Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 164: *New Programs*, How Long Should You Cut + Myths & Q and A

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

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Hey, everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, it's me, your host, Danny Matranga. I want to start today's episode off with a genuine thank you. And that is to each and every one of you who is subscribed, who listens regularly, and who has left a review. In the past five weeks, we have hit download PRs four times, meaning four out of the last five weeks, the podcast has done its most downloads ever. Episode 162, The Alcohol Dilemma, which was released a couple days ago, has been on track and will surpass the highest total download mark within a week of release of any episode I have released so far. So you guys are doing an amazing job of helping me grow this thing, of being the engine that helps this reach more ears. And I cannot

say thank you enough. Seriously. I know that I start quite a few episodes off with just gratitude and saying thanks. But to those of you who subscribe on iTunes, on Spotify, on Google Play, on the various platforms who have left a review, who subscribe on iTunes, on Spotify, on Google Play, on the various platforms who have left a review, who have shared this to your story, thank you so, so much. I'm really, really grateful. Two things I want to share with you guys. One of them is from our amazing sponsor, Legion. Another one is from my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. The first is Legion has launched a brand new pre-workout in blood orange flavor, and it is phenomenal. Now, if you like a caffeinated pre-training formula

with clinically dosed ingredients, that's ingredients included in the dosages that are shown to work in the literature, then Legion's Pulse is the best on the market. The cranberry and the blood orange are now my two favorite flavors. I am impartial to blood orange. I love everything blood orange. It's my absolute favorite. But if you don't want caffeine, which some days I don't, particularly if I enjoy an espresso in the morning, you can try the stimulant-free version, which includes all of the other performance-enhancing compounds like beta-alanine, L-citrulline, betaine, but none of the caffeine. That's great if you already have caffeine in the morning and you don't want more, or you train in the evening.

Legion's Pulse pre-workout is my go-to. I've been taking it for many years, long before we aligned in a brand partnership. They make phenomenal products, including their protein powder, whey and plant plus their multivitamin triumph, which comes in a men's and women's formula, Triton, their omega-3, as well as Genesis, their greens powder, which I like because it includes such a hefty dose of reishi mushroom. So you can go ahead, go over to legion.com, shop for all your supplement needs, try that new blood orange or cranberry pre-workout, my two favorites. Check out using the promo code Danny and you'll be supporting the show. Now, a big announcement for you guys from my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, we have a variety of different options that you can use to work with us to reach your fitness goals, your fat loss goals, your performance goals, your physique goals, whatever it is. Multiple different coaches with tons of credentials and

tons of experience working with clients in person and online. This isn't just farmed out to garbage coaches who've never even trained anybody. To be a member of my team, you have to have in the trenches experience and be legit. And so after forming this team and creating offerings like fully customized online coaching that includes nutrition coaching and programming, a lot of handholding, a lot of support, a lot of communication, as well as some options for those of you who are more independent and just want to get it and go, like PDF-based programming in the form of our program's foundations, Female Physique, Female Physique 2, and Power Build, I realized there was a little bit of a gap there. We have an offering for those who

really want things totally tailored, totally built from the ground up with that coaching element where they have access to their coach via email 24-7 around the clock support. Something that I think is integral and for those who want to get the absolute most out of their training. And then we have something for people who want no hand-holding, who want to just go in and execute, kind of the lone wolf type. But what do we have for people in the middle? People who perhaps want some form of community. They want programming that is designed intelligently, that is progressive, and that isn't boring? Well, what we've done is we've partnered with Train Heroic. Train Heroic is the best technology and training apps to bring

you two different training programs that we'll be launching in the spring. The first is Elite Physique. This is a female-focused training program that is bodybuilding-based. It's a four-to-five-day-a-week program. You can do it in the gym. It updates every single week. You can track your metrics in the app. You can actually gauge your progress against other members in the community in a competitive but not comparison-driven way, in a way that will drive community, collaboration, and help you move forward in a community. We're also getting message boards built in so you can communicate directly with me and my core coaching method team for everything from form review to exercise swaps. And you can also communicate with your

other team members all around the world who are following the same program that will be updated each and every month. So all you need to do, show up to the gym, answer the readiness assessment on how you slept, how you're feeling, how sore you are, and then get after it. The app allows for easy toggling between sets, the opportunity to log each and every weight, time or RPE, depending on how things are programmed.

