Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 195: Cultivating "Essential" Strength (Special Release)

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Todays episode is an interview from the essential strength podcast hosted by Dr. David Skolnik. I really enjoyed the interview and had to share it here.Subscribe to the Essential Strength Podcast HERE!Follow David HERE!hanks 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.

Hey there, guys. Coach Danny Matrenga checking in with another episode. Today's is going to be a little bit different. Instead of me riffing on my own or interviewing somebody else, the episode you're about to hear is me being interviewed by Dr. David Skolnick of the Essential Strength Podcast. Enjoyed being a guest on his show so much when I went on about a month ago that I decided to share that episode with you guys here. David makes great content. I really enjoyed being a guest on his podcast, and I've enjoyed listening to some of his podcasts since being a guest. So if you like this, check out the rest of David's work on the Essential Strength Podcast and enjoy the interview he and I did talking about fitness, motivation, and some of the mistakes I think people make that limit them from reaching their ceiling with their fitness pursuits. Sit back and enjoy. All right, Danny, good morning. Welcome to the Essential Strength Podcast.

Nice to reconnect after, it's been like 18 months since I've moved out of California and left the greatest gym in the state of saying strength. So yeah, this is going to be fun. Yeah, man, I'm looking forward to it. Excited to chat. Nice to see your face again. Let's do this. Let me hit you with the opening question and then we'll get into some Danny specific, you know, conversations. So for you, as with each guest on the show, what is your personal definition of strength? Yeah. So I think that, you know, you probably get some relatively fitness specific answers that bleed into non-specific or non-fitness specific answers. But the word I often come back to when I think about strength is resilience, which is just

the ability to kind of push through the challenging things life throws your way. I think that a fitness plan and exercise plan helps one fortify that resilience because there's going to be many days that you don't want to do it, but sticking to your plan and habit helps you show up in the face of adversity. And I love how that carries over to life. So a lot of times with my clients, when we're doing resistance training or strength training, I often find that we're building strength and resilience that extends outside of the gym too, which is just the ability to do the hard thing when you don't want to. I think that that's what strong people do, whether or not they're physically strong at all. The ability to do hard things that oftentimes you

don't want to do, I think is the marker of a strong human being. Have you had clients actually explicitly express that to you? Like I found that training in the gym with you has helped me be more resilient outside the gym. Yeah, definitely. And I think like through the transformation of helping somebody live a healthier life, you communicate to them to reach your ultimate goal, you're going to need to make sacrifices. And that might mean giving up foods that you think are tasty or setting boundaries around people who are not necessarily toxic, but aren't necessarily aligned with you reaching your bigger goals. And you have those communications while you're training somebody. And then they might go home and say, hey, I'm not having that tonight. And I'm not putting up with your bullshit. And when they come back to you and tell you, hey, I set some really good boundaries around my boss telling

me that I need to stay late and miss workouts. And those things I find show up actually all the time. And I'm certainly no therapist. I'm definitely not a life coach, but it's always nice when somebody says like, Hey, you know, I am prioritizing this and I'm, I'm reorganizing my life to be more aligned with being healthy, um healthy and setting boundaries. And so I see that stuff all the time. I think what you just mentioned about people not necessarily being toxic is worth talking about just for a second of all the things you just said. Because that's a very probably overused phrase. It's very popular, popular you know toxic this and toxic that and i think what you mentioned about there can be people who aren't toxic but who also aren't

helpful kind of like there's a difference between like there's a spectrum of things you could drink between like water and bleach like soda sure it's not gonna kill you immediately but maybe like having that little drip over time three four ten years later you're like oh man like what happened to me and i think relationships are kind of like that too yeah they are i think we've we've not wildly but we've certainly overcorrected from everybody being tough everybody dealing with their own shit, everybody being, you know, stoic to a world now where everybody's a victim of some esoteric trauma that nobody else can understand. Nobody's parents loved them enough. Nobody's heard and felt and understood.

