Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 194: My 8 Most Embarassing Fitness Mistakes

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Thanks For Listening!  LEAVE A REVIEW OF THE SHOW:There is NOTHING more valuable to a podcast than leaving a written review and 5-Star Rating. Please consider taking 1-2 minutes to do that (iTunes) HERE. You can also leave a review on SPOTIFY!OUR PARTNERS:Legion Supplements (protein, creatine, + more!), Shop (DANNY) HERE! Get comprehensive lab analysis of the most important biomarkers for your health from our partner Marek Health HERE (save using the code "corecoaching")Get Your FREE LMNT Electrolytes HERE! Care for YOUR Gut, Heart, and Skin with SEED Symbiotic (save with “DANNY15)  HERE! Put your nutrition on autopilot with our amazing partner CHOW meal prep HERE (save with code "danny")RESOURCES/COACHING:  Train with Danny on His Training App HEREI am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on YOUTUBEFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE! Sign up for the trainer mentorship HERESupport the Show.

Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. This is episode 195 and I'm your host Danny Matrenga. Today I'm going to be sharing with you eight of the more what I would describe as embarrassing fitness mistakes I have made over the years. We're going to make a kind of trip down memory lane, if you will, and I will revisit eight things that I have done, not so that I can just poke fun at myself, but also hopefully so that you can learn the ways in which I've refined my process and reduced the number of mistakes I'm making now as somebody who's substantially more educated with regards to health, fitness, nutrition, programming, etc. So at the age of 27, I have a much better understanding of how these things work than I did at 17. So many of these things that we'll go over today are mistakes that I have made across a 10-year lifting career. So lots of things

I think that you can learn from here, lots of opportunity to grow and potentially avoid some of the mistakes I've made, in addition to the fact that I think sharing these things will be quite humorous. While there's a lesson in almost each and every one of these mistakes, some of them are, I think, objectively somewhat funny or silly. So if you're just a fitness enthusiast, you should get a kick out of these. Starting off with the first fitness mistake I made, this was perhaps what drew me into fitness, not necessarily in the long term, but in the short term, one of the elements of the fitness industry I found most exciting was supplements.

fitness industry I found most exciting was supplements. And very early on in my career lifting weights, I took a lot of supplements, a lot more than I take now. There weren't evidence based fitness supplement companies out there like Legion. The probiotic space wasn't around. The electrolyte space wasn't really around when I started working out. And I say that because most of what I take now is just electrolytes daily, seed probiotic daily, and some whey, pre-workout, creatine, and multivitamin from Legion. A very simplified supplement arsenal at this point in my career. But when I first got started, supplements were the name of the game. It was where the money was at. It was so fun, so cool. And I was spending in high school every dollar of disposable income I had from doing random chores, miscellaneous tasks, anything that

I could to do to earn money in a small town, whether that was helping somebody move, mowing lawns, weed whacking, you name it. I was spending every penny I could on supplements, but not just supplements that I felt were beneficial like pre-workout creatine and whey protein. I used to get excited about buying supplements that were new. I would go on bodybuilding.com every single day, multiple times a day, whether it was on my phone or the library at the schools, the computer in the school library and look up their top 50 supplements and see if there was anything new, exciting, or cool that I hadn't taken yet. And even at this point in my career, lifting, having been doing it for between like probably at that point a year, maybe two, I had a decent idea that a lot of this stuff didn't work, but I was so in denial about it. I wanted it to work. I liked collecting the

supplements. I liked the packaging of the supplements. And so I tried everything from fat burners to BCAAs to EAAs to every type of creatine and form of creatine you can imagine to every natural test boosting product over the market to every insane, crazy pre-workout imaginable. And I loved putting the bottles up on my shelf. I was looking through my phone the other day and I found photos from like 2014 or 13 and I saw the supplement shelf. I was looking through my phone the other day and I found photos from like 2014 or 13 and I saw the supplement shelf that I had erected in my home, in my bedroom, like a literal shrine with all of these shiny packages. And it was interesting to me because I had almost an epiphany moment where I said, oh my gosh, to the uninitiated young or younger

