Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 151: Q+A 10 Training Philosophies Holding YOU Back

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, Danny Matrenga. And I want to thank every single one of you for tuning in. I actually want to thank you additionally, for leaving so many phenomenal reviews of this very podcast. I actually checked Spotify earlier and saw that we are closing in on almost 30 reviews. Thanks to every single one of you who has left me a review or subscribes on that platform. And as for iTunes, we're north of 200 reviews now. Thanks to listeners just like you taking two to three minutes to leave a rating of the podcast. It means so, so much to me. And I want to thank every single one of you

who has done that. And if you have not yet done that, it is not too late to enter the review giveaway. All you have to do is leave a review on iTunes and or Spotify. Follow me over on my coaching page at Core Coaching Method and you could be entered to win

two free products from our partners over at Legion. That could be fish oil, multivitamin, creatine, protein, you name it, all on the table for you to win just for leaving a review for this podcast. I'm excited about this one because this is actually the first episode I will be recording in 2022. Which sounds weird to say because I was barely getting used to saying 2021. 2020 being a full, technically not full two years away, but 2020 being literally quote unquote two years ago is unfathomable to me. 2021 went really quick, but a lot of amazing things happened, especially thanks to listeners like you. I launched Core Coaching Method and I'm working with a phenomenal, phenomenal stable or roster of clients. All of them are

amazing people doing very, very well. And I'm very grateful to have every single one of them on board. You're more than welcome to join us over at corecoachingmethod.com. We've been working really well with partners like Legion Athletics, Elemental Labs. We've launched or up just in the next month. You can expect to hear from Julie Roth, PaleoMG. Dr. Kyle Gillette will be talking all about hormones, specifically those related to body composition and performance, but also preventative health screening. Mike Matthews from Legion. We are going to talk a lot about supplement manufacturing, sourcing, integrity, what to look for, what to be, you know, kind of, let's call it conscientious of when making your purchase decisions, as well as many others. And I'm really excited to bring those guests to you. 2021 was a year where I probably fell short

on connecting you guys with guests in a way that I really wanted to. So I'm very excited to bring that back into the fold today, or I should say this year. Today, we're going to be talking about 10 training myths that I think have a tendency to hold people back. We're also going to dive into some of the questions that you have left for me over on Instagram. And I think we'll start of the questions that you have left for me over on Instagram. And I think we'll start with the questions, because that just generally seems to be the most organic and reasonable way to get the words flowing out of my mouth. My goal is to answer these fairly rapidly, to get through as many as I can within reason, and I'll try not to allow for too much overlap. So the first question comes from Julia underscore M underscore Wiggins.

And again, these questions are coming over from Instagram. So if you'd like to engage with me on this platform, or even over on that platform, tossing me a follow at Danny dot Matranga is probably the best way to do that. It's where I field most of the Q&As that I do for the show. So Julia asks, what are my thoughts on the 75 hard program? And for those of you who don't know,

75 hard is basically two days or double day workouts for 75 days straight, along with some other positive lifestyle things, including getting outside. And I generally think for most people, it beats the alternative, something my dad says all the time. It beats the alternative, meaning like, okay, is double day workouts and a bunch of aggressive lifestyle changes better than the way that the average Westerner lives their life? And I think that with a prevalence of poor nutritional

decision-making, a large percentage of the population being sedentary or borderline sedentary, that something like this would be really disruptive and could potentially help you end up in a new place after 75 days. But I do think it's really hard to stick with. And I think maybe the only thing I might change about it, I like the idea of trying to stick with something for long enough to make it a habit. only thing I might change about it, I like the idea of trying to stick with something for long enough to make it a habit. But I actually just listened to an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with Andrew Huberman, which is a podcast I've been enjoying very recently. And he had a podcast all about habit formation. And he said that the actual ability for individuals to form a habit and the duration it would require for that habit to become solidified is highly variable person to person. For some people, it could be as few as like 15 to 18 days. And for others, it could be in the 200s. It really just depends on the individual.