Everybody needs copious amounts of self-care. Everybody who does not actively give me exactly what I need at any given time is toxic and I'm cutting them out of my life. I think that some of that stuff is good in small doses, but I do think we've gotten to a point where people are so quick to label anybody who gives them any kind of dissenting feedback as a toxic human being. I certainly think there are no shortage of haters and toxic people who do not want to see you succeed because any success that you might accomplish is a direct indication of their inability to get anything done. Those are the people that I think you need

to cut out, which are the people who don't want to see you succeed or would happily sabotage you on your road to success because it just kind of shines a light on their inability to get shit done. And just not necessarily cutting those people out from your soapbox of you're toxic and you're out of my life, but you know, like, Hey, don't, don't give them so much time. If people aren't helping you or encouraging you or, you know, giving you feedback that's at least delivered gently and positively with some actionable feedback, they're just shitting on you and generally negative spend less time around them you know like yeah i don't know those are the bleach people who are actually trying to kill you try it out yeah you're like no more beach bleach people substantially less time around the soda people hang out as much as

you want with the water people tell me how you're how tell me how your life feels there we go i think that might work post in there somewhere there's some uh yeah and i think that also speaks to your definition of strength right like you cut out everything that is even remotely challenging and you will never be resilient right you're like boy that weight was heavy that's a toxic weight like yeah exactly lightweight yeah no no no, no. And there, there are people out there like that that, you know, are like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Not today. Not today. I don't want to lift that today. And I'm like, all right, well, have fun staying exactly where you're at. Like it does take a little bit of friction in this world to get things going. You can't grow in your comfort zone very much.

A lot of people are averse to that friction. And sometimes through resistance training or physical fitness, you can expose them to that and teach them that, hey, you survived that. Look at that. And you're going to be stronger for it. I do think it's a great medium for that, especially as you look at a world that many people would describe as like increasingly soft. But I really think what it is, is it's just it is a challenging world to live in. And not everybody was raised in a way that they know how to cope and deal with adversity. And I think that strength training is a, or just resistance training, physical fitness in general, it's like a really good vehicle for exposing yourself to voluntary shit that you don't want to do that makes you a little bit more likely to do the tough stuff required to live a good

life. I mean, I don't fucking know. I feel so pretentious for even saying that because I don't have it figured out. Nobody does. But I think in general, being able to do hard things is a good skill to have. And I think in general, fitness pursuits, practices, and habits are a great way to expose oneself to those kinds of things so that you can build them constructively and actionably, as opposed to just consistently reading self-help books that you do nothing with, which is the quintessential early 2000s, early teens of the new century way of dealing with shit. Like, oh, I read this book and I have all these tools that I'm not going to use until I use my next audible token on another regurgitation of the

same crap. It's like, have you tried just doing it? Cause that works pretty well. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The, the self-help book that you didn't take action on is a very good analogy. And I agree. I don't think it's pretentious to say that the world is a tough place. Objectively, this is probably the easiest world that human beings have ever lived in, like convenience wise and safety and risk to bodily harm and just premature death by, you know, raiding tribe standpoint. Easiest world to stay alive in tribe standpoint easiest world to stay alive in hardest world to stay sane in but a lot of people yeah they they they don't see challenge as anything but negative and so yeah i agree i think that's know, the world doesn't care about us. The world is just what it is. And it's up to us to interpret our circumstances and everything around us and to see a challenge

that maybe we've never faced before via a 10 pound PR can only help with that sort of metaphorical, you know, 10 pounds of mental pressure you've never felt. You're like, you know what? This is an opportunity. Last time I faced a challenge that I've never done, I overcame it. And I believe that made me stronger. Totally. Couldn't agree more. And then again, everything on that spectrum is to, at first it's easy, but to reach those highest levels, you have to be systematized. You have to be diligent and you have to be consistent, those highest levels, you have to be systematized, you have to be diligent, and you have to be consistent, all of which are very, very much valuable life skills that bleed into relationships, business, finance, spirituality. If you know how to be systematized, disciplined, show up, follow a plan, resistance training can teach you that as well, in addition to teaching you

resilience and helping you conquer the inner bitch as it's often called. Yeah. Mark Bell, you know, another Sonoma County guy, he's talked about that and how he's at this point in his life, you know, he's sort of fairly far removed from competitive powerlifting now, even though, you know, 10 years ago, he was squatting a thousand pounds, but he, he talks about how he kind of looks around at all his friends and all these people who are extremely impressive strength athletes and how dedicated they are to following their program, like linear periodization and progressive overload and managing their diet and making sure that you have the water cut protocol and they have their whole year planned