So you're making sure that you are making consistent progress. When you combine that with the community element and direct access to me and my team, I am confident that this will be the best value in app-based training. The second team I have, I have two teams, Elite Physique, which is a gym-based physique program. The other one, Home Heroes, is a home-based training program. This has been something you guys have been asking for for a very long time. That's programming done exclusively with bands and dumbbells. If you have more stuff at home, you can scale it up, but you're getting all of the same

things. Direct access to me and my coaching team, form review, critiques on how to execute and perhaps perform the movements properly, substitutions for pain points. You'll even get access to our partners at Kratos Sports Performance and Physiotherapy if in fact there are any movement dysfunctions, pain points, or injuries that you're trying to work through or work around. These are going to be community-based programs designed to help you succeed, stave off boredom, and implement very easily right from your phone, whether you're training at a gym or you're training at home. And just stay tuned, guys, because I cannot wait to get you guys on the team, to interact with you, to bring the community that we have here

in this podcast. All of you who are listeners of Dynamic Dialogue, I want to see you. I want to train with you in the app. I want you in there. I want you part of the team. I want to engage with you even more. Instagram's cool. YouTube's cool. Twitter is cool. The podcast is so much better because we can connect at such a more intimate and such a more, I think, authentic level. And the training community that we're building here is going to be that on steroids, no pun intended. It's going to build out this community. It's going to allow us to interact. It'll be the closest thing you can really get to training with me outside, of course, of online coaching or in-person coaching with me. And those spots are becoming increasingly harder to find. If you are looking for a coaching relationship, I would absolutely recommend

applying now in the spring. Things tend to pick up closer to March and April because the rush for everybody to get their summer body seems to really hype itself and just kind of pick up steam in late spring. So if you're interested in coaching, if you want the most hands-on experience possible with the most support possible, you can apply at corecoachingmethod.com. And if you're just looking for programming, we have programs there as well. But if you want something kind of in the middle, stay tuned. We've been working on something really special and I absolutely cannot wait to share it with you. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about a really popular question I've been getting asked. This one popped up in an Instagram Q&A. We're going to deep dive into how long a cut

should last and how long you might kind of draw that out based on your goals, some targets, some tactics, some specifics that I think for anybody who's looking to lose body fat, you'll get a lot out of this. But before we do, I want to debunk three myths that keep showing up over and over again, either in DMs or in the question box. And these myths are the myth of starvation mode, the myth of squats being bad for the knees or deadlifts being bad for the back, and the myth that creatine and protein are bad for your kidneys or bad for women. So let's first talk about starvation mode. Starvation mode refers to a state, a mythological state in the body, at which point, due to a lack of caloric intake, the body actually starts to engage in increased fat storage. Basically, the premise is

not eating enough causes the body to panic and store more fat. This is entirely false. It is a myth. And let's talk a little bit about how this works. So first, let's look at third world countries. I want to be sensitive here because I don't want to make light of anybody who is dealing with actual starvation. But if you go to countries where food scarcity is quite prevalent, you do not see people with high amounts of body fat due to the fact that their bodies are adapting and freaking out about energy restriction and going into some super physiological state of enhanced fat storage to protect the body. What you see is razor thin people with bones protruding, thin skin who look

malnourished. Starvation is starvation. Starvation mode does not exist. What does exist? Metabolic adaptations to weight loss. The minute you go into a calorie deficit, the minute you start losing tissue, be it muscle or be it fat, hopefully it's as much fat as possible and as little muscle as possible. And we'll talk more about how you can do that when we get to the actual cutting question later on in the show. But as your body tissue starts to come off by being in a deficit, right? Hopefully most of it's fat. There are mechanisms, biological mechanisms that start to fire up, that start to try to adapt to this new baseline. The body is going to try to fit