consumer, the appeal of these shiny bottles, these fascinating label claims, these incredible influencers. Back then, this was kind of before social media influencing was huge. This was like before discount codes. This was like when supplement companies would find high-level athletes and high- level bodybuilders to represent their brands online, but more specifically in magazines. So like I would have magazine cutouts of like the bodybuilders that I thought were cool and keeping like all my bodybuilding magazines, all my cutouts, all my supplements in like one shrine area of my room. And so I was spending a ton of money on shit that, in truth,

wasn't helping me whatsoever. If I could go back and redo all of that, I would take and spend substantially less on supplements, and I would definitely have gone back and gotten a personal trainer. We'll get to some of the hilarious training-specific mistakes that I made over the years, because I think you guys can learn a lot from that as well. But from an opportunity cost standpoint, this one went first because I think it was my largest regret, given that if I had simply just not spent that money on supplements

and spent it on something that was a little bit more likely to help generate results, whether that be a coach, whether that be education, or just saving it. I think that would have been in a lot better place. So that was probably the most embarrassing supplement-specific mistake I made, which was spending multiple hundreds of dollars a month on stuff so that I could collect it, display it, try it, see what it did. I was so inquisitive, but it really ended up burning a hole through my pocket and I didn't get much out of it. The second most embarrassing mistake I make, this is something that I think back on all the time. I thought it was relatively funny that I did this. And I don't know where I got this idea.

But again, when I started working out, I literally went to the gym and just tried to figure it out. This was at the very infancy of YouTube fitness and social media. And like, there weren't too many people making good content at this time. There were a few people who were making content at the, uh, that they're bigger now. Sure. But there were a few people that were making relatively good content, uh, educational pieces of content that would somewhat guide me. But I remember starting every single workout. So this is the second mistake is starting every single workout with isolated arm supersets. And so this is like so, so funny to me because it's very much the opposite of how one might intelligently design and program today, and that you would probably start with compound movements instead of isolation movements. And you might not necessarily start with a

superset of isolation movements for small muscles that will then be asked to come to the party in five minutes. But I would literally start every single workout, even if it was going to have legs featured in the workout. That's another thing I didn't think I needed to train legs because I already was playing so many sports. But I would start with hammer curls, supersetted with overhead dumbbell tricep extensions, doing a triple drop set of 35 curls to 35 overhead extension, 25s all the way down to 15, supersetting between those two. And that single superset, starting every workout with that, totally trashed my elbows. It was just too much volume on the elbows and too many inefficient exercise choices to then go into

like what I would almost always do second, which was barbell bench press. So I would destroy my fucking elbow stability and the muscles that were responsible for creating stability around the elbow joint with tons of volume. And then I'd go bench with my hypermobile elbows and hyperextend everything. And I would even start like I wanted to get as many reps of 225 as possible. So I even like went through a phase where I would put 225 on the bar to start because I had this brilliant idea that I was getting fatigued working up to 225. So just really unintelligent program design, probably the second biggest mistake I made. Thankfully, when you're young and you're resilient, you can kind of get through that. And still to this day, like I have

some elbow stuff that lingers, but it's gotten a lot better. And I've learned from that. Uh, the third one, and, and this one I laugh at a lot was just the general decision to pair exercises in ways that I thought were cool, fun, creative. Uh, and in thinking back on it now like it didn't make any sense but like an example is like i would pair incline barbell press with incline dumbbell fly oh two inclines or i perform a super set of decline dumbbell press with incline dumbbell flies oh they're opposites i do the decline press with the incline fly. Or I would do something super stupid and do a tri-set of incline machine bench press with flat barbell press and decline chest dumbbell press. I did incline flat and decline, all presses, all part of one super