out for a competition schedule, maybe two years. He's like, imagine if you did that for your finances, your marriage, your anything like you, you guys could be killing it in every area of life. And instead, you're like, please, I've got to go fund me for new knee sleeves. You're like, what are you doing? I know, man. It's one of the things that has been challenging for me as a fitness professional, which is like, listen, I would love to invest as much time, energy, and effort into the expansion of my physical capabilities, but it's not aligned with my ultimate mission of helping other people experience what it means to expand your physical capabilities, to live pain-free, to lose enough weight to be able to

take the vacation to Europe you want. I want to share that with people. What I learned very early is going all in on your own fitness pursuits, whether they be athletic in nature, whether they be cosmetic in nature, whether it's the road to the stage or the road to the platform, that requires a tremendous amount of time and energy. And I think a lot of fitness professionals or fitness enthusiasts become entirely absorbed in their own journey. And while I think there are lessons to be learned from going all in on something, if you're unable to carry those lessons over into other elements of your life, because you're so damn obsessed with what are ultimately short-term goals that likely won't

position you long-term, financially, spiritually, emotionally, or relationally to be happy. Like if you just want to fucking hug your goddamn stupid little bodybuilding sword trophy for the rest of your life, and you want to walk around with that, and that's what you have to show. I think you've done yourself a disservice because the habits, behaviors, and things it takes to develop an exceptional physique or incredible strength, you can bring, if you can even bring a fraction of those to other people, you can change the world. There is a mildly self-interested vein of our industry that has always frustrated me. I've been in that vein myself, especially as somebody who found this industry younger. I've made all those mistakes. And there are so many lessons that you can take from this

and apply to other areas of your life that give you extreme leverage to just live better. If you just zoom out a little bit and realize, hey, fitness is a big thing, but it is certainly not the only thing. Are there one or two of those mistakes that you can expand on a little bit where you're like, God, if I had known what I do now, I'd be so far beyond where I'm at. Yeah. Unfortunately, because I found the game young, I got to make the mistakes early and make the pivots and make the recovery. But, you know, I would say absolutely the first mistake that I think a lot of people

make in their fitness is grotesquely misunderstanding the stress adaptation cycle. Like I just felt more working out was better. And if I went six or seven days a week, I'd just grow like a weed. And I probably wasted three to four years of unproductive training and wildly through just wildly wasted hours that I could have probably gotten more strength, more hypertrophy, better consistency by just training four days a week, like not an idiot. But I didn't think that four days a week was enough. So I fell firmly into the all or nothing mentality that a lot of people do when they first find fitness that has been a recovering, or I would say like catching my or getting my feet underneath me after

making that mistake has helped prevent me from making the all or nothing mistake in other areas of my life, which is so, so important. And then if I had to think of a second one on the fly, like just a lesson that I've learned through fitness, I would say it's probably for through like working with other people. learn through fitness, I would say it's probably for through like working with other people. It's just that you need to be able to communicate effectively and communicating in a way that makes you sound smart or trying to communicate in a way that makes you look smart to other trainers, to other coaches, to other people is very self-serving. And it's not necessarily like aligned with my ultimate mission of helping people be fit. So do you want to sound

smart or do you want to help people? And if you can get your ego out of the way and, you know, communicate to people in a way that resonates with them, that they can actually hear instead of trying to communicate in a way that makes you sound smart, you'll probably change a lot more lives a lot quicker. So those are like probably the two fuck ups that I go, oh fuck man. If I could just like run that back again, I'd probably just train four days a week. And instead of trying to like sound smart, I'll just tell people what they need to hear, how they need to hear it. And like, I don't necessarily regret those things every day, but I do laugh at that guy when I see him in my camera roll. When I go back four or five years ago, Oh my God,

that guy thought he really knew what he was doing, but he was so stupid. The, the episode prior to this conversation we're having now in terms of release order was with Shantae Cofield. And she was talking about this concept of empathic listening, which the definition is listening to others with the intention of understanding them as they want to be understood, which I think is sort of the only way to then

