let's say that that time is cumulatively worth about $20 an hour because some of it was, you know, I was, I was in high school. Like,

let's just say that my earning power wasn't all that high, but our free time has value, but that's a $12,000 I would have flushed down the toilet, basically training inefficiently, uh, when I could have been training in a much more efficient way. And I look back and I don't think that that's necessarily wasted time, but, uh, and I'm sure many of you who've been lifting for a while, if you went back and looked at the stuff you did when you first started working out, you would find it very laughable. And yeah, I definitely wish I could go back and get some of that time. We'll talk a little bit about that in the third point and some of the ways that like just jealousy, not jealousy,

but comparison, uh, can be problematic. And I wish that I could go back and train a lot smarter because I was kind of just feeling it out as I went for the first one to two years of my training. And if I'd had somebody in my corner, it would have saved me a ton of time, a ton of money. And that I wasted a bunch of money on supplements, a bunch of money on other dumb shit. It would have saved me a ton of pain. And like I said, I was in high school, so I wasn't doing a whole lot of working. But if you're an adult and you have a job and you have other responsibilities and you're exercising with the best intentions, inefficiencies in your exercise are costing you something. You know, if that workout is less efficient than it could be,

it's definitely not ideal. And so bringing somebody on board whose job it is to help you optimize for efficiency so you can get more out of less time, cut corners, not fall prey victim slash, you know, get screwed over by all of these are the source of that, but there are plenty of good trainers out there, whether it's in person or online. So that's something now, obviously I have a bias because I run a coaching company, but that is definitely something that I wish I did earlier on. I think I would have got a lot out of it and saved myself a tremendous amount of time. So number three is allowing comparison to be anything other than educational. And what I mean by this is, I think in many ways, we all spend some time comparing our physique, our performance, our rate of change, whether it's how fast we're losing weight or how fast we're gaining muscle to other people. And it can be really destructive. And I think that comparison

can, in the long run, really hold us back. It can really hold us down. And something that I've often done is I've allowed comparing myself to other people, whether it be their physique, whether it be their strength, whether it be, you name it, their business, whatever. I have found that to be more defeating than anything else. And not particularly envious person. Like it doesn't just make me jealous. Sometimes it shuts me down a little bit. And one of the things I wish I did a better job of early on was acknowledging when I saw somebody who was bigger than me

or stronger than me, or maybe when I was in the beginning part of my personal training business. So this would actually be as a fitness professional, if they had more clients than me, instead of allowing that to shut me down, make me feel disappointed, stoke feelings of inadequacy, I wish that I had looked at those as opportunities to learn from that person. To say, hey, this person's obviously doing something that's working really well for them. I wonder what I can learn here. I wonder what I can gather from them. That's something that has really held me back. And I think we all, unfortunately, are conditioned to want to compare, especially with social media. We spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others.

And because fitness has become ubiquitous amongst many young people, it's so common, And because fitness has become ubiquitous amongst many young people, it's so common, it's so prevalent, we spend a lot of time comparing our routines, supplements we take or don't take, the body parts we have developed or not developed, the fat we want to lose or not lose to other people. And it can be defeating. It can create envy, right? They say comparison is the thief of joy. I definitely agree with that. But I think

as somebody who wasn't envious per se, but definitely, I definitely, because I think if you compare yourself to people, you can do one of a few things. I think it can motivate you, but I do think that if you looked at a hundred people of either comparison, either eliciting the emotion of motivation, the emotion of defeat slash bumming you out slash inadequacy, or the emotion of envy. I think of those three groups, the least amount of people would look at somebody, compare themselves and feel inspired. I definitely fall into that category of feeling kind of inadequate. And then some people just get straight up jealous and they're haters. And that I don't think people wake up and want to be like that. I just think it's how we respond in these, this hyper strange novel social media landscape

where we're all just having our dopamine circuitry hijacked all the time by buzzes, haptic feedback. Like I don't think our brains were designed for this. I heard somebody make a really good point that when we first started working out, and this applies to me too because this was in many ways before social media and the fitness space really kind of became inextricably connected. You just wanted to be the biggest guy at your gym. You want to be the most jacked guy at your gym. that's not good enough because every gym's most jacked guys or 10 guys are on the internet. And so every time you open your phone, you see hundreds and thousands of people that are more jacked than you. And you're like, wait a minute, where are all these people coming from? There's so many more inputs. Like before it was just like, I only know the people that go to my gym. And that was almost a better time. But I wish, and again, this is more of a lesson for you guys, that when those comparison things did flick on, because they will, they're almost impossible to get away from,