So 75 days of consistent workouts might be a good thing. I do think it's really unreasonable for most people and likely unsustainable. But that's just me. So this one comes from underscore Mike underscore 2020 underscore LA. He says, thanks for the advice on ending leg day with 100 lunges. I love it. Any other finishers you recommend? So 100 bodyweight walking lunges is something that I program for clients for quite some time because I think that walking lunges are phenomenal for a variety of different things. One of which of course is training the

glutes, training the quads. But I also think to do a walking lunge, you need to have a good stability to get low into a walking lunge. You need to have good mobility. And I think that doing body weight training can reinforce those things. And if done at the end of the workout, the kind of overall amount of fatigue or muscle damage you're going to do is reduced by doing body weight and simply doing a hundred unbroken reps, 50 per leg for beginners or a hundred unbroken reps, a hundred per leg for advanced trainees or 200 if you'd like to do it that way, is how I tend to program those. And if you want and you're totally psycho, you could load them up. But as for what one might do if they enjoy that and they're looking for something similar for finishers with regards to the lower body, one of my favorites is

a single set 100 rep kettlebell swing for time with between 25 and 40 percent of your body weight depending on how competent you are at swinging the kettlebell and if you're a smaller female you might go as low as 20 percent of total body weight it really just depends on your grip strength and what you're capable of swinging based on your training age or your training competency but swinging kettlebell for a hundred unbroken reps is pretty hard. So you'll probably have to set it down and take breaks. But the main goal would be to have 100 reps done in a relatively short time frame and then improve upon that. I find it's really good for conditioning and it's great for the posterior chain, glutes, hamstrings, core,

low back, lots of really, really valuable ballistic stuff too. Like you're getting a lot of snappy hips. You're getting a lot of aggressive thrusting paws, but it's really, really good. It's got a lot of carry over to a lot of the lifts that you're going to be doing. Okay. So this one comes from Shelly, Shelly Bobelli. And she asks, probiotics in capsule form, are they necessary? And I generally say no, because I don't think most probiotic supplements even have the ability to survive or be, you know, their integrity is disrupted

by the acidity of the stomach and the mechanical elements of digestion. But there is one product that I might recommend, and that is Seed. Seed, I am not partnered with at this time, but it is a company that I'm currently communicating with, with regards to beginning a partnership, because I think they have something really special. And hopefully there will be more to come on that later, depending on what we can get together on with regards to my brand and their brand, but Seed does something pretty unique in their probiotics base, which is that they use strains of bacteria that have been shown to be effective at, you know, eliciting responses in humans, not rodents. Additionally, those strains are then administered through a dual capsule system. The outer capsule protects and ensures that the actual

innards, or if you will, the guts, the actual bugs inside the secondary capsule can get through the stomach, populate and quote-unquote seed, or literally, you know, put down roots, if you will, for lack of a better term, in the gut. Many probiotic supplements, you're not really going to get the probiotics populating the gut. They just show up in the feces. So unfortunately, that is the definition of like shitting it out. So I hate to say that, but most of them are not the business. If you were going to pick one, I might pick seed as it looks like they have a really promising product and I'm in the process of trying it and working something out with them as we speak. And if things go well and I like what I'm seeing, I would be happy to bring that to you guys because I do think that taking care of your gut and your microbiome,

I shouldn't say microbiome, microbiome is global, right? So there's a skin microbiome, there's a oral microbiome, there's an intestinal microbiome, there's a vaginal microbiome. When people say microbiome, they oftentimes conflate that with meaning like, oh, it's just the gut, but it's not. But taking care of your intestinal microbiome is really important. And I do think a high quality supplement that can actually make it to your gut could be a nice addition. Okay. This question comes from at mulletslayer asking my thoughts on lifting to failure. So I think for most people, lifting to failure is a relatively fine way to train. The closer you get to failure, right, the closer your muscles get to literally giving out on a set. In all likelihood, the more that set will contribute towards muscle growth. contribute towards muscle growth. It seems that proximity to failure is a pretty good indicator for the hypertrophic potential of a set. And while I think training to failure on every set is kind of silly, training to failure a few sets here and there could be really valuable, not just for getting the actual stimulus, but for calibrating how close you need to get to actually

be quote unquote, one or two reps from failure, something that a lot of people really struggle with. Additionally, I think when you train to failure, exercise selection is somewhat intuitive here, but a lot of exercises are simply safer than others. If I want to take my quads to failure, I'd certainly rather do that on a hack squat or a leg extension than a barbell squat. If I want to train my lats to failure, things'd certainly rather do that on a hack squat or a leg extension than a barbell squat. If I want to train my lats to failure, things like pull-ups or straight arm pull-downs might be better than things like rack pulls, which don't really work the lats much anyway, but you kind of get my point here. Aggressively performing compound movements with external stability