set. There's no muscle fiber in my pecs that won't be punished from this. And I ended up just doing way too much junk volume that didn't really get me a whole lot of anywhere. And this stuff did not just stop there like at all. Like I would do 21s on every fucking exercise imaginable. So I was originally taught 21s when I was probably 17 as using an easy bar and doing a partial rep curl from the bottom to the mid range do seven times doing seven reps of mid range to shorten position and then seven full reps. So if you're driving or trying to visualize this, hold an easy bar, curl the weight from your lengthened position where your arms are all the way long halfway up seven times, then hold in that halfway position where elbows are at 90 degrees, curl from halfway

to all the way seven times, and then do seven full reps for a total of 21 reps, seven of which are done half bottom to top or bottom to mid, seven of which are done mid to top and then seven full. And so that was like some super bro-y, hand it down wisdom of like getting a sick arm pump. You do 21s. And I was like, okay, well, what if I did 21 lat pull downs where I did seven wide, seven in the middle and seven close, or I did 21s on pushups where I do seven wide, seven in the middle and seven close. Like I would find a way to apply these kind of silly principles to anything so that I could kind of, in my opinion, just play with it and explore it.

But also I think I have a little bit of young lifter ADHD. I was a kid in a candy shop, if you will, and I didn't want to leave any stone unturned. So these workouts often got long, but I suppose mistake number three, without a doubt, was consistently looking for opportunities to make workouts fun, hellacious, creative, unique, in exchange for productive. Had I just been focused on putting more weight on the bar on a handful of simplified lifts and really just getting better at those, I think I would have made a lot more progress earlier on in my training career. But the good news is making these mistakes really, really helped me, I think, have more empathy for clients and better understand some of the mistakes that other people make. have more empathy for clients and better understand some of the mistakes that other people make. The fourth mistake, this is more of a nutrition one, was cooking food and not eating it.

So I would religiously prepare my meals every single weekend, chicken on the George Foreman grill, steamed broccoli, and rice. And I would make 14 Tupperwares, one for two for every day that I would pair with a standard breakfast. So my breakfast would be like a protein shake in the morning. After workout, I'd have like toast and eggs. And then I would prepare two meals of chicken, rice, and broccoli that I would take with me to school. Cause that's what I was told I shouldn't be doing by the bodybuilders. That's what I should be doing. I should be eating that diet. Now, when you pair that with the amount of exercise activity I had for sports and lifting, absolutely under eating. There's no way in hell you'll ever convince me that I was not straight up in like full blown bonafide starvation status. Like I was shredded to a bone. I had good

muscularity by virtue of being young and hyper responsive. But what I would do is I would regularly prepare these foods in shitty little Tupperware is what I could afford at the time where they wouldn't really hold well and they wouldn't make it past Wednesday before they started. Like the chicken just got stiff as a board. And so I just wasn't fucking eating. And I was training hard. I was practicing sports like baseball, basketball, football, and I wasn't eating. And I wasn't allowing myself to eat foods that albeit weren't healthy, like pizza, french fries, hamburgers, what my friends were eating, right? Because I had this notion that those foods were quote unquote bad. But what I was really doing was I was living in a chronically malnourished,

underfed state with tons of physical activity and really missing out on the opportunity to build a lot of muscle. It's unfortunate. I still, when I started high school, was about 130 pounds. When I graduated, I was about 170 pounds. But I bet I could have been closer to 180 or 190, which is a little bit closer to where I'm at now. I run between 185 and 195 pounds, but I was eating like an idiot. I was training really

hard like an idiot, but I wasn't giving my body anything to fuel itself. And so additionally, like I spent a good chunk of my mid to late teenager sick all the time. Why am I so sick? Why do I get a cold all the time? I was getting colds all the time because I was so overworked. I was so malnourished. I'm sure my immune system had nothing to, you know, I didn't really have anything to work with. So like that mistake was orthorexic eating patterns, being obsessed with eating clean foods, not allowing myself to enjoy my youth and the foods that my friends were around, and then preparing foods that could have been nutritious and helpful, but not fucking eating them because they tasted gross because I couldn't cook worth of shit. And I wasn't able to prepare or store them properly. Taking a little break from the action

here to tell you about our amazing partner, Seed. Seed makes the best probiotic supplement on the market, bar none. I'm very confident with that because I think that the probiotic space and the gut health space in general is filled with people who have no idea what they're talking about or who are looking to make a buck. This isn't to say your gut health isn't important. In fact, it's probably one of the most important and most intriguing developments we have seen in modern medicine and modern physiology. Our relationship with our guts is critical. It's crucial.