social media makes it so. I wish I did a better job of being in that smaller demographic of being like, I'm inspired by this. I see what's possible or what at least somebody's doing something different or better than I am. Can I learn from them? And so I know that that's probably easier said than done because it's something that I'm still working on. But I do think that there's value in not allowing your comparison to lead to feelings of inadequacy or trying not to create space for it to turn into envy and instead trying to be a little bit self-aware when you feel that comparison coming on to go, okay, can I learn something here? Can I be positive here? Can I not allow this to turn into feelings of inadequacy or envy? 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. Number four, this is the fourth largest mistake that I've made. It's been the most costly, and that was a large-scale over-reliance on supplements. Early on in my training career, I loved supplementation. I was a total victim of supplement marketing with their awesome names,

their awesome packages. I wanted to buy supplements and put them on display cases so I could look at them. I would put them, you know, I literally like line them up so the bottles look pretty. I'd go on bodybuilding.com's top 50 and look at the products that were coming in and out of the top 50. I would buy products that I had no necessary intention of using per se long term just to try them and see what the hype was about. Uh, everything from, let's see, uh, myostatin inhibitors that turned out to be complete bullshit. Uh, clear muscle that turned out to be complete bullshit. Uh, SARMs, those just fucked me up and did next to nothing, but fuck my skin up. And,

and those are just like cheap, tacky, pretend steroids, selective androgen receptor modulators. I almost got my SSRIs mixed up with my SARMs. Did SARMs, over-the-counter test boosters, tried that, did nothing. Fat burners, every flavor of protein you could imagine, every type of pre-workout you could imagine. I spent so much of my young disposable income on that shit. Even when I first started personal training, like in 2013, I was spending half of my 24-hour fitness poverty paycheck on supplements, which is, when I look at it now, hilariously embarrassing. And if I could go back in time, I would tell myself, listen, dude, the only thing

you probably need to be taking as a relatively new lifter is protein, creatine, fish oil. And if you're not getting your greens in, you might benefit from a greens powder and a multivitamin. Like I would have saved myself so much money. And I, as somebody who's pretty interested in personal finance, and I think of myself as a decently financially savvy person, if I had had the ability or wherewithal to have invested that money into security stocks instead, I'd have something that was worth a shit ton more than a bunch of MD supplement bottles and a bunch of supplement horror stories to tell. I remember back when Jack 3D came on the market and it was the most popular pre-workout when I first started working out. So when I tried pre-workout for the very first time, I tried Jack 3D, which had quite a bit of

caffeine, but it also had an amphetamine analog and they're called 1,3-dimethylamalamine or 1,3-DMAA, analog and they're called 1,3-dimethylamylamine or 1,3-DMAA, which was a highly, I would say, addictive dependence forming amphetamine that really got you wired and really got you hyped up to train. And you could just walk into GNC and buy this. And I remember scrapping my money together to go buy this shit and take it one scoop at a time. It didn't, after a couple of weeks, it stopped working. After that, I would go to two scoops, three scoops. Now remember at three scoops of Jack 3D, we're talking almost 400 milligrams of caffeine, which is several cups of coffee paired with enough amphetamine to just take down a tranquilizer and to tranquilize a human being or, or actually that would have the opposite

effect. Maybe not for me because I do have ADHD and people who have the prefrontal cortex activity that is consistent or let's call it most typical with ADHD, a lot of times uppers will help regulate them. So Adderall, for example, definitely an amphetamine has a very calming effect on me. 1,3-dimethylamalamine did not. It didn't tranquilize me, ironically enough. It did the opposite. So I was taking enough of this amphetamine to mobilize an army. It was a lot. It would get you hyped the fuck up. And then all of a sudden, boom, they took it off the market. And I was like, well, literally nothing makes me feel alive except for this crack juice that they took away from me.

So what am I going to do? And there was a manufacturer at the time named Driven Sports. And Driven Sports created like some type of, kind of, it was supposed to replace Jack 3D. It was called Craze. And I'm going to completely forget what the active ingredient was in their pre-workout. I won't remember it. Anyway, they said they were using some plant shit. I can't remember. And it was going to elicit similar effects and they would take the throne from Jack 3D. So I was like, dude, whatever. I got to get back on this shit. So

scraped together my coins, went on bodybuilding.com and tried this stuff. And this stuff was widely sold across the United States. And then boom, it tests positive for the methamphetamine analog and a diethyl phenylalanine. So N A D E P E A, uh, phenyl ethyl thymine, by the way. So this shit fucked me up and it's not a regulated industry. I didn't know this, nor did I care. I just wanted to spend more money on these shiny bottles because I was at 17, 18 year old lifter, completely addicted to crack juice. And I remember when they stopped making Jack 3D and they stopped making craze, uh, I was in my first, I want to say regularly sexual relationship at this point in my life. So, sexual relationship at this point in my life. So, uh, I was in high school. I was exploring the different, um, let's say poles of my sexual fancy. Um, I was enjoying myself and all of a sudden, boom, all of that shit stopped working for several weeks. And this was consistent with me coming

