Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 175: Build YOUR OWN Program (How-To, Sets, Reps, Splits + MORE)

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in today's episode, we're going to talk quite a, how to select exercises based on your goals and preferences, how to maybe even work around pain, as well as how to configure sets, reps, total volume, etc. I'm going to go first over my programming and what I'm doing. I'll explain my goals in detail. And then eventually, we're going to build a full grown program from the ground up that I think is kind of aligned with the majority of the audience's goals. When I say the majority of the audience, I mean the majority of the people who follow me. It might not be specific to you, but by the time we get to the end of it, you should have a pretty good idea of what sound programming looks like for your schedule, and you should have some agency as you head back into the gym, which should be pretty fun and I think cool and insightful for all of you.

Before we do that, though, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. Core Coaching Method is the brainchild of almost 10 years working with clients one-on-one in person and online. After spending a lot of time working with clients in big box gyms, a lot of time working with clients in studio gyms, time working with clients at the university gyms as a one-on-one personal trainer, I moved into the online coaching space. And one of the things I realized very quickly was many of my competitors in the online coaching space had little to no real in-person experience.

So the online coaching space is kind of marred with poor communication, robotic programming, and very impersonalized communication. And I felt like there was a way to bridge the gap between good personal training in person and good personal training online. And that's why I started Core Coaching Method. It was the opportunity to kind of take the many things that I had been doing in person with communication, with relationship building, with meeting people where they were at, and blend them with the world of online coaching. Me and my Core Coaching Method coaches are all certified with a bevy of different certifications in fitness, mobility, body composition, nutrition, you name it. And we

work with clients across the spectrum, not just people who want to compete, whether that be in powerlifting or bodybuilding, but also just general population clients. We offer full spectrum online coaching, programming coaching, nutrition coaching, as well as just plain old programs. If you want to go to the gym, print out a program and take it with you, we have those on the website as well. And I'm excited to announce that in April, we will be launching our core coaching collective app series. We've partnered with Train Heroic so that you can join a training team. The two teams that are launching first are Elite Physique, which you'll be able to take with you and train at the gym with myself, my coaches, and an entire community of people looking to make progress just like you. And the other team is Home

Heroes, which is built for those who don't have as much equipment, but will largely be training from home and want effective programming they can do in a relatively short amount of time. Train Heroic is the best app in training, and they will be featuring both of these teams where you can, again, interact with me, get form review, communicate with your other teammates. But Train Heroic gives you insights into your daily readiness and recovery. It allows you to track all of your training progress, your maxes, your training history. It gives you video demos, which are actually filmed and recorded by me and my team so that you're not playing any guessing games when it comes to exercise execution. And it keeps you connected with your coach. Of course, that'd be me and my coaching team

and all of your new teammates. So elite physique, you guys will all be one team. Gals mostly will be one team and home heroes. You guys will all be one team and you'll be able to message with each other in a private community that you can have access to for less than your daily cup of coffee. And that is coming down the pipeline in just two weeks. I can't wait to share that with you. You can get on the waiting list by heading over to corecoachingmethod.com, where you can also apply for one-on-one online coaching or try one of our pre-written programs. Without further ado, though, let's go ahead and kind of break down what it is that you need to do to put an effective training program together. And we've done similar podcasts like this from before, you know, in the past, but I really think it's important to start from the

very beginning. And so first things first, you got to start with a number of sessions that you can make it to the gym. In general, I think somewhere between two to six days a week is ideal. Seven days a week literally means we're not taking any days to rest. And I even think six is pushing it. Two is at the low end of efficacious, meaning like one is probably not going to help a ton, but it's certainly better than zero. Two, three, four is kind of the sweet spot. I'd say four or five is best for advanced lifters with six being reserved for those who are taking their training and recovery the absolute most seriously. So just some ideal examples of how somebody could train. If you're going to the gym two days a week, it's best to probably have two total body sessions. If you're going to the gym three days a week, it's probably still best to have total body focus

sessions at three days a week. If you're going to the gym four days a week, that's when I would like to recommend breaking things to upper lower. So you do two sessions for the upper body, two sessions for the lower going upper, lower rest, upper, lower rest, something like that. Five, you can get a little creative. You can go three lowers and two uppers. If you want to prioritize the lower, two lowers and three uppers. If you want to prioritize the upper, we'll talk about that in a second, or you can go with a upper lower, days one and two, and then a push-pull leg. You can get really creative. Same thing with six. So I'll walk you through what I've been doing, and then we'll go through these options again so you can kind of frame what you're doing. So I am currently training five days a week,