requirements to failure on a very regular basis could be more problematic than opting to use things that are really stable, like machines. All right, this question comes from TSparks0312. She asks, hit us with your favorite book recommendations. So recently I have enjoyed the books Will by Will Smith and Ryan Holiday. Or no, is it Mark Manson? Mark Manson and Will Smith co-wrote Will, his autobiographical narrative. Very interesting, very entertaining, fun read. book I've read. For anybody looking for fiction, I might recommend Project Hail Mary, as well as Ready Player One. Both of those are sci-fi, but very fun, very engaging. I read quite a bit, so I might not have exactly what you're into, but I have quite the list. Another one that I have been enjoying a lot is The Hidden Life of Trees.

Talks quite a bit about trees and nature. I've also been reading 4,000 Hours Time Management for Mortals, which is a pretty interesting look at how we go about spending and managing our time. So those are some book recommendations from the last couple months that I think you guys might like. Okay, this question comes from Vijay Kins. He says, is the deep squat the only true way to squat? Or is the regular squat okay? So this is an interesting question because it might be a nice segue into our discussion later about training styles and training habits and training behaviors that hold

people back. But in general, training through a full range of motion is great for mobility. It's great for muscular development. A lot of people look at a deep squat and go, that's full range of motion. And they look at a half rep squat and go, oh, that's half range of motion. But what somebody's range of motion may be is contingent on a variety of different factors. And I have found that the most variance show or the variance between lifters on things like the squat tends to be pretty noticeable. Meaning like if you have a tight hip capsule, or just let's just say generally the way the architecture of your actual hip, the way the head of your femur, your femoral head sits inside the acetabulum.

If you have a tighter hip socket that has a little bit of restriction, and like you can test this by just lying on the floor and trying to pull your knees to your chest. And you can just kind of generally see how well that hip moves or have somebody do it passively doing something called the hip scour, where they just kind of grab your leg and wiggle it around and see how much mobility you have there. Then you have things like femur length, which varies a shit ton person to person, even gender to gender. I do find that women tend to have slightly longer femurs or longer legs, shorter torsos relative to most men. And that can contribute to things like reduced squatting depth. Ankle mobility is a really big one. A lot of people have limited ankle mobility, so that can

influence how deep you squat. And the reason I bring this up is because a deep squat for me with really good hip mobility, really good ankle mobility, and what I would describe as pretty good stability. My deepest squat is ass to grass, but I'm also really short and have modest sized femurs. For somebody who's taller with different tissue restrictions, a deep squat might look shallow, but for them, that's the fullest range of motion they can get. And both squats in truth would be pretty darn effective. You don't see these kinds of mobility limitations as commonly when we're talking about things like bicep curls or tricep extensions. It seems like most people can walk up and perform those through a range of motion that is identical regardless of the way they look.

And I find that things like squats, lunges, deadlifts often look a little bit different based on people's anthropometry. And so it's always worth remembering that the range of motion that works for you and where your body is at, right, isn't necessarily the best range of motion for somebody else to train in given the mechanical constraints of the exercise we're choosing, right? So if an ass to grass squat also brings with it a massive butt wink and requires you to reduce load substantially, it might not be as effective as a really tight, really dialed, good looking half, quote unquote,

half rep squat that's within your active range of motion that allows you to maintain the proper biomechanical cues and really train hard. So I think that'll do it for the questions today. Let's go ahead and move in to the meat and potatoes of the episode, talking about 10 training myths that I think are holding people back. These are things that I get in DMs. These are things that I get from you guys in questions, just like the ones I answered. These are things I see with clients or clients that we're onboarding when we talk over the phone. Common myths, common misconceptions that I see that hold people back from reaching what I believe are reasonable fitness goals. So the first is the myth that more is better. And what I mean by that is more volume, more sets, more reps, more time in the gym is better. And the thing that is holding you back