inside of the constraints it's given. Meaning, if you go from irregularly eating 3,000 calories a day to slashing it down to 2,000 calories a day, your body is going to try to from regularly eating 3,000 calories a day to slashing it down to 2,000 calories a day, your body is going to try to adjust from that 3,000 calorie metric to fit within the constraints of the 2,000 calorie metric. How is it going to do that? In all likelihood, it's going to do that by reducing NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, of the different things that make up metabolism. That seems to be the most adaptive component,

the component that adjusts the most quickly. So you'll probably fidget less, you'll probably move less, you'll probably have less energy, but you won't magically start storing fat. After an extremely long time in a deficit, you might adapt to the point where that 2,000 calorie metric is no longer a deficit and you start gaining body fat in that metric because it could be such an extreme adaptation that it becomes a surplus. This is generally rare, but it can happen. And I think this is where the myth of starvation mode comes from. But starvation mode itself is a myth. Metabolic adaptations to weight loss are real, but it's important to know that those adaptations are reversible and they only happen up into a certain level. Generally, the longer you're dieting, the more intense the diet,

the greater the adaptation. So let's move on to this secondary myth. And this is the myth that deadlifts are inherently bad for your back and that squats are inherently bad for your knees. So these myths came from individuals who have back pain, whether that be idiopathic, where we don't necessarily know where it comes from, nonspecific, or knee pain. Maybe it's for the same reasons it's nonspecific, or it's just general wear and tear, engaging and interfacing with exercises like squats and deadlifts, which can enhance stress on those tissues and lead to pain. And as a general rule of thumb, given the complexity of those movements, if you perform them improperly, because you're generally going to be performing them with higher amounts of weight

because of the muscles you can recruit, the opportunity for an injury to occur is probably greater when they're done with bad form or when these exercises are done by populations who already have pain in these areas. Now, what do we know about deadlifting for the back? We know that it requires a lot of core strength, a lot of lat engagement, and a lot of strength in the glutes and the hamstrings. If you don't have that stuff kind of ironed out before you start deadlifting, you don't have adequate posterior chain strength, you don't have good core integration. You can't get your lats to engage. Then you start ripping on deadlifts. The weak link is probably going to be the low back. And the tissue likely to get stressed the most is probably the tissues in and around the lumbar spine, as is the case for squatting.

If you don't have good ankle mobility, you don't have good core strength, you don't have good strength in the quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings, and you squat with poor technique, it could agitate the knees as well as the hips, even the back. But for healthy individuals who move well, I believe that squatting through a full range of motion and deadlifting are actually good for the knees and back because they expose you to situations, of course, at the bottom of a squat where you're in a tremendous amount of knee flexion. You have to come all the way up into knee extension. And then in the deadlift, you get into that deep hip flex position where your back is close to parallel with the floor and you really have to stabilize and recruit musculature to maintain

the integrity and straightness of the spine. That stuff is good. That should reinforce long-term, and these are terms that mean next to nothing, but you'll understand, quote-unquote, knee and back health, right? I believe that doing those exercises properly will probably reduce the prevalence of things like nonspecific low back pain or some of the various knee problems that are often associated with having weak musculature around the knees. I think training through a full range of motion will generally help you move better as you age. So that, again, is another myth. Let's move to the last one. This is specific to creatine and protein. And the first myth is that they are bad for the kidneys. So giving you the quickest rundown possible, the kidneys filter blood. They filter fluid. They take stuff out that doesn't need to be in there so it can get used where it needs to be used. And their primary

job is filtration, detoxification. The liver does some of this stuff too. And if you have a lot of protein in the diet and you have a lot of creatine in the diet and you have kidneys that struggle with this filtration process. And you can get this stuff assessed on labs. My partners over at Merrick did my labs. We looked at all my kidney levels. My kidneys are completely and perfectly healthy. And I take five grams of creatine every single day without exceptions and eat my body weight in total protein. So what I can tell you is for me, eating a high amount of protein and taking creatine every day does not affect my healthy kidneys. Now, if I went to Merrick, drew my labs and saw that my GFR, my glomerular filtration rate was bad, or that some of the metrics that we can look at to assess kidney