and my goal is hypertrophy, meaning muscle growth. So I am trying to find five weekly sessions that can help me develop my muscles. I've been training for quite some time and I'm natural. So what I'm aiming to do is train each muscle group at least twice. So the split that I have come up with is upper body, where I train the entirety of my upper body. I'm doing a push, a pull in all planes of motion and some accessory shoulders and arm work. My second training day is an entire lower body training day. My third training day is for the chest and the back. My fourth training day is for the arms and the shoulders. And my fifth and final training day is another leg day. So there are three total upper

body days, one complete, one just for the chest and back, one just for the arms and shoulders, and two lower body days, which differentiate quite a bit, but follow the same basic patterns. We'll talk more about this in a minute. So that's how I fit it to my schedule. What you should do now is ask yourself the question, how many days can I regularly get to the gym? If the answer is two days a week, I would recommend starting with two total body sessions. If the answer is two days a week, I would recommend starting with two total body sessions. The answer is three. I'd recommend three total body sessions. If the answer is four, I do upper lower.

The answer is five. I would do some combination of upper lower, upper lower total, or three uppers, two lowers, two lowers, three uppers. However, you've got to make that work. And for those of you that are doing six, you might want to do something like push pull legs, where you do a push day, a pull day, a leg day, take a break, and then repeat. So those are kind of the basic frameworks. But how you split up and actually determine what goes into these sessions really depends

on what your goal is. If your goal is strength-specific, meaning my goal is I want to be as strong as possible, you'll probably do less overall volume, meaning sets, and have a greater percentage of your work be intense and heavy, closer to failure with heavy loads. If your goal is hypertrophy or muscle growth, you'll probably do a little bit more volume. Although your intensity and load used might be a little bit less, you'll still train close to failure and you'll focus on training with a variety of exercises than challenge muscles in their lengthened and shortened position. If your goal

is fat loss, you can really train however you like because most of your results will be driven by nutrition. But I will say you should focus on either strength or hypertrophy in some capacity because both of those training modalities have the ability to help you hold on to muscle. And if you're training for an athletic goal like a sport, you're going to probably focus a little bit on skill development, meaning things like dribbling a basketball or throwing a football, or even in CrossFit, you have to make time for the gymnastic work too. If you're talking about a sport that's still resistance-based and you'll have a blend of strength training and hypertrophy training. So that kind of rounds things out here for the first portion. We've got to determine our training goal, and we've got to determine our training schedule.

Then we can kind of split those body parts up as much as possible, and that really kind of informs the decision that we make with our split. Then comes all the fun stuff, the exercises, the sets, the reps, the rep schemes. We'll get into all of this stuff. The things that we call the variables and the new app-based programming that's coming out, all of this stuff will be taken care of for you guys every single week. So those programs are designed to be four or five days a week. And they follow a similar principle like elite physique is four days a week, upper, lower, upper, lower with an optional fifth day, which focuses on the glutes, quads, shoulders, and core. And home heroes is four training sessions a week, upper, lower,

rest, upper, lower, rest, rest. And so those are programs, elite physique, that's a little bit more hypertrophy focused and home heroes. That's got a combination of the two, but because we're working with less overall equipment, knowing that most people will be training from home, it's going to incorporate some higher volumes, some higher reps to make use of reduced equipment. But that's also something that you should consider is building your program around the constraints of what you're working with. So how we've set up a split with regards to scheduling, how we decide goals, how we break things up based on body parts or regions, that's all out of the way. So let's

talk a little bit about building a split from the ground up. You know how many days you're going. You've even probably decided at this point exactly what body parts you're training on what days. So let's talk about kind of the fundamentals of training the body from a global to regional perspective. So globally, there are a few movement patterns that should show up in all of your programming. These are the push movements, like push-ups, which occur in the horizontal plane, and overhead presses, which occur in a more vertical plane. The pulls, things like rows, which are more horizontal, and things like pull-ups, which are more vertical. You have hinges, like Romanian deadlifts and kettlebell swings. You have squats, like barbell squats, leg presses, and goblet squats. You have lunges, like split squats and

walking lunges. And you have movements that challenge the core's capacity, like rotation, anti-rotation, and stability. You also have aerobic demands, which you can meet outside of the gym with things like walking and hiking, and you can also meet those with some form of gym-specific cardio. But really what we're looking to do when we talk about training the human body and what should show up in our program, whether we train two days a week, four days a week, six days a week, whether we're doing upper-lower split or total body, you should see movement patterns that fall into the category of pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, hinging, core, and cardio. All of those things should be trained for overall athletic development, overall injury reduction, if in fact that is possible, right? Having a well-balanced, well-developed physique should help you prevent injuries and maybe stay out of pain, especially