And taking care of that by eating a lot of different plants, a lot of different fruits and vegetables, getting a diverse array of fiber and resistant starches can go a long way. But so can supplementing with a high quality probiotic. Seed makes the best probiotic on the market with 53.6 billion active fluorescent units. These are organisms that are going to be alive and helping transfer a variety of different benefits to the human host. All these things are actually proven to work in humans. These strains work in humans, not rodents. Seed is not cheaping out here by providing you with any random strain. They're providing you with strains that help with digestive health, gut immunity, gut barrier integrity, dermatological health, cardiovascular health, micronutrient synthesis, as well as many other things. They're vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, nut-free, shellfish-free.

So very friendly for those of you who may have a variety of different allergies and who are looking for a supplement you can take that can enhance a variety of different things. I have a very, very good track record over many, many years of having to deal with things like eczema and having to deal with things like psoriasis on occasion, especially when the weather changes. And I swear to you, since I started taking seed, I have noticed substantially less of that. And there's four strains included in Seed shown to help with things like atopic dermatitis. So there you go. Not to mention the plethora of strains for the health of your gut.

If you're looking to take your gut health to the next level, you can go to Seed.com. Subscribe for their daily symbiotic. You can take one or two a day. You can share it with a partner. Sometimes you can do that. But it goes a long way. It's the best probiotic supplement on the market. I absolutely love it. And you can use the code Danny15 to save. Back to the show. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training.

We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program

where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength, as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are

somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing partners over at Elemental Labs. Elemental Labs makes a flagship electrolyte product known as LMNT Recharge. Recharge is amazing. It's got bioavailable

forms of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which can really help you train, contract your tissues, and get hydrated. I love having it in the morning before my fasted training because oftentimes I wake up without an appetite, but I want something in my stomach so I'm not flat, I can get a pump, and I can get hydrated in the gym and still perform my best. I also love to sip on my recharge when I'm on the golf course or especially when I'm in the sauna. The more you sweat, the more likely it is that you will need to replace valuable electrolytes like sodium, magnesium, and potassium. And while if you have high blood pressure, you might not necessarily be a candidate for electrolyte supplementation, many athletes and active adults need more salt

and more electrolytes in their diet than they currently get, especially if they sweat, live in warm climates, or humid climates. I found a bunch of different ways to use my Recharge, but like I said, I love using it before and during my training, whenever I do something active outside or my sweat rate increases, or when I'm in the sauna. And you can actually try it completely for free. All their best flavors that are totally free of sugar have only 10 calories. They're sweetened naturally, and they come in amazing flavors like raspberry salt, orange salt, citrus salt. My favorite is the mango habanero or mango chili and the leban habanero, which I take in the sauna. There's flavors for everybody and you can check

them out by going to drink element tea slash coach Danny. They'll send you every single flavor in an individual packet. You can try them out completely free. Just pay shipping drink element tea.com slash coach Danny. Get your sample pack today completely for free, just pay shipping. DrinkLMNT.com slash Coach Danny. Get your sample pack today completely for free. Just pay shipping. Back to the show. Those were some big ones. Number five, this came a little bit later in my training career, but it was skipping, running from, or bashing on cardio. So in high school, I had a basketball coach in particular, who really enjoyed conditioning as a means of like punishing or just kind of ingraining hardcore work ethic into children. And I don't know if that was ultimately his goal. When I look back at it in hindsight, I think like, okay, I'm really glad

