Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 150 Training Split Master Class (How To Train OPTIMALLY) Regardless Of Your Schedule:

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Thanks For Listening!—-Support The ShowThere is NOTHING more valuable to a podcast than leaving a written review and 5-Star Rating. Please consider taking 1-2 minutes to do that HERE.You can also leave a review on SPOTIFY!Legion Supplements, Shop HERE!Get Your FREE LMNT Electrolytes 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.

Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you at this from four different primary training objectives, which would be, of course, muscle growth or bodybuilding, fat loss or body recomposition, performance or athletic enhancement, and longevity or long-term wellness. And so those are the four primary reasons that people tend to train or that the people who work with me and my coaching company tend to be interested in. And a lot of what we do depends on scheduling. It depends on time. And so we'll break down the most time efficient ways, splits, and things you should consider and include for anybody looking to build muscle, lose fat, increase their performance or their longevity.

And of course, trying to do all of these things at the same time is generally a bad idea and relatively inefficient. So I'm going to break these down kind of piece by piece and maybe even give some insights for those of you training at home and for those of you who are training back at the gym, because we are reaching what I heard to refer to recently as the endemic. And I kind of like that. Hopefully with, you know, I think now 77% of the population is vaccinated and we've got, I think it's, what is it? Is it Plavolix? It's the new Pfizer COVID pill. It's a protease inhibitor, but it stops COVID from replicating at a relatively effective clip if taken within the first like two to three days. So this will hopefully get us to a point where

we can start to move on societally. And then also, Omicron being hyper-transmissive, but at least at this point, seeming to be less deadly, probably a very, very good thing. Or as good as something like this can be. Not to spend too much time talking about COVID, but you guys are my audience and you're really important to me and kind of piggybacking off of that. I'd like to highlight some reviews from my phenomenal listeners. You guys do me a ton of favors, whether it's sharing the podcast on Instagram story, sharing it via word of mouth, but few things are more impactful on the growth of a podcast than plain old written

reviews. iTunes has a portion of the show in the menu where you can actually scroll down and leave a review. And all of you who have done that have been phenomenally helpful. This review comes from Sammy102031, and she says, I love the way Danny can explain information. You can also tell he just cares. I can't recommend this podcast enough. I'm the type to add to my library and not really listen after the first day or episode, but I've been listening almost every day now. His podcast is so motivating. Plus, he talks like a real person and doesn't act too certain in the way he thinks. I enjoy it. Give him a listen. For real. Thanks a lot, Sammy. Those are a lot of things that I

really try to bring to the table when I speak, whether that be on Instagram or here on the podcast or YouTube, anytime I have a camera in my face or the opportunity to get my message out there. So it's good feedback for me and very helpful. This review comes from Kapooch, and they say, such useful information and so easy to comprehend. I'm currently in a certification for health coaching and plan on getting my personal training certification. I will definitely be recommending this podcast to my clients as a reference. I also love the fact that they are around 30 minutes short and sweet. Thanks so much for the info. I really appreciate that review and I'm very, very hopeful that you pass your wellness coaching and personal

training certifications for all of you listeners out there who are coaches, trainers, you know, whatever you like to call yourself. I very much appreciate your reviews and your feedback. As many of you know, in our industry, positive constructive criticism can be very helpful in improving our craft. And so all of the positive critiques and reviews you guys have left me have been helpful. And all of the private ones that you've messaged me about the podcast have been helpful too. So I so appreciate every single one of you for helping me grow the podcast. Another way you can support the show and allow me to bring what is essentially zero cost information directly to you is to shop with the sponsors of this show.

One of those is Legion Athletics. Legion is my go-to manufacturer of protein powder, creatine, and omega-3 fish oil, as well as the Genesis Green supplement I take every day. It's loaded with a phenomenal micronutrient dense profile, but it's also the only greens powder with three grams of reishi mushroom, which is something that I go absolutely nuts for. The Recharge Creatine is my favorite creatine on the market, and I love their grass-fed whey isolate. If you need more protein in your diet, but you're not a dairy person, you might also try the Planche Plus, which is a blend of pea and brown rice protein, giving you a full spectrum of all the important amino acids.