follow up and communicate to them what will actually help. And yeah, you're, you're a hundred percent right. There's a big difference between communicating so that you sound smart and communicating so that you're telling other people what they actually want to hear and not need to hear, but like what you think they need to hear, what they think they need to hear is that, man, that's a game changer as a coach, as a business person and in a relationship, all that stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. So those are mistakes that you made that now that everyone listening has heard them. Some of them I've made many more. So one of the things, the other things I wanted to ask you about was, and you mentioned this earlier in terms of like kind of some of the comparison traps that people make in terms of, you know, thinking that

if someone else is, is doing something better than them, that somehow that's like a personal fault of theirs, or maybe even if the person trying to make them feel bad. Sure. You made a great post recently on Instagram about five things you want every single one of your clients to understand. And I think one of them was that just because someone else is making progress faster than they are, that does not indicate a personal failure of any kind. Yeah, that's actually a regurgitation of a Charlie Munger quote, which is somebody else getting rich faster than you is hardly a tragedy, which I think just comes down to this like foundational component of being human and this organization of this 250,000 year old brain that works on this resource bias that if somebody has more acorns than me, they are going

to do better. Like we have this just unbelievable computational ability in our reptilian brain to turn everything into a scoreboard, whether it's somebody's fitness, the square footage of somebody's house. And the fact of the matter is people are at different spots along the way. And if you stop and look at the scoreboard, it hardly gives you the context of the whole game. And other people are allowed to be successful in their fitness. Other people are allowed to have better physiques than you. Other people are allowed to have better physiques than you. Other people are allowed to have better genetics than you. Other people are allowed to have a schedule that's more aligned with sticking to their nutrition and fitness than you. And the situation that they

are in isn't an indictment of your ability to reach your goals. And focusing on that is one of the most futile things that you can do. And I find that, you know, an intent focus on how much better other people have it is usually a harbinger of going absolutely fucking nowhere. So, you know, this notion that somehow, some way, like somebody else's success is in any way, shape, or form impacting my ability to find success is something that I think a lot of people struggle with in the fitness space and beyond. But just the idea that, hey, other people's progress should either inspire you, motivate you, or inform you in some way. It should in no way, shape, or form knock the train off the rails. Allow other people to be successful. Allow other people to have a nicer physique than you. allow other trainers to have more clients than you, allow other fitness professionals to have

more followers than you, and see what happens. Just allow yourself to be on your own journey and allow other people to be successful without thinking that in any way that has a reflection on you. If you just sit around and sulk with that, you'll get nowhere. It's, if nothing else, an indicator of what can happen for you if perhaps you find a way to align as much as you can in your life with reaching your goal. And so that's something I've always told clients. Just don't worry about where other people are at. Focus on your own shit. What are some of the other things that you try and instill in as many clients as possible?

Yeah, I think the most obvious one, the thing that pops right into my mind is play the long game. I think it's the just philosophical approach to life that I like. It's something that I'm a big fan of when it comes to things like personal finance. The recipe for getting rich in the 21st century is about as simple as investing $1,200 a month into the S&P 500 and allowing 100 years of consistent, stable returns to do what they've done consistently and stably for about 25 to 30 years. And you can guarantee yourself millionaire status at $1,200 a month if you just let the market do what it does. And so something that I've often told clients is like, listen, if you are capable

of sitting down, identifying your goal, and giving yourself a long enough time period to reach it, baking in multiple stops along the way for the inevitable fuck-ups that will occur, I can guarantee you almost 100% likelihood of achieving your goals. But it will take longer than you think. But if you give yourself that additional time, the probability of failure goes down drastically. If you give yourself some artificial constraint or some phony deadline that quite frankly doesn't exist when we talk about something as lifelong as physical fitness, you're going to set yourself up for feeling like you failed. So I always try to instill in clients to zoom out to the longest term possible goal that they have and work backwards

from there. It's like the, I think it's the TurboTax commercial that's going around right now where the guy who's investing in crypto and he keeps being like, I'm a millionaire. I'm not a millionaire. I'm a millionaire. Oh, I'm not a millionaire. He'm not a millionaire right he's like at the club yeah back at work and he's packing up his desk and he's putting everything back in the drawers i feel like i just feel like crypto is like a perfect like i don't want to say perfect because like there are some like i think one could look at crypto and be like okay there are some like noble and like unique things that this brings to the table in a finance system that has always been stacked against Joe Everyman and that is obviously filled with good old boys. There are so many gatekeepers.