as you age. And depending on how athletically inclined you are, having a strong body and strong joints across a variety of movement patterns is really important, but those are the things we want to capture and feature in each session. So let's break this now down in two regions. We'll start first with the lower body, and we'll kind of work through those mechanics. So the first was a hinge. Hinging is the movement that occurs at the waist where the pelvis stays pretty stable, the core stays tight, and the back stays flat. And we allow the body to literally hinge at the hips by pushing the hips back. This stretches the glutes and hamstrings and requires them to work really hard on the way up.

So hinges are a phenomenal way to develop the posterior chain. Some popular hinge movements are the Romanian deadlift, the kettlebell swing, the barbell deadlift, and even things like the Nordic ham curl and hip thrust kind of look and feel like a hinge. But mostly what we're training here is the posterior chain or the backside and the pull are kind of antagonist counterparts, is the squat. The hip hinge is hip dominant, and the way most people squat tends to be knee dominant, in that it will challenge the musculature of the quads and hip flexors, as well as the glutes, but not so much the hamstrings. So squatting movements can be things like lunges. Lunges would technically be a subcategory of this, but really things like squats, goblet squats, step ups, right? Knee flexion, bending based exercises. You'd count that as a lunge as well.

Leg presses, bilateral or unilateral. Things that are really leg dominant. Now, if you hold a bar low enough on your back and you really push your hips back when you squat, you can make it a more posterior chain dominant squat. That is a low bar squat. But for the purpose of working through these exercises, these are how these patterns work. The lunge pattern, the final lower body specific pattern, which you can think of as a lower body unilateral pattern, meaning like it's going to probably challenge the posterior chain and the anterior chain somewhat equally, but be unilateral, challenge the posterior chain and the anterior chain somewhat equally, but be unilateral,

are the split squats, the reverse lunges, the walking lunges, etc., all of which can bias the quads or the glutes one more than the other depending on the angle of the torso. So when you think of your lower body training, you should try to incorporate as many of these as possible. If you have a lot of lower back pain, you might be careful with the hinges that you select. So you select for hinges that don't challenge the lower back as much. And if you have a lot of lower back pain, you might be careful with the hinges that you select. So you select for hinges that don't challenge the lower back as much. And if you have knee pain, you might select for knee flexion dominant exercises that don't require so much depth and movement. But in general, one thing that I found to be fairly true is if you work your way towards your goal slowly,

you can probably incorporate all of these movements or some iteration, regression of these movements, regardless of how much pain or dysfunction you might have. 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. So transitioning now to the upper body, we'll break down the push and the pull. We'll start

with the push and the horizontal pushes, which are pushes that occur kind of in front of upper body, we'll break down the push and the pull. We'll start with the push and the horizontal pushes, which are pushes that occur kind of in front of the body, like push-ups and bench press. And then you have overhead movements or vertical presses, like the overhead press. These movements typically work the chest, shoulders, and triceps. So these are muscles usually on the front of the body. The triceps are on the back of the arm, but they work to extend the elbow. And the chest, shoulders, and triceps work in concert a lot. When we talk about the pulling movements, we're talking usually about vertical pulls like lat pull downs, overhead rows, cable, sorry, assisted pull-ups, pull-ups, all of these things. And when we talk about

horizontal movements, we're usually talking about things like barbell rows, Australian pull-ups, all of these things. And when we talk about horizontal movements, we're usually talking about things like barbell rows, Australian pull-ups, one-arm dumbbell rows, cable rows. Those are usually going to work the back muscles, the lower traps, the rear delts, the lats, and the biceps. So you'll notice the pushing movements work the exact opposite muscles as the pulling movements in the same way that the squat almost works the exact opposite muscles of the hinge. So having a nice balance of these throughout your program is going to really lead to symmetry, overall development. It can help you avoid having any imbalances. And that's why in the programming that you'll see on the app and the programming that my clients are used to, whether they're clients working for hypertrophy or strength, there's usually a balance of these pushes and these pulls, these squats and these hinges with the isolation work usually getting