If you'd like to support the show and meet your supplement needs from a manufacturer with clinically dosed ingredients, fully transparent labeling processes, and educational information instead of promotional materials being shoved down your throat, you can head over to legion.com and check out using the promo code Danny. Another way you can support the show and that I can hopefully support your training endeavors is to actually ensure that you are getting hydrated in the gym. And my partners over at LMNT, Elemental Labs, have one of the best electrolyte supplements on the planet. It's loaded with sodium, potassium, and magnesium. If you train in the morning,

you train in a humid or hot climate, you sweat a lot, or you use the sauna, you should absolutely consider supplementing with electrolytes. And LMNT makes it easy. They have set aside sample packs containing all of their most popular flavors for listeners of this show. All you got to do is head over to drinklmt.com slash coach Danny, or just click the link in the show notes below to secure your free sample pack. Try all their best flavors. My favorites are raspberry, citrus, and mango chili. And again, all you have to do is pay shipping and they'll send it right to you. I think you'll love it and end up ordering more. I can't recommend it enough, especially for those of you who train early or fasted. It is phenomenal. It really makes a big noticeable difference in how I train.

fasted. It is phenomenal. It really makes a big noticeable difference in how I train. But without further ado, guys, let's go ahead and get into training splits, considerations, and how to best train for muscle growth, fat loss, performance, or longevity. So the first thing I talk to all clients about, whether they're my clients through core coaching method or the clients that I've worked with in person over the years, is it's not so much how well a program is written, how well a program is designed, how optimal a program would be if it was performed perfectly that makes a program effective. It's the adherence of the actual applicant to the program. And so what I mean by this is you can write the best program in the world, but if you don't show up every day and execute, it will be inherently

inefficient. So the first thing that you have to consider when trying to determine what is the optimal training split for me is what is something I can stick to to a high degree of compliance. And I often tell people a three-day-a-week program done with 100% compliance is the same as a six-day-a-week program done with 50% compliance, if not better, because that three-day-a-week program will be designed to optimally train the body in three sessions. But if you set up a six-day-a-week split and can only get to the gym three, four, five times, and your compliance is short, obviously there will be some elements of that program that aren't expressed properly, and there will be some musculature or some adaptations that aren't addressed properly because you're missing

sessions. So the first thing you must do is you must become very clear about the number of sessions that you can train weekly. And we'll get to what those splits might look like for each of these various goals as we go along. I promise not to leave you hanging. But once you've determined, okay, I have a really good understanding of the number of sessions I can get in per week. these various goals as we go along. I promise not to leave you hanging. But once you've determined, okay, I have a really good understanding of the number of sessions I can get in per week. And for novices, anywhere from one to three is probably fine. I would say a novice is somebody who's within their first year of training. For either intermediates or novices who are really aggressive about their progress, whether that be for health, longevity, performance, muscle gain, et cetera, somewhere between three to five days a week might be

optimal. And for those of you who are very well trained, you're advanced in your training in that you've perhaps been training aerobically or anaerobically for quite some time, maybe even many years, you might be able to get away with upwards of six sessions, sometimes more. Again, it depends on how those sessions are stratified and divided up across your week. But in general, the newer you are, the more results you can get from less training. And the more advanced you are, the more training you'll have to do to drive infinitesimally smaller results. That's just the nature of adaptation. And that's just the nature of our physiology. And you have to understand that. So, you know, we're probably going to be looking for 99.9% of trainees to be training somewhere between

two and six days per week. The duration of those sessions is also very important. Not everybody has the ability to commit to, you know, 90 to 120 minute sessions. People who bodybuild professionally or, you know, perhaps they bodybuild recreationally in a way that really brings them a lot of pleasure and joy and they have a schedule that allows them to commit to two hours of training or maybe you have an aerobic athlete who likes to go on very long, multi-mile long runs and their schedule affords that, that's phenomenal. And those might be good for respective goals like building muscle or losing body fat or building aerobic threshold, elevating aerobic threshold, I should say. So in the same way, it's important to get clear and be very realistic about the number of sessions that you can commit to in a given week.

It's also very important to get clear on the duration of those sessions and how you actually spend each minute of those sessions. We'll talk about a little bit more as we go, but it's important to be reasonable and realistic. So I think that for most people, the optimal timeframe to commit for training is somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes. Now, training is somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes. Now, ideally, I'd say 60 to 90 minutes with novices being able to fall north of 60 while still getting some pretty considerable results and advanced trainees needing to probably go north of 60 to continue to attenuate more progress and gains. But that stuff is really, really important. Some additional considerations when planning out what might be the optimal split or routine for you

are what is my training environment like? Meaning, am I training from home? If you're training from home, that likely eliminates the commute time and that likely mitigates or reduces the number of items and things you need to be bringing with you, right? If you've been training or exercising for a while, you know that you have to prepare things like a gym bag, a water bottle. There are things that you may bring with you to the gym. And so training from home has its perks in that it minimizes the, you know, likelihood for error or forgetting something. It minimizes the number of excuses and it reduces commute time. But maybe you train at work because you have a facility at work. I know a lot of the clients that I work with who are in the Bay Area tech scene, they have