In America, the banking and finance system is heavily skewed in favor of those who already have wealth. So like crypto definitely is like not all bad. But like most of these shit coins are nothing more than the fucking dog shit diets and supplements that people hype you up on that they're just trying to make a quick turn and burn on. Like whether it's there are so many ways in which like fad diets and fad supplements are marketed to people who don't know any better by people who do know better and know that, well, this isn't exactly what I did to get in shape, but I can make a quick profit on it.

I'm like, how is that any fucking different than shit coin 69 or jizz rocket? Or like, these are real coins that people are like, Hey, let's just sell this to people who don't know any better and make as much money as we can until there's regulation here. Yeah. I'm going to rent a mansion and launch a Bitcoin and make one video with like six drones. That's all it is. Then I might be able to buy this mansion off all y'all suckers. Yeah. And crypto is big enough that they don't need D-list celebrity fitness inspo endorsements. They get fucking Steph Curry and LeBron James and Matt Damon out here to tell you to buy shit coin or go on crypto.com or FTX

and make an account and buy all these speculative assets that none of my fucking money's in, certainly not a good amount of it. And yeah, see what happens. You know, it's like, you know, a celebrity endorsement and the 1% possibility of unbelievably rapid results in fitness or unbelievably rapid results in the accretion of wealth is still extremely tantalizing to the average person. Perfect segue into another question I wanted to ask you. you made another post recently and it was talking about the idea of a, the difference between the concept of a quote unquote best diet versus best dietary practices. What's the difference? So like when I think about what most people need nutritionally, like I feel that it actually becomes quite simple. The general population would benefit from not drinking

caloric-laden beverages, drinking more fluids, eating more plants, eating more protein, eating less processed food. Those are dietary practices that I think are generally applicable for a massive swath of the population, 90 plus percent. There are people who exist on the fringe that will need to make substantially greater adjustments to their dietary practices to live the healthiest life possible. But for most people, if you just said, okay, new rule, you can only eat processed food twice a week. You can only eat fast food once a week. The rest of the shit that you eat is going to be mostly cooked from home, mostly plants, mostly whole grains, mostly high quality animal proteins, protein shakes in there. Just got to make sure you get enough protein and drink

tons of water, stop drinking sugar free drinks. Can you do that? That would change 90% of people's health prognosis positively. And if everybody in America did that would be far and away the healthiest country in the world with the lowest cumulative BMI. And it's just so motherfucking complicated for people to grasp that those practices are essentially the underpinnings of every fad diet that people use for weight loss. Oh yeah. You like keto? I bet you like it and lose weight on it because it's mostly protein and mostly vegetables. Oh, you like vegan? I bet it works well because it's a shit ton of fibrous, rich plant food. That's very nutritious. Oh my gosh. Carnivore works for you. Funny what happens when you eat mostly protein.

It's like, okay, all of these things are very constrictive and hard to stick to. But there are some themes here that seem to be relatively consistent. Can we just pull out the themes? Because none of these diets are effective, in my opinion, at that population level. And so to say that any one of them is the best would only ever be applicable for the context of one human being for whom I bet my fucking ass, if they said carnivore is the best diet ever for me, I'd say, maybe it is the best diet ever for you. But like, have you eaten a fucking piece of fruit? Because even the main carnivore dude, whose name I can never fucking remember.