health were off, I might not want to add large amounts of protein to the diet or supplement with creatine. But what we know, at least at this point, is that generally speaking, for those with healthy livers and kidneys, particularly kidneys, supplemental creatine and high-protein diets tend to be okay. Now, there's another extension of this myth, which has to do specifically with women, and that's that for some reason, creatine is bad for women or that high protein diets are bad for women. And this persists because high protein diets and creatine are often used by younger men looking to build muscle as quickly as possible. And I think that given the fitness industry's obsession with kind of scaring women away from weightlifting or scaring women away from things

that would otherwise be healthy for them because of some irrational fear of getting too big too fast, people somewhere along the lines got the idea that these supplements or these nutritional strategies are reserved exclusively for men and that they're harmful for women. And what I can say is I haven't seen any reason to believe that that's the case. I've worked with hundreds of women over the years in person and online, and many of them have followed a high protein diet and supplemented with creatine. And I cannot think of one specific instance where we had any problems. So those are three myths that I really wish would go away. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. 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. And that kind of takes us to the main portion of the episode, guys, which is this question that came from Dania Noel or Dana Noel, which is how long should a cut last? And so let's first define what a cut is. A cut is a period of time in which you're committing to being in a calorie deficit with the goal of reducing body fat. And so the length of that cut is always going to be directly correlated with how much body fat you would like to lose. So the more body fat you have to lose, the more aggressive the cut has to be,

or the longer the cut has to be, right? The less body fat you have to lose, either you can probably shorten the duration of that cut, right, by having a greater deficit, but we could probably expect that cut to just almost always be a little shorter because you just have less tissue to lose overall. Now, here's my recommendation when planning a diet and planning a cut when it comes to how long it should be. I would say take as long as you possibly can because, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday on my Instagram Live, people have a tendency to fail on diets, slip up on diets, make mistakes on time, I think that most people, generally speaking, don't do a very good job of adhering to a diet right out of the gate, right? Most people will struggle. And so I like to bake that into the timeframe. Like, okay, I know that 5% to 15% of people, let's say 5% to 15% of people can pick up a diet, run with it and execute it perfectly from start to finish with zero hiccups and zero slip ups. The rest of people will probably have either days or even weeks where they struggle to hit their

deficit, where they struggle to do it consistently, where they fall off because of family, because of friends, because of vacations, because of other commitments. And learning is an incredible part of that process. And I think that failing is very important in the dietary long run because you need to learn kind of where your weaknesses are, where your blind spots are, et cetera. So the first step in determining how long it's going to take to cut is establish how much weight you'd like to lose and then work off the framework that for smaller individuals, you'll probably be able to lose between a half a pound to a pound a week. And for larger individuals, you can lose like one to two pounds a week. And for obese individuals, you can lose two plus pounds a week. We'll talk a little bit

more about that as we go. But take that framework. You know, I want to lose this much weight. This is a rate that's reasonable. And then give yourself a little extra cushion understanding that diets tend to be a little bit tricky to adhere to for the large majority of people. Now, how can you make this easier? Let's first talk about macros. Well, the first thing you can do once you've established your calorie deficit, which is going to be any number really below your total daily energy expenditure, for most people, it's going to be somewhere between 200 to 500 calories. You can diet with a steeper or greater deficit. But in my experience, the greater the deficit, the more intense the deficit, the more discipline is required. And there's a lot of

volatility there. So if you try to go like a thousand calories under and you get to the point where you start to see some really intense adaptations, or you get to the point where you're really, really dealing with a lot of cravings, it can lead to binging, slip ups, and problems. So I tend to find longer timeframes with more conservative deficits work best for most people. But you establish that deficit, again, 200 to 500 calories below the total daily energy expenditure, and then you go to protein. Protein is the most important macro for a fat loss program, in my opinion, because it keeps you full and it helps you maintain muscle. We talked a lot earlier on in that section about metabolic adaptation, about the negative impacts of total tissue loss on metabolism. Losing any amount of tissue will