I had to deal with this individual because 16, 17, year old, Danny was like petrified of this guy. He was so scary. He was tall. He was bald. He was short. He didn't say short, like in that he didn't say much. He was actually quite tall, but didn't have much to say. Just looked at you, stared at you and made you run like crazy. And some of the conditioning workouts that we did were absolutely absurd. Like I grew up in an area where it would regularly be between 90 and 105 degrees during the summer months, fall months when school started. So into September, August, all of that stuff. And he would make us go out to the track every Tuesday and Thursday for basketball. And you think like, okay, track and like we did more conditioning than the cross country team,

but we would go out to a dusty old track. He would draw a line in the dirt, and he would make us run between 8 and 12 400-meter sprints. Each sprint had to either tie or beat the subsequent time, which, if you think about it, is fucking stupid because you will see a precipitous drop-off in what you're capable of doing with each 400 meter sprint it is the hardest like aerobic slash mostly anaerobic activity you can do like you're sprinting 400 meters it's like as far as you can sprint before you have to kind of shift

down to being more uh aerobic in how you metabolize fuel like you literally can sprint for about 400 meters and then you're going to see the drop off. He would have us do between eight and 12 of these motherfuckers. And you know, you got 14 guys on a basketball team. So you got 14 opportunities to tie or beat your last time every round. And of course, after three or four rounds, everybody's missing because they have no juice left. So he would count those as what he would describe a plus one. So each round we'd get between eight and 10 plus ones from guys not meeting or beating their time. Interestingly enough, then he would have us run 200s, 200 meter sprints, about 10 to 12 of those. And the same thing would happen. People weren't able to tie or beat their last time. So you ended up in a situation where you had like plus 60, plus 70, 70 to 80 individual instances in which people didn't tie or beat

their last times over these 400 and 200 yard meter sprints. And so what did we do with those? If it was plus 85, that meant you ran up and down the bleachers 85 times. All this to say, I developed a relationship with aerobic exercise that was pretty negative. I looked at it as purely for punishment. And the minute I finished playing sports in high school, I took about two years off of not only playing basketball specifically, but doing any kind of cardiovascular exercise. And I felt the difference when I started doing cardio again in a more positive and holistic light. It did really help my health. And I felt the difference when I started doing cardio again in a more positive and, you know, holistic light. It did really help my health. And I still had a substantial amount of like

aerobic endurance and mental toughness to be able to stick with it. But I skipped it for about two or three years because I got punished with it. And I really kind of developed a love hate relationship love in that, like, I like how it feels, but hate in that I didn't know how to do it in a way that wasn't punishing my body. And it would have always been used as a punishment by people who were introducing exercise to me in my influential younger years. So all this to say, like, how you use something and how something is presented to you can really impact how you view it over the course of your life. And so if you have kids or you are a coach, think about this as you introduce various things, whether it's weights, nutrition, cardiovascular exercise, right? Like using it as punishment isn't optimal, in my opinion,

for getting somebody to stick with it in the long term. And when we talk about youth sports, none of these kids are going pro, very few are going pro, if any, very few are even going to get to play at a collegiate level that will support their academic goals, meaning they'll get a scholarship so that they can go to school for free. So knowing that most kids won't even come close to either of those, like your job shouldn't be to punish them with exercise so that they can take it academically to the next level. It should be to use sport as a way to teach, you know, things like teamwork, work ethic, getting outside of yourself. And again, I also think it's a good foundational way to build fitness and a good relationship with fitness if you do it right.

