Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 142: Overcoming Fitness Failures + Friction 5 Tips and Philosophies:

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, Danny Matrenga, and today's episode is something I've wanted to bring you guys for a really long time. I want to take a look at how we can better respond to slip ups, failures, not meeting our expectations on our respective individualistic fitness journeys. All of us want to accomplish similar things, right? Many of us want to look better. Most of us want to feel better.

I'm sure all of us want to live longer in some capacity. And we pursue these goals with individualized fitness programs. We follow different diets. We follow different things, different rituals, all designed to help us reach our end goals, which are probably much more specific in that maybe you want to look good in a particular set of muscle groups because you've always felt self-conscious there. Maybe losing weight would help you feel more confident and let you do more things.

Maybe escaping pain would help you play with your grandchildren or perform better in sports. There's so many different reasons that we have for working out. And of course, you know, there's a lot that goes into maintaining a routine and with life being hectic and chaotic, failures can happen. Mistakes can happen. Slip ups can happen. Shortcomings can happen. And having worked with over a thousand people in the last 10 years in person, online, in big box gyms, in studios, out of my garage studio, all over the world in an online setting, really, I found there are a lot of different responses to failure. And I want to share with you the stuff that has inspired me, things that I have learned from my clients, things that I look to implement, and just some of the lessons I picked up along the

way so that hopefully when you do run into friction, when you do run into problems, because this stuff is going to happen. Unfortunately, it's just part of the journey. I want you guys to be able to respond, pivot, and grow through adversity instead of just being a prisoner to when you fail, when you fall. And I use the term when because it is going to happen. It is normal. Life gets in the way, even for the best athletes in the world. What do you think happens when an athlete on a multimillion dollar contract tears their ACL, is out for the season, right? That is a failure. That is something nobody saw coming. It's a slip up. It's huge. It knocks them off their feet, but they do what they can. They get back to it. They try their best, right? Again, these are people who are being paid to exercise, but I use that as an example

because even people who we look at in the pinnacle of sport, at the pinnacle of profession, even the pinnacle of wellness, oftentimes they fall short. But many times I find that the people who we admire most or who look like they have it all together. They fail many times more than we do, more frequently than we do. They don't meet their own expectations, but they pivot more quickly. They respond better and they grow through adversity. And I want to share some of that stuff today. I think you guys will really enjoy that. But before we do, I want to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. When I created Core, it was really important to me that I created a coaching program, a coaching company that kind of blended the best elements of in-person coaching and online

coaching so that our clients got an experience that really made online coaching feel hands-on. Whether that is through communication via email that is around the clock, nonstop, always having the support you need, 24-hour access to your coach. Whether that is weekly check-ins designed to drive accountability, nutrition monitoring, biofeedback, customized programming designed for you if you're training from home or if you're training at the best gym in the world or maybe a little bit of both. in the world, or maybe a little bit of both. Really building things from the ground up for our clients so that they can implement them, they can come to us for feedback, things that are collaborative, not just expecting clients to meet demands and telling them that if they don't, they're failing, but being there every step of the way to pivot. Many times clients will experience failure. We're going to talk about that a lot today. But getting creative, getting collaborative, working alongside our clients just like you do in person. Because oftentimes what I found with online coaching is the plans are made so far in advance.

Here, here's a month program. Go do this for a month. Well, what if we need to pivot after the first week because an exercise isn't working efficiently and it's causing pain? Or there's an equipment malfunction at the gym, or the initial dietary prescription just isn't up to snuff. You need to pivot quickly. So for all of our online coaching offerings, whether you're choosing to work with me or one of my phenomenal coaches, all online core coaching method clients get unlimited email access, customized weekly programming, nutritional coaching updated as

needed. And there's even options for those of you who just want programming or just want nutrition coaching. And if you're in the market for something even less hands-on like a consultation, whether that be a consultation about how to better run your fitness business, a consultation about your macros, you want to know what your macros should be to meet your fitness goals. You want to make sure your programming is tight, or you just want some resources that will help you better understand different various principles that commonly show up in health, wellness, resistance training, performance enhancement, physique sports, you name it. You can find all of that over at corecoachingmethod.com. Okay, guys, so I want to share five tips and five

philosophies for overcoming friction and failure on your fitness journey. Now, for you coaches out there, many of our listeners are personal trainers. This is going to be very, very important for you to pay close attention to because you'll be able to bring this to your clients. I think that you'll find that this stuff shows up every single day, whether you work with people in person and online, and it will help you motivate them through failures, through struggles, and even educate them, give them some tips. And for those of you who are on a fitness journey, these are just more arrows in your quiver. This is going to hopefully give you a boost, a better understanding of how to look at failure as something that is part of the process because having done this for this long, I think one thing I'm absolutely certain of is that those people who are just