negatively impact metabolism. Your body's going to constrain. It's going to reduce its energy expenditure to try to fit inside of what you're feeding it, right? Pretty simple. If I'm making widgets and you give me 30 pieces to make 15 widgets, I can make 15 widgets. But if you give me 20 pieces, right, now I can only make about 10 widgets. I can only do so much with what I've got. So that constraint's going to happen. But eating a lot of protein will help you preserve muscle, which is a more metabolically active tissue than body fat. It's not as metabolically active as some people will say. A lot of times you hear for every pound of muscle, you burn an additional 50 calories a day. That is an old, stupid, tired

myth, but you will burn more calories per pound of muscle maintained than per pound of fat maintained. Fat actually has a metabolic rate too. It's less expensive to maintain it from a calorie standpoint. But getting that protein will, one, help you stay full, and two, help you maintain muscle, which is really, really important. Now let's talk about dietary fats. So these are essential, and they are your largest source of caloric intake. Remember, protein has four calories per gram. Carbs have four calories per gram. Alcohol has seven calories per gram, which is why in general on a cut, I would strongly recommend not consuming it at all. If you can go back again and listen to episode 162 that I did

with my good friend, Jordan Lips, we talked all about alcohol. And my general assertion is that you abstain for the duration of your fat loss diet. It makes it so much easier. And fat has nine calories per gram. So a lower fat approach is often better for people who are gonna use exercise because as an intervention to help with fat loss as well because carbohydrate, which we'll talk about next,

is a tool for energy production and a tool for muscle preservation as well, much more so than fat, but you have to get enough fat. You can't be below that essential dietary fat intake threshold or you'll start to see some problems. For men, the most noticeable problems will be things like hair loss and reduced libido. For women, it can be things like menstrual dysfunction, hair loss, lost libido. You'll oftentimes see things like skin and joints start to feel shitty when fat gets too low as well. So make sure you're getting enough protein and enough dietary fat. If you have questions about how to do that, you can go to the

Core Coaching Method website, go to the Nutrition Fundamentals free guide, download it, learn everything you'd ever need to know about macros for dieting. And then the last piece, of course, is carbohydrate. That's probably going to be the macro that you consume the most of. Yes, even while dieting, I recommend eating a fair amount of carbohydrates. Think about it. Those are fruits, vegetables, whole grains. Vegetables generally yield very little dietary carbohydrate. They yield a lot of fiber. But fruits, whole grains, legumes contain carbohydrates, right? Even some of those foods that we really enjoy, those processed foods can tend to be carbohydrate dominant. So you might want to

stay away from some of that stuff because one, they're really hard not to overeat and two, they have a lot of additional calories. They're hyperpalatable, but the carbohydrates are important. That's your fuel for training. If you're doing weightlifting, which I tend to recommend, that's your fuel for recovery. It's great for mood. It's your fuel for your brain. So trying to diet with a lot of protein, the right amount of fats, and as many carbs as you can while maintaining that 200 to 500 calorie a day deficit, expecting to lose, again, between a half a pound to a pound a week for smaller folks, a pound to two pounds a week for modestly sized to larger adults, and upwards of two to three pounds a week for modestly sized to larger adults and upwards of two to three pounds

a week for obese individuals. We'll get to that again. Like I said, your initial size is going to determine a lot of how quickly you lose weight for those larger individuals, for people who are obese or dealing with morbid obesity. I do believe that rapid weight loss, while not necessarily appropriate for all populations, might be appropriate for this population. I'm not a doctor, so don't listen to anything I say, but I do believe that morbid obesity and obesity are physiological states at which point you are massively increasing your risk long-term for cardiovascular issues, the development of things like diabetes, and while many people often say that there is no direct correlation between weight and things like arthritis or pain, I have not seen that. I believe that anecdotally speaking,

at least carrying around a ton of additional body fat does have an effect on how you deal with pain and the overall health and mobility of your body. I don't think it's ideal. I would never judge somebody because they were heavier and I would hope that all people who are struggling with their weight or looking to reduce their body fat feel comfortable in a gym and training environment. That I think is what we're really after is to make sure that everybody feels comfortable