is not doing enough work or not being in the gym long enough. And I generally find this to be untrue. It's pretty rare that I run into somebody who I think is training at a frequency or training at a duration or training with a number of exercises that is truly limiting their ability to do what they need to do to drive results, right? I find that most people are in the gym long enough. In fact, some people are in the gym too long. I find that more people are in the gym too long than too little. And so my challenge to you would be if you think that there's time in the gym to do more work or you'd rather do more work or you want to see if doing more work is going to elicit more results or you're already doing a massive amount of work and wondering why more results aren't coming your way. I might challenge you to try to take the same amount of work and do it better. And I know that's like, well, what do you mean

better? I mean, do it with better form, do it with better technique, better execution, better queuing, closer to failure, right? Polish that same amount of work up. Really give it your absolute best because I find that more work isn't always better, but productive, better work tends to be better. So start with the amount of work you're doing and ask yourself, can I make this any better than it already is? And if the answer is yes, then do that before you add more work. Another myth that I think is really holding people back is the notion that if I want to look like somebody, I need to train exactly like somebody. And that the reason that these influencers, particularly female influencers, look the

way they look and have the bodies that they have is a direct reflection of the exercises they choose to do in the gym. And if I did the same exercises that they did and the order that they did them, then I would have the same body. And it's very reasonable to understand where this idea came from, why people think this way, because one, you know, it's intuitive. And two, I think we all want it to be true because we want to be able to develop the bodies that we see and we go, wow, what a nice body. I wish I had that body. Well, I'll never have that body.

I wasn't born like that. Well, wait, what if I follow their exact program, their sets, their reps, their exercises? Maybe I can. But the truth of the matter is, in my opinion, is that most influencer programs, most influencers who are communicating to people that if you want to develop my style of body, you need to train my way, are being semi-disingenuous. Particularly, I find this is more true in women. One of the things that I've noticed is the prevalence of women who have very clearly undergone some form of body augmentation with regards to either gluteal enhancement through body fat transplant or implants and liposuction to create a extremely small waist, rounded hip look that is, to the

naked eye, perhaps doesn't look massively out of the ordinary, but to the trained eye is very clearly some form of, let's call it surgical fat enhancement. So that is not something that you can really change by following their workout program. But I have found more frequently, I should say more recently, women who have had these kinds of procedures are selling programs. Now, what about women who are just naturally very genetically gifted and have no body augmentation whatsoever? Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to

and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Well, again, I don't necessarily think that if a woman has phenomenal glute genetics, phenomenal body fat predisposition patterns for body fat to be stored around the glutes and the thighs, that they should be selling quote-unquote slim thick programs because they have a look that is classifiable as slim thick, right? I've seen this quite a bit. But the problem is if you took a hundred women, very few of them would likely have the genetic

predisposition that you have to have body fat stored the way you have it. And following your workout program might make them move better, feel better, look better. But it will not change the actual genetics of where they store body fat. And so they might get some glute growth, they might get some thigh growth, but in all likelihood, they won't achieve the same physique. So the notion of just following someone's routine blindly and ending up with their physique is a little bit silly. And the reason I'm passionate about this is this is something that I used to do all the time. I remember going on bodybuilding.com and following the various workout programs of all of these really jacked dudes. And I was like, damn, like I finished fucking all of

these and I looked good, but I don't look like them. Why not? And it was in large part due to the fact that these guys weren't disclosing the facts that they were taking steroids. And I thought it was as simple as just following the rules and doing what they did. And I would eventually end up looking like them. And the truth is, if you do everything right, you're going to end up looking like the best version of yourself. If you do everything right, you'll look a little bit better than the best version of your parents. You know, your parents are giving you all of the genetic kind of, let's call it, they're giving you the genetic blueprint and you're trying to build a house. And, you know, you might be able to go off the blueprint a little bit

and get a little bit more out of it, maybe have an extra room or maybe an infinity pool or maybe you have a three-car garage instead of a two-car garage, but by and large, you're working off whatever blueprint your parents gave you. And you can maximize the shit out of that, but you don't necessarily just get the physique of somebody with an amazing physique by following their program. And this isn't to say that these people shouldn't be allowed to sell their programs. I think that's more than okay. And I think it's a very reasonable way to make money. But I do think it's important for consumers to know that you're not going to end up with