absolutely perfect, they nail their diet every day, they never miss a workout, they train insanely hard, those are the outliers. And yes, when you look at social media, those are the people that we see because they live at one end of the bell curve. And that's totally understandable. Nobody wants to see and hear from normal people just like them, but that is how most of us operate. And it's very, very normal to fail, which leads me to my first point, which is normalization and understanding, right? That failure is a feature and friction is a feature, right? The best in the world make mistakes, but one of the things that

they do better than anybody else is get immediately back to what I call neutral thinking. So tip number one is practice neutral thinking in a world where failure is normal and failure should be expected. And I don't mean failure in the sense that you completely quit and gave up. I mean failure in that you might not have lived up to your expectations for that day. And when you do, instead of allowing things to crumble down around you, instead of going into that self-sabotage cycle of, oh, I missed one meal, so now I'm going to binge, or, oh, I missed a workout and I took the whole week off. What I recommend is getting back to something called neutral thinking. This is a concept that first came across my plate

from Trevor Moad, the late Trevor Moad, former mental conditioning coach for Russell Wilson, the Seahawks quarterback and a phenomenal consultant for some of college football's best teams. Trevor wrote a book called It Takes What It Takes. And I can't recommend reading this book enough because Trevor really goes into his philosophies for fostering this neutral thinking, this mindset of when I meet friction, when I meet failure, I'm not going to pound on myself.

I'm not going to get down on myself. I'm going to get back to neutral. And he has worked with some of the best athletes in the world and found that helping them work through these high pressure failures and getting back to neutral as quickly as possible. You cannot just mitigate damage in game and promote performance in game, but it can lead to more successful careers. One of his most successful clients is Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. And Russell Wilson has participated in many big games, but perhaps none more significant than the two Super Bowls he's played in. Now, Seattle won their first Super Bowl with Russell Wilson at the helm pretty

handily over the Denver Broncos. But in the second Super Bowl appearance of Russell Wilson's career, he made a pretty fatal mistake throwing an interception down at the one-yard line that was picked off by New England Patriot Malcolm Butler. And that is the kind of mistake that can live with you forever. A goal line interception in the fourth quarter that led to the Patriots going on to win the Super Bowl. The Seahawks lost the Super Bowl on this play. And this is devastating to somebody who plays quarterback. But working with Trevor, Russell was taught to get back to a place of neutral thinking, meaning after a failure,

after a slip up, after a mistake, I am going to get neutral. I'm going to be objective. I'm going to review what happened, and I'm going to move on from this. And Russell came back the following year and had one of his best statistical seasons ever. And this is something that he practices every single day. Two quotes from the book that I really love are the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging. How much sense does that make? How many of you can pause and go, man, you know, digging. How much sense does that make? How many of you can pause and go, man, you know, I think about it when I think about it. After I have a bad workout and I tell myself I should have worked harder, I beat myself up for it for a couple of days and it ends up making my subsequent workouts even shittier. Or when I mess up on my diet and I slip up, I end up binging later on in

the day, right? So remember the first step to getting out of a hole after you haven't met expectations is to stop digging. Get back to neutral thinking. Ask yourself objective questions like, what can I do to course correct? What's the right thing to do right now, independent of perhaps the mistake I made earlier? And another quote I love is negativity. Again, from the book, It Takes What It Takes by Trevor Moad. Negativity affects you negatively 100% of the time. So when you make a mistake, you do not have to sugarcoat things and be insanely positive. I think that being delusionally positive is ineffective and inefficient in its own regard. Lying to yourself that you're going to get there one day when you're never willing to do the fucking work ain't going to get it done, but neither is piling on and being excessively negative. So when in doubt, when you meet friction, and this is something that I have

seen with the clients that I've worked with who've been the most successful, whether it's the clients who have built the most muscle, gotten onto a bodybuilding stage, had phenomenal performance in sport, lost over a hundred pounds. I see this the most with the people onto a bodybuilding stage, had phenomenal performance in sport, lost over a hundred pounds. I see this the most with the people who have lost a ton of weight. They are able to get back to neutral even when things aren't going well. A client I work with, who I won't name, but she lives in Florida. She's a mom. She has a very busy, hectic schedule. And she has lost working with me over 60 pounds. But in the first year, we didn't lose much of any weight.