work gyms. If you go to a traditional gym, which I think is probably where most people at this point are training, you know, there are some considerations that you need to think about there. But overall, if you've identified an approximate number of sessions, ideally the exact amount of sessions you can commit to every week, the durations of those sessions, right? Probably in minutes or hours and the location, then you can schedule them and get to work. And that's the most important thing. It's getting that shit written down, getting that stuff scheduled. That's exactly what we do for our clients at Core Coaching Method when we do

intakes. You know, we look at, okay, how many days a week can you train? And then I usually ask, okay, if you can train five, does that mean you will always hit five or will you always have a threshold of four and maybe sometimes hit five? And oftentimes people say, well, five would be on a good week, four would be most weeks. And I say, okay, then let's program for where you will be most weeks because I'd rather program four and give you the freedom to maybe add an extra session than program five, and you'd be 75, 80% compliant more often than not. Okay, so let's talk about muscle growth here as our primary training modality in this first portion and what those training splits might look like for people who are training one to three times a week, four to five times a week, six times a

week. There will, of course, be some crossover here. And I think specifically with fat gain, there's a lot of similarities in how we like to program and what I generally recommend for fat loss training and muscle growth. They're quite similar. But if you can train one to three times per week, I would recommend if your goal, again, this is for muscle growth. If you can only train one to three sessions per week, I think doing total body sessions makes the most sense because again, frequency is an important element and component of driving progress. And for most lifters, training more than one time a week is probably better than training one time a week only. And if you can only train one, two or three times a week, you certainly need to stimulate a lot of muscle tissue in each of those sessions. And I think once you

get to four or five times, you get a little bit more luxury with how you can spread that volume out. But if we're talking about only being able to train one to three sessions per week, I think a total body program focused on compound lifts, minimizing the amount of time spent on isolation lifts, not that there's anything wrong with that. But again, we're looking to maximize and get the most leverage out of our training and training multiple muscle groups per movement is likely going to be more efficient. And then again, we're looking at what we can recover from. So, you know, if you have 60 to 90 minutes and you're focusing on mostly compounds, it might make sense to have a day in between each session. You know, maybe you train Monday,

Wednesday, Friday, take the weekends off. But for those looking to gain muscle who can reasonably commit to one to three weekly sessions, a compound-focused total body training program is probably the best. Now, for people who can commit to perhaps four to five sessions a week, and this is more common, this is what I tend to see most amongst people with a physique goal or even a fat loss goal, most amongst people with a physique goal or even a fat loss goal. Body part splits tend to work better. I like to split that volume out across multiple sessions. Generally, the lower body will get its entire training day, you know, separate from the upper body training hemispherically, if you will. So maybe if we can train four to five times, we might have two days designated for the upper body, two days designated for the lower body with a, you know, pretty heavy skew towards compound lifts

with some isolation stuff thrown in there as well. And that fifth day, if you can afford a fifth training session can be used for isolation specific work, body parts you specifically want to bring up. So something we do quite a bit with, I'll use clients who have a female physique specific goal, meaning they generally want to develop the back, shoulders, glutes, hamstrings, core, et cetera. We'll do two leg days and two upper body days. And then that fifth day oftentimes includes accessory shoulder work, accessory core work, accessory glute work, or it's an entirely third, entirely separate third leg day. It's very important that you say third, nevermind. But yeah, so look, that's for four to five days a week

training for bodybuilding muscle growth. And then occasionally we'll run into somebody who has the time and schedule and lifestyle that will afford them the luxury of being able to train six times a week. Again, a body part split makes sense. We might continue with some type of upper-lower. I have had clients train upper-lower alternatively for six days. That is probably only for the most advanced lifters. I might recommend instead something like a push-pull leg split where you have a full day for the upper body pushing musculature. This of course includes the pecs, the triceps, the deltoids, the pulling musculature. So a separate day for that. That's usually the lats, rear delts, rhomboids, lower traps, biceps, and then a leg day, quads, glutes, hamstrings, calves, and running through those two times each. So two push days, two pull days,

and a leg day with one rest day, or alternating between upper and lower three times. This is very rare that this gets used. I find that you can get away with a little more isolation work because of how spread out everything is. And I wouldn't recommend doing a lot of your work at or near failure, probably near failure fine,