the body of the person who wrote the program just by finishing it in all likelihood. Okay, moving on to number three is the myth of no pain, no gain. But I'd also like to spin this into the fact that a little bit of pain is probably a good thing. So let's break this down. So no pain, no gain is an old school exercise adage that if you're not actively in pain or hurting or quote unquote feeling the burn or really, really suffering while training, then your training isn't effective. And I think that using pain and suffering as a general way to gauge training quality might not be ideal. But I also think that we've seen a real kind of departure from the, let's call it old guard with a lot of new trainers being on what I'd call like

team no sweat, meaning like, oh, you don't have to work out hard at all. And quite frankly, I think if you want to achieve results, if you want to develop your body, if you want to build strength, if you want to reduce body fat, you know, if you're going to the gym, why not work fucking hard? Why not put your best into it? You know, I'm certainly not perfect. I don't take every set to failure. Not every set's perfect, but I certainly want my sets to be challenging. I certainly want my workouts to leave me feeling like I accomplished something. That's a good feeling for me.

And on some days, that's not what I need, truthfully. And on more days than not, the last thing I need is a massively stressful workout because I've got five or six sessions that day. I've got 20 plus online clients to manage, two coaches who work for my coaching company that I would like to work closely with. I need to discuss with them what's going on

with their clients. I've got a podcast to record. I've got a guest to get on the podcast. I've got to take Cooper on a walk. I want to spend time with Christina. Christina is my girlfriend, for those of you who don't know. But these are things that, you know, stress somebody

out. There are a lot to have on your plate. There's things to do. And when the day gets really crazy, I might not necessarily want to go into the gym and do one rep max squats for three hours and just die, but I can still go in and do a good workout, right? But assuming my stressors are normal, assuming I don't have like a Herculean day or just hellish day to overcome, I think hard training is really effective. And so if you're using no pain, no gain as an excuse to train dangerously, that's not a good idea. But if you're identifying the dangers of the no pain, no gain philosophy and spinning that into, you know, not training hard ever, I think that

might really hold you back. And so don't be afraid of training really hard. Okay. Number four is the myth that more exercises in a given session is going to be better for your gains. I used to be so invested in learning about new exercises. I used to get so excited to learn about new exercises and new supplements, especially when I was early in my training career, just recreationally lifting between the ages of like 16 to 19. I would go on bodybuilding.com and look at all the new supplements that came out because adding something new into the mix intuitively made sense as a good way to move things along faster. And I would do the same thing with new exercises. Whenever I saw an exercise I hadn't tried before, I couldn't fucking wait to go to the gym and try that the next day. I could not wait to do it. But here's the truth. Something that I've learned from

working with a lot of people and working with my own body for almost a decade now is that sometimes what's, you know, been around for a while has been around for a while for a reason. The reason that things like squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, push-ups, split squats, lunges, leg press, hack squat, chest press, cable fly, lateral raise, upright row, with some exception, you know, the reason that so many of these exercises have been around for so long is because they are really efficient. And a lot of the alternative forms of them or spin-offs of them, if you will, are fine analogs and they might be okay to cycle through here and there, but by and large, there is a huge library of exercises available to us. And in my opinion, some of them clearly rise above the rest as being really efficient,

really effective, and generally safe to perform for many, many years, right? You have to think about it when you're a trainee or you're lifting. You don't want to pick exercises that are so shitty for you. They really just put your joints in disadvantageous positions. They cause a lot of pain and progressively overload them for a decade just because they're new. When comparatively speaking, you could choose an exercise that trains all the same tissues with no pain, maybe mechanically, it's a little more efficient. It's a little less likely to cause dysfunction, right? Like those are just generally smart training principles. And so I think that what you want to do is you want to select for the least number of exercises that can hit the muscles you want to hit intelligently. And so early on in my training career, I would have like the average workout contained 10 to