off of this stuff. So there were some side effects. And those are side effects that are much more consistent with coming off androgens or anabolics, things like steroids that have a much greater ability to influence your actual ability to get an erection. So I have gotten to a point with these stimulants that I was unable to get an erection. So what did I do? I got back on the internet and I looked up pre-workout dick doesn't work. And sure enough, on the bodybuilding.com forums, I came across something called stim dick. Stim dick, which is, if you can Google this, is kind of like a colloquial way of describing taking too many stimulants leading to not being able to get an erection. And so I was like, well,

this has been strange because I am in my late teens. Everything used to give me a boner. And now nothing, including the female who I am actively in a sexual relationship with, is able to arouse me. This is so strange. Like, I could sit there and be like, I'm 17. I'm horny. I want to have sex. But I can't because my dick has been broken by pre-workout.

So I read more crazy shit from the online forums on bodybuilding.com, including buying tribulus terrestris and taking tribulus, buying horny goat weed and taking horny goat weed. I ate an entire watermelon in a day because apparently that was supposed to help because it's full of citrulline and none of that shit worked. And eventually, like after a couple of weeks of not taking this pre-workout, everything sorted itself out and it was totally fine. And it could have also been just some nocebo. After I learned about StimDick, I, you know, anxieted myself out of being able to become aroused. But that's super embarrassing and it's like totally avoidable. if I had a good personal trainer at the time, they would have been like, don't take that shit. You don't need it. But who knows? Maybe they would have had a discount code. I've been like, bro,

use my discount code, stimdick69 for 69% off your inability to get an erection for the next two to three months. But I was way reliant on supplements and it messed me up. Number five, and this is something that I still struggle with, is not optimizing my nutrition. And we'll keep it brief here, but nutrition is really, really, really important when it comes to driving most of our desired training outcomes. Even if you want to build power or explosiveness, nutrition can help. But if your goals are building muscle or losing body fat, nutrition is extremely important, probably more important than your training. And I was like king of the track every macro I ate, prep every meal I ate for like three or four years. And then it just became too much when I was working and in college. So one of the areas where I took a big hit was with my nutrition. And I like to chalk up at least one to two years of inefficiencies in my training to getting subpar

inadequate nutrition. So those are the five biggest mistakes I've made just to round them up before we go into the Q&A section today. I initially tried to do too many things at once, which led to training inefficiency. I wish I had hired a coach early on in my training career to save me from myself, save me time, save me energy, save me money. I wish that a lot of the comparisons that are whipped up by my usage of social media currently, but much more so early on in my training career, were educational and motivating more so than defeating. And that's something that I wish I could have gone back and fixed, but I'm trying to be vocal about it now because I think it affects

a lot of people. Number four, I was way too reliant on supplements. It cost me a lot of money and a lot of problems. And number five, not being serious about my nutrition throughout a good portion of my training career, which really held me back and limited the results I could get. And for me specifically, we're talking about muscle gain because I've never had a problem

maintaining a healthy weight or at least a weight that I'm happy with or a body composition that I'm happy with. So yeah, moving on to our Q&A. So our first question comes from at Kendraann23. And Kendra asks, what are some tips from coming back from overtraining? Yes, rest, but to not get back into that unhealthy cycle. So I actually made a post today on Instagram where in essence, I said what I say many times or said what I have said many times, which is you only make the gains you can recover from. A lot of people, including myself, this just didn't make the list of things that fucked me up early on in my training. Not the top five anyway, but it's on the list. A lot of people struggle with taking rest days.

They actually feel guilty. They have a hard time taking a step away because they have some neurotic obsession with training. And that's really unhealthy. And so one of the best things you can do whenever you're being unhealthy and unreasonable in your behavior is to inject as much logic into the situation as possible and ask yourself, okay, why do I resistance train? Well, I resistance train to damage my muscle. Why do I damage my muscle? Okay, so it grows back bigger or stronger. Or so I give my body a reason to maintain it while I'm losing fat. Okay, well, if I do that every single day, and I go, I do it so much to the extreme where I reach over

training, am I helping or hurting myself in the long run? I'm hurting myself. Okay, well, do I train because I'm obsessed with training and damaging myself or do I train for outcomes? I train for outcomes. We all train for outcomes. So one of the things that you can do is just try to reframe it as, hey, I'm trying to stress my body so that I can adapt, but I also

need to create time for recovery. And one of the best ways not to fall back into that unhealthy cycle is to educate yourself on how resistance training actually drives adaptation in the first place. It's through stress and adaptation. If you stress the system and you adapt, you will overcome. If you overstress and under adapt, you will end up in a pit of despair, sorrow, and inefficiency. So create space for recovery. It's the only way to play this game in the long term. You can't just burn the candle at both ends forever. I promise you that. I know it's hard to hear, but I promise you it's the truth. All right, next question comes from Blion Ashley. She says, can I be in a calorie deficit and build muscle at the same time?