sprinkled in across the day. So let's talk about a little bit more about the core and the cardio before we get in kind of how we break this down and what an individual workout should look like. For your core training, there's a few different movements that the core does, one of which is rotation, things like medicine ball throws or cable twists or wood chops. One of them is anti-rotation, like the payload press. Anti-extension exercises like stir the pot and plank. stability and preventing flexion and lateral flexion. The core does a lot of things, so it's probably best to borrow from a few different core categories as you build out your core training. I tend to like to have core training at the beginning of the workout to get the core involved, kind of ready to go and get it out of the way, which I find is a good way to make sure it gets done. And that shows up a lot in the elite physique and home heroes programming. You will not be skipping your core training anymore. And I think that's part of the reason why so many clients see so many strength gains so quickly is because they

actually start to develop the core. And as for the cardio, there are a lot of ways to do this. Typically you can do low intensity, steady state cardio or LIS, where you go for longer durations with lower output or high intensity interval training hit, where you do for longer durations with lower output, or high-intensity interval training, HIIT, where you do higher periods of higher output cardio for shorter duration. So you might do 15 minutes with the 30-second sprint and a 90-second recovery for 15 minutes. And then the last one I think is just generally sound is walking, which could definitely be considered LIS, but I think when people think of LIS,

they think walking on a treadmill, going to the gym, and walking on the stairs. And when they think HIIT, they think like doing it on the treadmill or the elliptical. I mean like literally getting outside and just going for a walk. Just plain old zone two walking is another phenomenal way to build your aerobic base, move fast enough that you can still talk, but you might be huffing and puffing a little. And so those are kind of the fundamental components of good programming. And the exercises we select from these categories, we should select ones that challenge the muscles at different lengths, that work well with our body, that work well with our anthropometry, how we're built. So for example, if you are somebody who is extremely tall, you might do a goblet squat or a hex bar deadlift instead of trying to do a leg

press because those movements in particular might align better with how you're built mechanically, right? If you have very long arms, a lot of bench pressing might be harder from a strength production standpoint than somebody who has very short arms. So you'll always make some adjustments and selections based on who you are. And that's one of the cool things about the app-based community is you can communicate directly with me and my coaches to take these programs and make sure that they're tailored as best as we can to your goals, your anthropometry, your limitations. And having that community will allow you to also bounce these ideas off other people who are working through the same program in a way that will help them also see success. So I want to work through like

a sample program for somebody that might be five days a week, physique focused. So this will be a bodybuilding style program. And we'll actually work through a sample week of the elite physique programming that's coming up. So we can keep this really easy for you guys. We already kind of talked a little bit about what my split looks like, but this is a five day a week, upperweek upper-lower-upper-lower total split starting with the first day of the week, which is a lower body day. The first two exercises are done as a warm-up. They are side planks and single leg RDLs done as a superset. So side planks are effective for creating core stability as well as shoulder stability, and the single leg RDL

practices the hip hinge and gets the body kind of primed for movement. So there's a light warmup there, which is always a good idea when programming. If you have a limited amount of time, you might reduce how much time you spend during your warmup. But I would imagine that for most people, if you could allot five to eight minutes just to get a brisk walk or jog going on the treadmill to elevate your core body temperature, and you pair that with a little bit of core work, you'll body temperature, and you pair that with a little bit of core work, you'll be very happy and ready to go in a short amount of time. The first exercise of the first lower body day is a barbell Romanian deadlift, which is a hip hinge.

That's done for 10, 10, 8, 8, which I think is a fairly middle of the road rep scheme. Remember, guys, if you want to work maximal strength, you're probably going to be doing reps from like one to five. If you want to build muscle six to 12 is generally a good place to be. If you want to build endurance north of 15 is a good place to be. The cool thing about muscle growth though, is as long as you train pretty close to failure, you can build muscle with pretty much any rep range. So given that this is a hypertrophy program, muscle growth program, you'll see a lot of variance in the rep range. The second exercise, another big lift. You'll notice a theme here. The bigger, more complex lifts go first. The second lift is a hip thrust,

also for 10-10-8-8. So really starting off hammering the posterior chain hard, you'll see that this day actually has a little bit more posterior chain focus. And this third day, which is the lower body day that we'll get to in a minute, has a little bit more quad focus. So pay attention here as we go through. The third exercise is another complex compound movement. It is the leg press. So that would be an exercise that's kind of nicely biasing the glutes and the quads. So a little bit more shift towards the anterior chain, finishing with 100 walking lunges for time and 100 kettlebell swings for time. So you have three primary exercises, the Romanian deadlift, hip thrust, and leg breasts that make up the compound meat and potatoes portion of the workout, followed by walking lunges and kettlebell swings for a kind