but with like one or two reps, but I would keep the majority of your work at or near failure, probably near failure fine, but with like one or two reps, but I would keep the majority of your work south of failure. So those are training splits for individuals interested in muscle growth. Now, what about individuals interested in fat loss, performance and or longevity. So let's start here with fat loss. And we'll go back to the one to three time a week framework. 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'm still going to focus on total body compound resistance-based training. I would add in lots of walks and lots of aerobic training in non-training situations, meaning I'm looking to increase my NEAT or go on walks separate from my training situation. For fat loss clients, I still want the majority of the training that they do to be resistance. I find that this sets the stage for slower and more stable fat loss that is much more consistent. And I often use the stock market analogy, which is would you happily invest if you knew you were going to get slow,

steady gains and returns with very little volatility and eventually reach your end game? Or would you rather bounce back and forth, have high volatility days, low volatility days, but have a much higher likelihood of spinning out or hitting a plateau? And I find that that's what happens when clients focus on extreme training modalities or massive amounts of aerobics as a means to drive caloric expenditure, as a means to drive body fat reduction. So for fat loss, I'm still recommending lifting. For those of you who can only reasonably commit to one to three weekly sessions, focus quite a bit of your time on compound lifts, just like you would if you were looking to gain muscle, and then try to increase your steps, go on walks, increase your caloric expenditure in those non-designated lifting times, whether that's through, you know, behaviors like parking farther

away, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, going on a walk after dinner with your spouse, increasing the number of times a week you walk your dog by 50%, etc. So what about individuals who are looking to lose fat who can train four to five times a week? Well, not dissimilar to the, you know, bodybuilding routine, I might recommend in this case, an upper lower split. Again, with that fifth day being designated for aerobic fitness, because I do think that there is a rationale for increasing aerobic fitness as well as caloric expenditure. So maybe four days, two upper, two lower, and one designated for cardio or three total body exercise days with two designated for

cardio. I think that would work very well for rapid body fat reduction. And if we are talking six days a week, this is where we can get really, really creative. We could do three total body compound-based exercise days paired with three different aerobic training days, meaning maybe we do one at low intensity, long duration. We do one at moderate intensity, moderate duration, and we do one at high intensity, short duration. Maybe we do two upper body days, two lower body days with two hikes. Maybe we do three days a week total body with three long walks. You know, how we split that up really depends, but I would recommend spending more time lifting than doing aerobic work. So I do think my desired frequency for a fat loss client who could get to the gym six days a week would be two upper body days, two lower body days, or two upper body days, two lower body days with a fifth resistance day paired with one to two cardio sessions on top of that. So transitioning away from aesthetics, meaning like muscle growth and fat loss to something like performance, there's

a lot of opportunity here for crossover, sure. And plenty of athletes also look phenomenal, but in general, performance, wellness, and aesthetics occupy opposite ends of a triangle. And that the further you move towards performance, the more sacrifices you're likely going to have to make with health and aesthetics. The more you move towards aesthetics, the more sacrifices you'll have to make with regards to your performance and your health. And the more you move towards health specific training and nutritional considerations too, the more likely you'll have to move away from aesthetics and performance. Although I do find a general focus on wellness has the most versatility and kind of bleeds nicely into increasing your aesthetics and performance, albeit quite slowly. Now for athletes or people who want to increase performance and athletic

performance or athletic outputs and can only train one to three times a week, I would focus largely on strength-based compound lifting and lower repetition ranges. I would include higher threshold aerobic work, such as sprints, and I would include different forms of plyometrics if we are talking about sports-specific performance. Now, all of this stuff is going to be highly, highly specific. So if your resistance training or you are training in a gym with the ultimate goal of maybe doing something like obstacle course racing, a Spartan race, running a marathon, playing basketball, those resistance bouts should be intense enough to drive the adaptation of strength, explos know, explosiveness, uh, tissue resilience, whatever you're after tender tendon stiffness, depending on the sport, but also allow

space for recovery. Um, because quite frankly, most people who are training for performance also need to have quite a bit of time set aside for skill specific work. If you can get a, you know, four to five training sessions in per week, which I find is most common for people who are, you know, chasing a performance goal. That's usually where things get fun. I think power, strength, and specificity are still the king when we're designing these splits. And we should focus on, you know, building maximum strength, maintaining maximum strength, driving things like explosiveness and relative strength, particularly for athletes who play things like football, basketball, baseball. We want specificity because again, not only is