I am a beginner. In your situation, you probably could kill two birds with one stone. For advanced lifters, people like myself who've been lifting for many years, it's very challenging to build substantial amounts of muscle while being in a calorie deficit. We're just less sensitive to hypertrophy occurring in general because a lot

of the lifetime using myself as an example, hypertrophy I'm going to get has already happened. So to get the last bit of juice out of the lemon, I'm probably going to need to be in a calorie surplus, eating protein spread out across at least four feedings, getting between eight and nine hours of sleep, minimizing my stress and training with a shit ton of weight, progressively overloading, training probably four to five times a week at a minimum and expecting very little return for a lot of work and a lot of discipline. But when you first start, you can literally look at the weights and fucking your body's going to change. You're so sensitive to things. And so I've worked with a lot of clients who are complete novices. And one of the things that I've noticed is once you first start, whether you're in a deficit, you're at

maintenance or you're in a surplus, you're going to gain some muscle. Another population that this is true for is people who have taken a hiatus. If your goals are to lose fat and also build muscle, I think the best thing you could do if you're a beginner is just find your maintenance calories, right? Be like, okay, what number of calories do I need to eat to maintain my weight? And then eat a lot of protein. What you'll find in doing that is when you eat a lot of protein, you start resistance training at maintenance, you're going to probably see some recompositioning occur where some of your weight, right, will fluctuate, but it will by and large stay the same, but you will lose body fat while you gain muscle. And for novices, recompositioning is

fairly common. For advanced lifters like myself, it's really hard to see recomp at just like, wow, oh my God, you look so amazing. It's possible. But my understanding is that it definitely isn't as noticeable, and it's probably not something that you can rely on. Last question comes from Julia Peach. She says, what conditioning. And the CSCS is a examination administered by the National Strength and Conditioning Association. When you sit for your CSCS, it's a massive two-part exam where you are tested on a bunch of different stuff from physiology to exercise science, all kinds of stuff, right? You're testing to be titled a CSCS or a certified strength and conditioning specialist. Like I said, it's the gold standard. This is what the guys who work in the pros have. This is what the guys who work in the division ones and division two college

programs have. It's a really good certification if you want to work with athletes. And so something I will have always wanted to do is maintain the ability to work with as many populations as possible. I'm not a fan of niching down personally. It doesn't really fit with my vibe. I like to get creative. I like to work with all populations, but to work with athletes at a high level, I wanted to have a certification that said, Hey, look, this dude's not a complete shit bag who just posts shirtless selfies. He actually has some education. So first things first, when you take your CSCS, you need to have a bachelor's degree. So you'll have to do that. As far as what I use it for, I just used it for rounding out my understanding of principles of training athletic populations, particularly in administering strength and conditioning coaching to people who want to

drive athletic outcomes. And this is not the only thing that you need to do if you want to work with athletes. A CSCS is not shit. You need to understand the differences between how athletes behave, the expectations, the stressors that every athlete's different. It's definitely not the end-all be-all. In truth, it's just another certification, albeit one of the harder ones to obtain. And it does say something about you. What I use it for is just further rounding out my expertise and being able to deliver more knowledge to my clients than I think a lot of the competitors in the coaching space. I think the more education, certifications and qualifications that you're able to accrue, so long as you actually learn stuff and apply it, the better you'll do. And so the CSCS was definitely a status thing for me

initially. I still front load that and put it out there because I think it's the gold standard in our space. But again, there are plenty of people out there who've passed the CSCS who are probably complete morons. So it's not the end all be all. I don't think any test really is. I think you still have to continue to learn and develop. Thank you guys for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button, share it to your Instagram story and tag me so I can say thanks. Follow along for more. If you listen on iTunes, follow along on Spotify or Amazon. I'm streaming my podcast on pretty much every single podcast outlet out there. So any listens, any downloads help.

The number one thing you can do is hit subscribe, share it via word of mouth or on social media and leave me a five-star rating and review right here if you're listening on iTunes. Thanks so much for tuning in and stay tuned for the next one.