But thank you. Even that fool eats fruit now. He knows he was, I'm not going to say he knew he was full of shit, but he knew that he probably could have gotten away with eating some fruit because guess what? It's fruit. And it's like, oh, now you eat a mostly protein rich diet with fruit. Holy shit, dude. If everybody did that, we'd all be insanely fit and healthy and well and getting probably

enough fiber to take a regular shit. And I know that you can dance around the fiber conversation with the carnivore people the same way you can dance around the fucking b12 conversation with the vegan people it really just comes down to the fact that like hey mostly protein or a good amount of protein and a lot of plants with tons of water and not so much processed food is like very very simple from a practices standpoint and i think that works better than trying to identify what most people do, which is trying to identify what is the best of these multiple fad diets for me. And people operate from a place where they're oftentimes searching for a diet. They're not even searching for nutrition. 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

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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. DrinkLMNT.com slash Coach Danny. Get your sample pack today completely for free. Just pay shipping. Back to the show. That last bit, I mean, everything you said there was fantastic. That last little bit is so pertinent though, because similar to exercise plans, right. Where people are looking for,

you know, Google headline best exercise routine ever, but they don't care why they're not actually thinking about their personal goals. And the idea of like, what does keto even mean? Like what, you know, most, I don't think most people really understand it. I think they just think it's maybe high fat or something, or that means they can't have bread, uh, you know, or whatever they're eating. They think they're eating low carb when they're just eating tons of vegetables. You're like, those are carbs. Like white bread is not the only carb and neither is donuts. So, yeah, I think, man, so important. Like the nutrition industry, similar to the health care industry and fitness is like it is a business, right?

People working in health care, nutrition and fitness need to make a living. But if the point is to make money and that takes precedent over helping people get healthy or fit, then that's an issue. Totally. And I couldn't agree more. So many people, our nutritional literacy theoretically should be built on our foundational understanding of a few basic things, which of course we don't teach children. But most people who do keto don't know what it is.

Most people who do veganism don't have some ethical flag that they're planting. I totally respect that. Most people are making largely misinformed decisions about their health because somebody who's also misinformed communicated that to them. And they have built a narrative around these things that might be entirely fictitious and completely, completely misinformed. You know, I know, I know people who think they are keto that eat carbohydrates, like, like, like that in his inherently and theoretically like hard to do, like, unless the carbohydrates you eat are like in single tiny, like one gram servings. Like it just shows that most people really don't even have a target that they're aiming at.

They're just spraying. They're just spraying. They're just hoping something lands and they're just using terms. And like, that's why I say, like, like let's shift away from diets and towards these foundational practices and components of human nutrition that are the bedrock of what most fit, healthy, successful people do, whether they try to reskin it and package it as a diet or not. fit, healthy, successful people do, whether they try to reskin it and package it as a diet or not. Yep. Frustrating, man. Frustrating, frustrating stuff. It's so much simpler than we've made it out to be. Same with training. It really is, but it takes that long-term approach. Like it's kind of, yeah, not,

not even like, I mean, we could go back to the crypto example, but I feel like most people are trying to hit the diet lottery. It's kind of the same. It's just like, okay, you can do that for your whole life. And the mathematical probability of you hitting it are fucking as dog shit. And you know what people say about the lottery? 70 times less than getting struck by lightning. They say that the lottery is a tax on stupid people. And that's exactly what it is. And I

don't mean that to sound condescending and pretentious. I really don't. I have played the mega millions. And you know what I thought when I went and bought that ticket? What the fuck am I doing? I know the odds of winning the lottery are dog shit. But we all get caught in the hype and the FOMO, which is like a new societal experience that social media makes like 10 times worse. But yeah, if you're trying to win the diet lottery, the odds of you losing are substantially higher than you winning if you just look at mathematical probability, which is another thing people are absolutely horrible at. So I think this speaks and you, and you've touched on this a couple of times,

sort of the separation between working off of motivation versus working off of a foundation of discipline. I think, you know, there's, you have to be on some level motivated to start. But then like fairly quickly that needs to shift towards discipline by like 5%, 10% until you're, you're heavily skewed in that discipline realm.