15 exercises if I could, even if it meant doing like two sets. But now as an adult, I would say I do one exercise every 10 to 15 minutes. Meaning if the session is going to be an hour, I'll probably do somewhere between four to six exercises. If the session is an hour 15, I could do anywhere from five to seven exercises. And that's the general duration of my sessions. And I usually do somewhere between two to four sets per exercise and keep my exercise as far as the actual number down a little bit. Because if what I'm doing is taking bread and butter exercises that really work well, that are really effective and doing them, but leaving enough time to do some of these kind of accessory fun novel,

not so sure how effective or efficient they are exercises. I might be partitioning my volume out a little bit more much. I might be incurring a little bit of what many people refer to as junk volume or volume that's just inefficient. And I might not be ensuring I'm recovering well because maybe my workouts are just getting longer because I'm making room for more stuff. And so more exercises doesn't always mean better gains. Number five, that supersets are a requirement and that they're the best way to increase intensity. I think that supersets are great, but I think that they're honestly misused. The reason I use supersets with clients in general is to either create local fatigue, which I think is good here, but also they're time efficient. So one of the best ways to use supersets, in my opinion, is to use

antagonist paired sets where we pair a push with a pull or a squat with a hinge, things that are antagonistic so that while one muscle group is working or one tissue is working, its antagonist is resting. And then you go right into training the antagonist and then the formerly working muscle gets to recover. So I think that supersets are first and foremost really efficient for time. I think they're really efficient at helping busy people intelligently put exercises together in a manner that allows them to train a large amount of tissue in a short amount of time. One of the things that I think really hurts people is they assume that they have to use supersets

or that the more supersets they do, the better because they're fitting twice as much work into less time. I think that supersets should be used sparingly. They should be used intelligently, but I don't think that they're a necessity. And I don't think that just randomly combining two exercises always makes the most sense. I think you want to look at, okay, what exercises am I selecting for the superset? What order am I selecting or putting these exercises in in the superset? Of course, we would start with the question of what is the desired goal of the superset? And I think the most important thing to ask is, am I doing this because it's hard? Am I doing this because it's efficient? Am I doing this because it's challenging a specific tissue? And I think more often than not, we want to end

up in, we're doing it to challenge a specific tissue. So an example would be like, I really want to sneak some extra volume in for my lats, but I don't have a lot of time. And so you might say, okay, well, superset straight arm pull downs with pull-ups and take the set of pull-ups to failure. Do that three times. That'll help you sneak in six sets. You're training a cable movement. It's going to get your lats pretty well trained. And then you're taking a body weight movement to failure. Might be a better thing than like trying to say, I don't know, superset like deadlifts with T-bar rows where the amount of fatigue accumulation might just open the door for something a little

more dangerous to happen given the mechanics and the mechanical constraints of the exercise. So using supersets incorrectly, I think, is really holding people back. And I would challenge you to try to use them to either one, make the most use of your time, or two, you know, really efficiently challenge one or more tissues. Moving on to number six is that you must, this is a myth that I really think has got to go, is that you must perform the barbell bench, the barbell squat, and the barbell deadlift. And I think that you could extend this to any exercise that people think that there, you know, is a requirement. I have found in 10 years of training people across a variety of populations attempting to drive a variety of different outcomes that no singular exercise is required. There isn't one thing that you absolutely, quote unquote, have to do.

Right? Truthfully, there isn't. There are many exercise, let's call them patterns, that I think are very, very high return. So I think squatting, very high return. So I think squatting is very high return. I think hinging is very high return. I think horizontal pressing is very high return, right? Meaning the return on your time spent doing these exercises is going to be good because it's going to challenge a lot of muscles. But I don't think your squats have to be barbell squats. Your hinges have to be barbell deadlifts and your presses have to be barbell bench. Because powerlifting is such an integral kind of pillar of fitness culture,

or let's call it physical culture, it makes sense why we've learned to champion these exercises. And they're certainly good exercises, but for some people, a goblet squat is a better option or a hack squat is a better option based on their mobility.

We talked a little bit about this earlier. That's why I said that this might come back around. Well, a goblet squat is a better option or a hack squat is a better option based on their mobility. We talked a little bit about this earlier. That's why I said that this might come back around. Same for the deadlift. Maybe the deadlift's good, but when you're six foot four, right, there's a better way to train the posterior chain because it's hard to deadlift when you're really tall. And maybe you're a bodybuilder. And while barbell bench is a great way to throw some weight on the bar, you can more efficiently challenge your pecs with things like cable flies, right? And I think when you're married to an exercise, it can be really challenging to cut it from your program. But it's always important to ask yourself, am I doing this exercise because it symbolizes something or am I doing this exercise because it's effective? Number seven is the myth of the hypertrophy rep range. So for anybody who's taken exercise

physiology, who has a personal training certification, you'll find that the hypertrophy rep range, quote unquote, is often communicated as being somewhere between six to 12 reps and eight to 12 reps. And then 12 to 20 reps might be endurance. Anything less than six reps is strength. And what I find here is that generally speaking, anything less than six reps is strength. And what I find here is that, generally speaking, anything less than six reps is probably best for building strength. Anything north of 15 reps might have an additional fatigue resilience component. It will help you develop some fatigue resilience or fatigue resistance, if you like. But that doesn't necessarily mean that hypertrophy can only occur between 6 to 12 reps. In fact,