specificity in training really important, but specificity with regards to what we're training is really important. So for training power, we want that to be plane specific. So like if I'm training a baseball player to have power in the transverse rotational plane, because that's how they swing a bat, that might look a lot different than if I'm training like a kicker in football who has a huge leg kick, but that's mostly occurring in the sagittal plane. So a lot of our training is specific to the actual movement selection too. And that's where it gets really fun and creative, but we still need to create adequate space for skill work. So if that's basketball, that means shooting and ball handling, or actually playing and scrimmaging. If that's football, that might mean agility work,

field work, you know, route running, timing stuff with whatever, depending on position, group stuff. If this is endurance work, like, you know, long distance running, we need to create space and recoverability for large amounts of mileage. So how you split that volume in training up, I would actually recommend shorter sessions, probably somewhere between 35, 30 to 60 minutes, maybe focusing on those big building blocks of strength and think about how athletes train in season and how muscular they stay. Obviously it's hard because, you know, you don't know who's exactly using performance enhancing drugs and who isn't. I think it's fun to operate under the assumption that most athletes don't, but that's simply

untrue. A lot of athletes do, and they're just very good at hiding it, or they have poor testing requirements that kind of allow them to slip under the radar. But most athletes keep a pretty lean muscular physique in season while training, maybe one to two times a week because they're practicing so much. So a lot of the hypertrophy and some of that stuff sticks around, which is nice. And lastly, let's talk about how I might spend my time training if I was focused on longevity and optimal wellness. And I don't think that training to build the most muscle possible and eating in that way is ideal for longevity due to things like mTOR and various inflammatory markers that seem to rise when you eat in a massive calorie surplus all the time. Training for fat loss and maximum

leanness certainly isn't good for wellness, hormonal health, just general well-being and thriving. And training for performance, which certainly isn't bad for your health per se, it takes a toll. It's a lot to recover from. And not all of these sports or things that we're looking to perform for are healthy for us in the long-term. Football being an example, look at what that does to long-term brain health and cognitive outcomes. But for those of you who are mostly just focused on longevity and wellness, and you can train one to three times a week, I would certainly recommend a balance of power, strength, and hypertrophy training. You know, again, probably looking at total body sessions here with some low to moderate

intensity aerobic work done between 60 to 80% of your heart rate max. So you can just take your the number 220, subtract your age from that, multiply that by 0.6, multiply that times 0.8, take those two numbers, juxtapose them at opposite ends of a range, and that's your 60 to 80% heart rate training range using an incredibly rough unscientific estimate. But, you know, we're looking at elevating VO2 max, training aerobically to enhance our cardiovascular fitness because that's really important when the number one killer of people is cardiovascular disease. And we want to pair that with activities like resistance training that help manage our metabolic health. Those things are really important too. Now, for those of you who can train four to five weekly sessions and you are focusing on, you know,

really improving your longevity, I would still want to lift at least three times a week total body with a focus on strength and a secondary focus on hypertrophy. I would still want to lift at least three times a week total body with a focus on strength and a secondary focus on hypertrophy. I would still want probably two designated aerobic sessions for lower intensity, moderate intensity aerobic fitness to elevate VO2 max, push that a little bit. VO2 max is heavily correlated with longevity. And I would absolutely look to incorporate things like sauna exposure. And you can expose yourself to the sauna if you have muscle gain goals, fat loss goals, or performance goals. But I think from a longevity-specific standpoint, there's some really encouraging data with

regards to sauna use and that ability to encourage vascular flow to the brain, encourage vasodilation, increase the secretion of valuable things like heat shock protein, and of course, reduce all-cause mortality. So those are kind of how I would approach training for various schedules, various situations across different populations. And hopefully that gives you some insights as to how we build a framework at Core Coaching Method for each client that comes to us. But the magic is in how those kind of scaffolds and outlines are tailored specific to the individual. And that's where the fun comes in. And that's why having a coach is really, really valuable. Because what I just told

you is only helpful in that it gives you an outline. But how you tailor that, how you actually make that fit, if the program is made to measure, it can make something that's already efficient, substantially more efficient and substantially more likely to get you ultimately where you would like to be. And thank you guys all so much for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. If you enjoy this, please share it. There's a lot of misinformation going around and a lot of people saying you got to train like me, look like me, et cetera. We're just pushing out general garbage. So information like this that I think is thoughtful, evidence-based in both what's referenced and what's been practiced can be really, really helpful for anybody out there

who's just getting started. And as you know, we are heading towards a new year. If we're not there, actually, by the time you hear this, we probably will be in a new year. And Lord knows the fitness misinformation will be running rampant as it always does every January. So thank you guys all so much for tuning in. And I will catch you on the next one.