We were just establishing habits. We were establishing behaviors, and there were a lot of slip-ups, mistakes, miscommunications, opportunities for growth. But never once in this process did this client give up, and very rarely in this process did this client get negative. They said things like, I understand that I can do better. I see the areas for opportunity. And we worked together. We kept pushing. And after a year, she started losing weight very quickly and seeing a lot of success because that's just how long it took for things to click.

And I know for a fact that if every time we ran into a weigh-in where things just weren't moving and she met that with tremendous negativity instead of objectivity, she would have never got there. And she started every single week with, this is a clean slate. This is a new opportunity. And I think that that is neutral thinking and action. And it's something I've loved to be a part of. So my fifth or my second philosophy in these five philosophies around what to do when you fail, what to do when you meet friction, is to acknowledge that the end goal, right, is substantially less valuable than the journey. Now, I don't mean important. I think that that's something that gets

highlighted a lot is it's all about the journey, not the destination. Listen, the destination matters. The end goal matters. The outcomes matter. The proof is in the pudding. Don't let anybody tell you any different. It's all about the journey. Well, not if the journey fucking takes forever and I never reached my goal. Duh. But there is a lot of value in the journey should you choose to look for it. So philosophy number two is find what you can learn about yourself on this journey, understanding that failure is going to happen. So if when you are confronted with an opportunity to respond to a slip up, a mistake, the scale's not moving, but you can get objective and say, hmm, what can I learn from this? Why did I have a night where I went out, ate two plates of nachos, came home, drank two beers, got high,

had half a pint of ice cream, woke up and realized I completely detonated on my diet? Is there something that I can learn from this? What I just described to you guys is basically something that happens to me at least once a month, where I get done with my day. I decide I want to enjoy a little bit of cannabis. I get the munchies. I eat way too much. And I end up asking myself the following morning, whoa, whoa, whoa, what the heck happened there? And I could get so frustrated with myself. But one of the things that I find is these occurrences are consistently, regularly, and almost exclusively preceded by me not eating enough throughout the day, me getting to the end of my day and being very hungry, and then me altering my appetite

with something like THC to the point where I'm not really able to handle those urges. And so if every time that happened, I just blew up and went, you're a failure. There's nothing to learn here. I'm not learning from the journey. I'm not learning from the experience. I'm certainly not getting back to neutral. I mean, you could be neutral by just being ambivalent and not caring, right? But I'm asking you with the second philosophy to take it a step further, to dive a little deeper and to actually ask yourself, okay, let's go through the who, what, when, where, why. Let's break down why this happened. Let's break down why I missed that workout. Did I miss the workout because I went to bed too late? I woke up too late. I didn't have time to pack my bag so I could go after work.

If that's the case, you can learn from that. You can say, wow, if I can find a way every time I make a mistake to identify why that happened and correct it so it doesn't happen again, you are getting that much closer. Even if it's the smallest shit in the world, even if it's the most minute thing in the world, if you can get better 0.1% at a time every single day, that compounds, that makes a difference. If you can get a little bit better every day on one thing, that compounds, that makes a difference. But you have to be objective. And one of the best opportunities we have to learn is after we have a slip up, after we have a mistake. And so the second philosophy isn't just a regurgitation of the cliche. It's not about the destination. It's about the journey or the journey is more important than the destination, however you want to say it. But the journey is important in the reason why it's important, right? Like, okay, well, tell me, why is the journey important? The journey is important because failures, slip ups and mistakes are going to happen. And if you're able to stay neutral and learn from them, that will bleed into everything that you do in life. 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. I have found, and again, I'm not trying to stand up on my soapbox. I understand that I have a lot of life left to live, and it can be patronizing to hear young people communicating in a pseudo-motivational and Tony Robbins-style way. But I have worked with a lot of people who are very successful in different areas of their life. And sometimes they struggle with their weight, with their fitness routines, with their healthy habits. And one of the ways that they can improve themselves in those areas is by borrowing what they've learned from business, what they've learned from their career, what they've learned from their personal lives, what they've learned from their relationships. to learn about yourself, that it makes failing a much more positive situation when it happens, because again, it is going to happen. My third philosophy here is that results are allowed to be seasonal, and they often tend to be seasonal. Now, I don't necessarily mean that you're going to make gains on the calendar cyclical seasons