I think you'll find that you can elicit hypertrophy at a variety of rep ranges, and you'll find that if you look in the literature, that most rep ranges have the ability to be hypertrophic if, and we discussed this again earlier, those reps are taken close enough to failure with good technique, yada, yada, yada. And I think how we select exercises and what rep ranges we select those exercises for is also a big piece of the puzzle. Like, you know, you can get away with doing sets of eight to 12 deadlifts, but you might not want to do sets of 12 to 20 deadlifts. You know, you might be able to say, okay, I'd like to train across a variety of rep ranges.

So, you know, I'm going to do six reps of squats, three sets of six. I'm going to do three sets of 12 leg extensions. And then I'm going to finish with three sets of 15 leg press. You can move those around, but squats probably makes the most sense to be on the lower rep range because of the constraints and the demands, right? And maybe leg extension could be the last one or the middle one because it's simpler and it makes sense to take that one closer to mechanical failure because it's safer. And training in a variety of rep ranges is something that most bodybuilders, natural or enhanced, I think have a tendency to do. And so looking at the anecdotal evidence and pairing that with the literature we have, I see no reason to really believe there's a hard and fast

hypertrophy rep range. What I do believe is if you're trying to build muscle, the majority of your reps should be somewhere between 6 to 12 reps. But that doesn't mean you can't go north or south of that number. Okay, number eight, the notion that there is somehow a best time of day to train. While there are some times of day where you're more likely to have hormones like testosterone at higher levels, where you're less likely to be fatigued, where you're more likely to have hormones like testosterone at higher levels, where you're less likely to be fatigued, where you're more likely to have more meals than you. I do think that there are reasons to maybe make the assertion that the midday to mid-afternoon might be optimal for most people. There really isn't a best time of day to train given that we all have really dynamic schedules, crazy lives, and we can't just afford to move things around

so we can go to the gym at two in the afternoon after we've had two meals when our testosterone's peaked, we're not tired, et cetera. No, no, no. I think the best time of day to train is whenever the heck you can get in there. Number 10 is the myth of the ideal training frequency. Well, I do think for most people doing somewhere between two to three days, or I should say two to three sessions per week per muscle group tends to be good for a variety of different things for performance, for wellness, for longevity, of course, for hypertrophy. might be able to get more away with more or less, but I do think that most people are probably going to fall somewhere between two to three days per week per muscle group as being the best. And number 10, the final myth is the myth of the quick fix. I have found with all the clients that I've worked with, people's ability to lose body fat rapidly or gain muscle rapidly is pretty rare. It can happen. Some people can do really well with

it, but most people are going to struggle with the process. They're going to have to work on it as they go. There will likely be some slip ups. There will likely be some struggles. There will likely be some fumbles, both in execution, right? Not just, okay, I'm having a hard time sticking with the plan, but also just in life. And I think that this notion that, you know, oh, you didn't get it fast because you didn't work hard enough, isn't always the best way to look at it. Because for some people, going slow and learning along the way from the different failures they make and from the different mistakes that just pop up is one of the best ways to go about doing it. And it's one of the most valuable parts of the process, learning about how you respond to failure,

learning about how your body responds as you go. All right, learning about how you respond to failure, learning about how your body responds as you go. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening to that episode. If you enjoyed it, do me a favor, share it, leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes. Written reviews are the best. And now you can leave a review on Spotify. You can even listen on other streaming services, but those are the main two that really help drive growth. And I want to thank every single one of you for tuning in and wish you the best year ahead in 2022. Please, please, please be safe out there. Make good choices. Think about what it is that you want to accomplish in the new year and then start making small incremental steps towards those goals every single day. I will catch you all on the next one.