and empowered to make whatever decision they wanna make. But for those who do have a tremendous amount of body fat to lose to reach a body weight that might be defined as slightly healthier, I do think that a rapid approach is often better than staying in that state. Now, if you can't keep the weight off when you try to diet rapidly and you do better at keeping it off when you diet slower, that's fine. But I would say for populations who fall or for people in that morbidly obese population category, sometimes upwards of three to eight pounds a week isn't

horrible. I've worked with clients, eight pounds would be an extreme example. I've worked with a number of clients who are north of 300 pounds who have been able to lose anywhere between five to eight pounds a week. Now that is not all body fat. There is a lot of water weight that comes off. Some people even say there's like inflammation that comes off, but point being, you're going to lose tissue very quickly when you enter into a deficit and you are actively in a, you'd fall into that category of let's say morbid obesity. And so somebody might say, well, okay, well I have to lose 200 pounds. Okay. But, uh, I, I think if I do two pounds a week, that's going to take me a hundred weeks. That's going to take me two years. Well, but you'll probably start out losing closer to five to six pounds a week, and then it will ratchet down as that adaptation occurs. So let's talk a little bit about how to fight

these adaptations before we put a bow on this episode. Thanks again, everybody, for tuning in. I want to key in on something really, really cool, and that is my partner, Elemental Labs Electrolytes. I've partnered with Elemental Labs to make sure that you can try the electrolytes I use every single day when I train. I take these before I train, fasted in the morning to make sure that I'm hydrated, to make sure that I got adequate amounts of potassium, magnesium, and sodium for muscle contraction. I always take these with me in the sauna. And Elemental Labs LMNT has no sugar, sweetened with stevia, and it's a salt, sodium, mineral-based electrolyte. So no added crap and dye and colors. And you can try every single flavor on me. Just pay shipping. I'll pay for the electrolytes. Go to drinkelemente.com slash coach Danny and try all

their most popular flavors. Okay, so real quick here, going over how you can stave off adaptations to weight loss that are natural and going to occur. Again, I felt that this just really coincided nicely with the kind of myth busting that I wanted to do on this episode anyway about starvation mode. But to minimize the effects of those adaptations, there are two primary things we can do. The first is a diet break, which is a period of time where you take a break from dieting. If you have a lot of weight to lose and you are planning on taking a long-term approach, I would say every six to 12 weeks, take at least a week where you eat at maintenance

calories and you are not in a deficit. This will stave off the rate at which adaptations occur, and it can even help you fight back against some of those natural and expected adaptations. What you're doing is you're just removing the stress of a deficit from the system. You're allowing the body to adjust a little bit. You'll probably have a great week of training. You'll probably have a better week with your mood. And so that is a really good strategy. Again, that's a week usually at maintenance. And I tend to recommend just bringing yourself to maintenance by elevating your carb intake. That can have some specific benefits for hormones like leptin and ghrelin, which for most of you over your head doesn't matter. We'll talk about them a little bit more in future episodes. The next piece, a smaller, almost like a mini piece,

is a refeed day. But for most people, I would recommend refeed days, which would be two consecutive days at maintenance where you bring carbs up. Generally speaking, those would be days where you might be training larger muscle groups like legs and you could use the extra fuel. But in occasional refeed days, generally days, I don't think one day does shit. Good for psychology, a nice little mental break from the diet, a nice little bit of reprieve from being in the deficit, and think about that as a mini diet break. So guys, there you have it. That's kind of my tip for how to structure a diet, to just put it all, to tie it up nicely. Take as long as you possibly can. For most people, a deficit of 200 to 500 calories is going to be fine. For some who are really diligent, you can do a little bit

more, but you have to be cautious. The longer you'd like to diet for, the more opportunities you have to implement helpful tools like refeed days or diet breaks. Generally looking at between 0.5 to one pound of fat loss per week for smaller adults, one to two for let's call it normal sized adults, and then two to several pounds more per week for adults who fall into the category of obese or morbidly obese, or just who are larger in general. And then again, just practice makes perfect. Dieting for fat loss is relatively easy. Keeping fat off seems to be really hard for people and sticking to diets for a long time seems to be really hard for people. So practice grace, practice patience, and give yourself all the time you can. Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode, guys, and I will catch you

on the next one.