of challenging finisher. So that is a strength slash hypertrophy focused posterior chain leg day. Moving on to the second day of the week, that is an upper body day with a mixed focus. So there's a balance between the anterior and posterior chains here. That's going to open up with banded face pulls and push up plus. Those two things prime the shoulders and get the body ready to rock and roll before moving into the meat and potatoes, which is a heavy lat pull down, and roll before moving into the meat and potatoes, which is a heavy lat pull down, a vertical pull, and an incline dumbbell bench press, a horizontal push. I find vertical pulls and horizontal presses tend to kind of contrast nicely with another. So that's pretty nice. There's two supersets to finish for time. Supersets are great when you're working through

a limited time. The first movement is a one-arm dumbbell row, which is of course a back or posterior chain focus movement. And the second being a lateral raise, which is a more isolated movement that works the shoulder specifically. With a final superset for the triceps, which is a straight arm pushdown, which hits the lats and tris, and a tricep pushdown, which really punishes the tricep. So this workout starts with a nice quick warmup, which really punishes the tricep. So this workout starts with a nice quick warmup, followed by some pushes and some pulls before eventually it all wraps up with some nice supersets to really spread the body or the volume out across the totality of the upper body. I actually just closed my window because I realized that my neighbor's dog was barking in an extremely

loud and agitating manner. So the rest of the podcast, you will not hear that. Okay. The third day, a lower body day with a focus on the anterior chain starts out with med ball slams and stir the pots to again serve as a warmup and prime the core before getting into the big three exercises of the day, which are barbell back squats, Bulgarian split squats, and leg extensions. So all of these will challenge the quads and the anterior chain a little bit more. It does finish off with some prone hamstring curls to give some isolated volume to the hamstrings in the shortened position, knowing that we've already challenged them in the lengthened position with the first session doing the RDL. You then get a little bit of calf raises and hanging leg raises at the very end,

just to make sure that you're hitting those accessory and supplemental groups. The fourth day of the week, which is again for the upper body, starts with a dead bug and a farmer's walk to challenge the core in a unique way. So if you look through, we've done side planks, banded face pulls, push-up plus, single leg RDL, med ball slams, dirt the done side planks, banded face pulls, push-up plus, single leg RDL, med ball slams, dirt the pot, dead bugs, farmer's walks. Those small little warm-up periods are also serving as our core training, our hip-specific training. All of this stuff that often gets neglected is worked kind of nicely into these quick warm-ups. I think you guys should probably

aim to do something similar if constructing your own training. Think about like starting your day with a little bit of vegetables. It's not the most fun, but at least now you don't have to worry about it later. That's kind of how I like to do this. So the first movement of the day is a cable row, a horizontal pull paired with a shoulder press, a vertical push. So we've done a nice contrast here on the first leg day, or I'm sorry, on the first upper body day, we did a pull down vertical with a press that was horizontal, and then we flip flop those on the second one. Then you finish again with two supersets. You'll see some more lateral raises, this time done with cables paired with rear delt flies, and then hammer curls paired with skull crushers. So that supplemental work

that comes after those big compounds is usually isolation work for the shoulders and arms, which I think is really, really appropriate on the upper body days that you focus on the compounds before getting into that isolated work. Because when we're doing legs, there's so many different compounds to choose from that you might not do as much isolation work there. Now, the final day of the week is a mixed focus total body day that you do not have to do for this programming specifically, but it starts with deadlifts, goes to prone hamstring machine curls, finishes with rope face pulls, straight arm pull downs, and pushups. So a nice balance of volume spread across four different movements. There is a warmup, which is just 2,500 meters of

rowing or a comparative amount of cardio. So there's some thrown in there, but that's a nice five day a week, upper, lower, upper, lower total split for an adult looking for hypertrophy. Most of those rep ranges are between 10 and 12. Most of the sets are between three and four. Again, guys, just so you can understand when you're training for maximal strength, your reps will usually get a little lower. And when you're training for hypertrophy, you'll usually be somewhere between six and 12, but you can definitely do plenty of high rep work and plenty of strength work. And these programs actually oscillate through blocks, which kind of focus on a little bit of everything. So the first block

will be strength focused. Maybe the second one will be hypertrophy focused. And the third one might have some higher rep hypertrophy work or metabolite work. There's a lot of different ways you can do this, but kind of consistently moving from one training stimuli to the next allows you to stay well-rounded and remain sensitive to the actual changes that your training is supposed to elicit. That's not me making a claim that you can confuse your muscles. It's rather my way of saying that after four to six weeks of doing the same exercises and getting a lot of progress, you might do better and actually increase your rate of progression by cycling some exercises in and cycling some stimuli through as well. I hope you guys found

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