Can you speak to why you think that's so important? Yeah. As a relatively unmotivated person, I think I can, you know, I'm not particularly motivated to do a particularly high number of things. You know, my mood is like skews slightly more like on the like, highly energized slash moderately depressive scale, like I would skew towards being like moderately pessimistic slightly depressive at times not highly motivated to you know move mountains so i'm nothing special and i i can i can speak from experience and say that like much like a video game where your character has like attack button a attack button b item on the trigger. And like, when you work up this small meter high enough,

you can go beast mode for like 10 seconds and do two times the amount of damage. And it's like, okay, that little meter is motivation. It will refill slowly. And when you use it, it will give you like a little bit of power, but you still got to play the game. You still got to play the game. It'll refill down the road. But if you only wait to fight or play the game or try to advance in the game, when you're in beast mode, you're going to die on level one. So, you know, motivation or discipline is not, in my opinion, the way to look at it. It's discipline. And then when motivation comes along, fucking hit that button, go beast mode, you know, maybe do two, three weeks worth of work in a week and then get right back on your grind.

Motivation can be the best tool in your toolbox to get you started, to get over a hurdle, to, you know, really get stuff done. And I don't think we should demonize it, but if you're sitting around wondering like, man, when's that motivation going to come back so I can take action? You know, remember that that's like it's a silly analogy, but it's like a gauge in a video game. It needs time to build up. Motivation is fleeting. It's tied to myriad of things beyond my understanding of human psychology. What motivates people can be like wildly different and absurd.

And so if you're just sitting around waiting for that, you're kind of fucking yourself. So if you can just say like, okay, I need to identify the bare ass minimum that I can apply towards this goal when I don't want to do it. Like that's what's kind of worked well for me. And like, I feel like social media is a good example. Like in theory, like what I do every day is I try to conceptualize one thought and turn it into a post. And a lot of times those thoughts aren't very good. But sometimes they are. And when they are and I get the feedback that they are, that actually generates more motivation. And so when I wasn't motivated to make content because my content sucked,

I just said, oh, my content sucks. I'll do it when I'm motivated. I'd actually never make good content. So I think what it really is... You never make any content, none, just, just find something you can do on the days that you're the least motivated to do something and set that as your bare ass minimum. And if that's your floor, if your floor is above zero, it'll be substantially better than hoping that you have this high ceiling. It's a lot like football or fantasy football, which I play, which is like, hey, at multiple points throughout this theoretical pretend draft where you're drafting players who might do well for you in this stupid little game,

you're always choosing between guys who have a high floor or a high ceiling. And if you construct a team of guys that are all high floor, you'll do pretty good, but you won't win the championship. If you construct a team full of guys that are all high ceiling, you might win some weeks by a lot, but you also lose by a lot because they'll bust a lot. You need to create a perfect team of just the right amount of high floor and high ceiling players to win. And in life and in these habits that we're trying to either make stick or use as vehicles to ultimately drive a means to an end, you're going to have days that are high floor or high ceiling. And you're going to have days that are hopefully high floor. If your floor is zero, if when you don't have motivation, you do nothing, you're fucked.

But if you're one of those people who are like, look, man, I've got it set up. So even on the days that I don't have a lot of juice, I know what I can do to still keep the ball rolling. Oh my God. When you layer in like the occasional day where you have that rocket fuel, you'll get really far, but just set yourself up so that you have a floor that's higher than zero. And when the motivation comes along, slam the button, I think you'll be good. That's my opinion on it, which again, pretentious as it sounds, I think works. No, but you, I mean, what can you speak to other than personal experience? And then also what you've tried to instill in the people you work with and you've seen work, right? It's like

anecdotal evidence is, is, is pretty important. And I'm sure you could find a self-help book to read that would outline most of what you just said. I've read them all. I've read them all, dude. I went through my fucking Tony Robbins phase and I'm like, that dude's soft. Then I went through my Jordan Peterson phase. And now I think that dude's a fucking idiot. And really what it comes down to is like, okay, this stuff is good for you at different stops in your life. And your receptivity to it is highly correlated to your worldview. At the end of the day, you got to do it. You got to do it. You can read them all, but you got to do it. Yeah. I'm always right. You can always tie it back to

training. Like squats are great unless, you know, until you're like, I want to compete in like a competitive kettlebell, like 10 minute, you know, snatch test. You're like, well, then you got to stop doing one rep squats. Like you got to grab the kettlebell, you know, Tony Robbins is good until you, you know, you need some stoicism, right you need some stoicism. Then you got to grab the Ryan Holiday because you're not going to get it from Tony Robbins. We talked earlier about not comparing yourself to others except to have them potentially motivate you or inform your decisions, maybe inspire you a little bit. And I do think there's a benefit to what you were just saying about keeping your floor high, even if your floor is like one,

anything's better. There are so many people at zero most of the time. And if your goal is to get ahead in life, whatever that means, whatever you're, and I would encourage people to like sit down and actually have some deep thought about what does success mean for you, whether it is financial or it's time freedom or being a great parent or being jacked as hell, right? Sticking at one and not letting yourself get to zero will move the needle. And life is inevitably competitive, right? It just is. We're still an animal, which people have a tendency to forget.