that we are accustomed to like spring, summer, fall, and winter. What I mean is that there will likely be certain parts of your year, let's call it your training year, where your stress is low, where you don't have as much on your plate, where you can really apply yourself to your training and your nutrition. And there might be other times in a training year where it's not the best opportunity. Maybe you're busy with work. Maybe you're having relationship challenges. Maybe there's stress. Being able to zoom out and go, okay, not every week, not every workout, not every day has to be the best one ever. I'd like it to be 0.1 to 1% better, but there will be days where I'm just keeping my head above water. And one of my fundamental philosophies is if you can have nothing but days where you either get a little bit better or you keep your

head above water, you will get there. And it sounds simple. If you can only have days where you take one step forward or zero steps back, you will get there. And understanding that not every day is, or not every week or not every month is going to yield insanely fast progress. The progress you got when you first got started, that you will likely hit points where you're stagnant or your weight goes up or you miss a workout. And just acknowledging that this is allowed to have ebbs and flows. This is allowed to be seasonal. I'm allowed to go through periods of extreme stress where I have projects at work, where I have family commitments. And I'm going to, instead of punishing myself for not making progress, I'm going to have an objective approach and say, hey, if I can just

maintain, I'm going to do well. Or if I can only go backwards by a small percentage, I can do well. Or if I can only go forward in the smallest percentage, I can do well. But I'm going to be realistic with myself when I hit these parts of my life or these seasons, if you will, of my life where stress picks up, where work picks up. And a lot of you know what I'm talking about. Many of you are perhaps working in professions where your work life is inconsistent. I'll give you an example. I have a lot of clients who are nurses and they work on a 12-hour shift four days a week consecutively followed by three days off. Some of my clients who are in this schedule or follow this kind of schedule who are hyper-stressed, they do really well and they perform really well when they're training those three days a week they don't work, meaning they don't train four days a week because the work stress is just too much to layer on additional training stress. But when those

clients get the opportunity to take one week off, maybe two weeks off, they can really, really push. I have another client who works in nursing and she first started out when we worked together several years ago for about a year and a half. She took a little break and she came back. And she was operating out of San Diego, training five days per week. Then she got a nursing job up in the mountains at a summer camp or something, if I'm not mistaken. And she had to make some adjustments because all she had up there was dumbbells. But she really focused on maintaining and doing the best of her, the best she could. Then when she came back, she got a month off of work.

And that was the month where we really, really pushed it. And she made phenomenal progress in that month. She made two, three months of progress. I swear, she was unbelievably primed to progress because she was coming off a period where she was doing a little bit less training because she was up in the mountains. And she just took off. She got launched, shot right little bit less training because she was up in the mountains. And she just took off. She got launched, shot right out of a cannon when she got back to her routine. She didn't fret.

She didn't freak out. She did the best she could with the situation she had when she was up in the mountains, understanding that she didn't have access to all the things she normally does. But if she did a little with what she had, she could really ramp it up when she got back. So just acknowledge that this stuff is allowed to be seasonal and I tell clients all the time, we need to build your training around your life,

not your life around your training. If you are competing in sport, if you are competing at a high level or if you aspire to compete at those levels, then you will need to make sacrifices and there probably are not a lot of opportunities for you to just maintain or just take a step back. But if you are somebody who falls into the category of general population, somebody like myself, who is not actively

competing in any sports, physique sports, powerlifting, I would like to look good. I would like to be pain-free. I'd like to set myself up for a long and healthy life using exercise to support my physical and mental health. Well, if you fall into that category, as I do, you can afford to have periods where you take it a little bit easier on yourself instead of just hammering it all the time and hammering yourself when you can't rise to the occasion. Because it's impractical, life is going to happen, especially as we come out of a pandemic and we would like to be more social. We would like to be more involved with the people in our lives. We have to get real about that. And so philosophy number three is training, progress, weight loss are allowed to be seasonal if in fact you don't lose sight of the main goals and you don't fall

off completely for large periods of time. Philosophy number four is to remember to differentiate between slowing progress and lack of progress. Something that I often find to be quite common are trainees coming to me after about a year or two of training really, really hard because their results have slowed down. This is more common with clients who have tried to build muscle, but the same is very true of clients who are looking to lose weight or even perform better. And I have to remind people like, hey, you will make some of your best gains in the first year of your training. You will probably lose the most weight in the first several months of your deficit. Your performance and skill at sport will probably

improve the most early on into these training protocols. Because what happens as our bodies adapt and as we become more well-trained or more adjusted to a deficit or less sensitive to a stimulus, right? As things just don't move as fast. And remember that things happen slow in living systems. Like we're talking about building muscle using tiny little amounts of protein or losing body fat by metabolizing and burning microscopic grams of fat at a cellular level.