The sixth one was, and this one I've talked about ad nauseum on the podcast, is an over-reliance on hardcore stimulants. And I'm not just talking about caffeine. In fact, the first pre-workout I ever took was Jack 3D, which had a modest amount of caffeine in it, but it had 1,3-dimethylamylamine, which was an amphetamine. So I was taking two to three scoops of caffeine and amphetamine to the tune of about 400 milligrams of caffeine paired with amphetamine almost every day to work out as a young adult. I did not need that level of stimulant. And that had very tangible and noticeable deleterious effects on my mood. It completely killed my ability to get an erection at the age of 17. I was taking Driven Sports Craze at the time, which had another amphetamine memetic in

there. And after like four days of taking that, I literally could no longer get an erection. This was something at the time that was referred to anecdotally on the internet as stim dick. And so what was my solution at that point? It was to buy horny goat weed and tribulus, which are supposedly at that time were supposed to be testosterone boosting herbs. Really, all they are are just a whole lot of junk. And so I took those thinking that the answer to a stimulant and a supplement making my erectile quality poor was more supplements. And in fact, all I had to do was stop taking that. supplements. And in fact, all I had to do was stop taking that. But I remember at that point,

I was in an intimate relationship, which many high school students can end up doing. I'm not recommending that for anybody, but I remember being like, what the heck? I can't have sex anymore because something is wrong with my actual penis and I'm entirely unaware of how to fix it. And I'm not going to tell my parents about it. So my solution was to just get back on the fucking internet. And oh my goodness gracious, the pathways you fall down to. So the point being, I became excessively reliant on stimulants and caffeine. And I weaned myself off substantially over the next several years to the point now where I usually don't even take pre-workout that contains caffeine at all. I

usually have one or two espresso shots in the morning at the studio where I see my clients or in my home office. And that's that. But I've learned a lot from overdoing it on the stimulants. It was fucking with my sleep. It was fucking with my mood. And it was even fucking with my libido when these products were legally allowed to contain stimulants that thankfully they're not containing as much anymore. The seventh mistake was too much density, meaning I was trying to fit too many sets and reps and too much duration into each session. So my sessions were actually too long. Now my sessions in the gym are between 45 and an hour and a half, 45 minutes and an hour and a half. And I find that that works really well. When I first started training, I needed two to three hour sessions or I wasn't

satisfied. And that was very unproductive. So what I have found is that work of higher quality is better than work for work's sake, especially if that work for work's sake is unintentional and it's not close to failure and it's not done with good technique. And so I've learned quite a bit from that. And I think for most people, 45 to 90 minutes is the sweet spot. And the eighth and most perhaps embarrassing mistake of all, because it's something that I so regularly speak out against now because it's a mistake that I think held me back more than all of these, was working out six to seven days a week because it's a mistake that I think held me back more than all of these, was working out six to seven days a week. I used to think that I needed to go to the gym every single day and I would get tremendous anxiety and tremendous frustration. If I didn't,

I would have incredibly negative self-talk. I would feel as though I was slipping back and not making progress when in fact, I think going so much was actually inhibiting my ability to make progress. I would go to the gym at right when it opened every day. So I'd get up at 4am to go. I'd be waiting for the guy to unlock it at 4.45am. I'd go in there half asleep because I was not getting adequate sleep. I'd pound a ton of stimulants and I would train like crap for two plus hours, six to seven days a week, instead of just training three to four days a week for about 90 minutes, training hard as shit, and then giving myself time to recover. When I look back at the introductory period of my weight training journey, my resistance training journey, I can't think you could fuck it up too much worse than I did. I did this about as

poorly and ass backwards as possible. And the reason I shared this with you guys today is so that you don't make these same mistakes. So I hope you learned something from this episode. I hope that you can laugh a little bit at some of the silly things that I've done. As a professional, I really speak out against these things now because I see how harmful that behavior was

and how hard it was for me to course correct, even as I learned more about how the body works. And I don't want anybody to make those same mistakes. Instead of relying on supplements, using cardiovascular exercise as punishment, or viewing it as a form of punishment, instead of always thinking more is better, I would encourage a more nuanced, thoughtful approach

tailored to your life that's built around what it is that you already enjoy doing that will make it substantially more easily to adhere to an effective exercise protocol. I want to thank you guys so much again for tuning in and I will catch you on the next episode.