This shit is going to happen really slow. And so something I find to be very common is people mistaking a natural decrease in rate of progress with failure. If you have been training for a considerable amount of time, you've been trying to lose weight for a considerable amount of time, improve performance for a considerable amount of time, the rate at which you see those improvements is naturally going to slow down. Your body will become less sensitive to these inputs. Deficits won't hit as hard, right? You won't grow as much from the same amount of volume. You won't build the same amount of athletic potential six weeks into a training program that you probably did the first three to four when you were hypersensitive to it. It's normal for things to slow down.

And so I think something we all lose sight of is we compare ourselves to other people and we want what they have or we see where they're at. And we don't really think we lose sight of how it was that we got to where we were at, but also how long it might've taken the people we're comparing ourselves to, to get to where they've gotten. And whenever you break out the comparison monster and it breaks out of the box that it lives in, it's hard to put that sucker back. But just remember, if you're comparing yourself to when you first got started or yourself to somebody who's already where you'd like to be, you're not doing yourself any favors. So just remember that rates of progress

are allowed to fluctuate and they tend to slow down the longer you've been working towards something, which is why, again, going back through these philosophies, being able to practice neutral thinking and being able to generate positive, intrinsic introspection, things where you're really looking in, what did I do here? What can I learn here when you fuck up? That's really important because that can help you get through these slower moments and stick with it when things inevitably slow down

And the fifth philosophy that I have and it kind of piggybacks off a point. I just made about introspection Is to be honest with yourself at all times about the level of effort and accountability when it comes to these protocols that you might be implementing. If you're trying to diet to lose body fat and you're not losing body fat, the first question you should ask yourself isn't, what's wrong with me? It's, am I doing the things that I know I need to do to make this happen in a level or at a compliance that will actually drive it home. Meaning, if you know your task for weight loss is to monitor your calories and track your protein, that's the habit. And you say, well, I'm tracking my calories every day and I'm not losing weight. My question might be, are you

tracking them 100%? Are you tracking them 70%? And a lot of times people go, well, I track pretty good most of the time. Well, this is a skill. When you're reaching failure or when things are slowing down, can you be introspective? Can you be honest? Are you self-aware enough to go, hey, I'm going to be honest. I haven't been pushing myself in the gym very hard. I've been cutting my workout short. I haven't been training close to failure, so I'm not going to gain as much muscle. Or, hey, I'm not getting good sleep. I'm not doing the lifestyle things I need to be doing, like going on walks and managing my stress. And I'm not tracking my calories the way I used to when I was seeing weight loss. So these are skills, the ability to look inward and create honest, reflective, introspection,

space for this where you go, am I doing what I really need to be doing right now to get results? And that's why people hire coaches, because we will let ourselves down before we let somebody else down. We tend to lie to ourselves about our successes and failures more than we would lie to somebody like a coach. So remember, it's really important to be honest with yourself about your compliance, about your adherence, about your motivations, about your effort levels. All of this stuff

is really important when trying to create physical change. So you guys, these are five philosophies and kind of tips I have around the inevitable failures and friction that will occur when you're trying to stick with a routine to build your body, to lose body fat, to create performance. All of this stuff takes time and it's not easy. If it were easy, 70% of the United States population would not be overweight, right? It's harder. It's easier probably to just become somebody who isn't active, who doesn't have these habits in place than it is to be someone who does. And acknowledging that the friction is normal is the first step in probably

reducing some of the stigma around fucking up. But here are those five tips and philosophies again. Number one is to remember that failure is normal and practice neutral thinking when it occurs. Number two is remember that the reason we say the cliche, it's about the journey and not the destination, is because journeys teach us lessons through failure, particularly fitness journeys. Number three, remember that this stuff is allowed to be seasonal and it's not always the best or even appropriate to be pushing yourself all the way, balls to the wall all year round. Number four, make sure you're not mistaking slowed progress, stale progress, or barriers for failures. And number five, remember to always practice accountability and introspection when you reach a point where you're falling off,

your progress is stale, or you're not moving at the rate you want. Thank you guys so much for listening to another episode. I hope you found this helpful and I hope that it helps you with your fitness goals or your client's fitness goals. If you enjoyed this, please share this episode. Tag me so I can say thank you. Instagram is the best way to do it and leave me a five star rating and review on whatever podcast service you listen to.

Another thing you could do that would help to help me increase downloads is just download this on Spotify and on iTunes. Most of you probably have both on your phone and simply downloading on both platforms makes a big difference. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next one.