I'm in a little bit of a Jordan Peterson phase right now, just like getting through the 12 rules for life. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I don't hate Jordan Peterson. I don't. And I like, like I have read his 12 rules for life. I haven't read it. I've audibled his 12 rules for life and I've consumed almost every podcast he's ever produced. And I find so much of what he says to be valuable, but I also find that it lacks nuance. And when I, as a 27 year old dude, go to my client and tell them that their personal responsibility is the only thing standing between them and their success, I have been, shall I say, schooled by adults who have different lives and situations than me telling me that, listen, motherfucker, there's more to life than personal responsibility, to which I have had the pleasure of saying, I've stepped away from this and learned that, yeah, there are some things that aren't in my immediate control. But I do like Jordan and I do like the

notion of personal responsibility ultimately on the road to creating the best life that you can. But there are some things we can't control. Not to go off on a, the best life that you can. But you know, there are some things we can't control not to go off on. No, no. It's like, he, he's a good person to have in your like social psychology tool belt. You're like this person that I'm talking to right now clearly doesn't think they have any personal response, like personal responsibility and everything is not their fault. Like I need to pull out, I need to be my Jordan Peterson today. The person who's like, has a bunch of

stuff going on in their life. Like I know what I can control. Um, right now it's right now it's, uh, my kids are really, you know, they're demanding a lot of my attention and you're, you can't be like, just make your bed, junior, just make your bed junior just make your bed okay i i guess part of what like skewed me and i'm not even no i'm not gonna go there that's don't worry about it i was gonna i was just gonna bring up the um i think it's chapter one where he talks about the lobsters yeah that's the hierarchy of the lobster yeah yeah like the lobster yeah stand up straight with your you know and like have your claws up and like sometimes you need to look big and that will actually help you like get a mate and like probably get a promotion that simple guys just

make your bed and fucking turn into a lobster and if you can't do that you'll go nowhere yeah man just pinch that motherfucker don't get out of your way. Yeah, exactly. I have one more question about something you shared recently on Instagram. And that was a post recently that is a little more maybe on the stoic side of things, possibly, or at least could be interpreted that way. or at least could be interpreted that way. And that was something you shared about, uh, making health a priority and, and either choosing to make your health a priority, but like assuming that someone is healthy, sure. Making it a priority to stay that way or eventually becoming sick and being forced. Like at some point, no matter what it's inevitable possibly uh terribly inevitable

that we will all prioritize our health but we have a choice right so like yeah we're all gonna die we all got that down we're all eventually going to reach the same destination and hopefully we reach that destination peacefully at old age with good health, surrounded by people we love as we gently fall to sleep and we don't wake up. But most people don't die that way. Unfortunately, most people die of preventable illnesses or illnesses that are oftentimes highly correlated with lifestyle decisions. And I like that quote because it speaks to the idea of where things fall

on a prioritization like framework or ladder. And I think if you spent your whole life with your health being a top five priority, you can prevent being in a position where your health is your only priority because you're fighting for survival. And so if you take rudimentary care of yourself over the course of your life, by focusing on these practices that we've talked about nutritionally and some movement practices to help you maintain and fortify your health, you can avoid being in that horrific situation where you get a diagnosis that then that is your life. Your life is now fighting this illness. That is priority number one. And my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at 46 years old. He can't walk anymore.

He got a horrible hand dealt to him. And he was on my dad's side. So his sister's husband was a physical therapist for 20 years. He was eating grape nuts, organic, non-GMO, high protein, grass fed shit before it was fucking cool. And he died of bone marrow cancer in his sixties. Not everything is preventable and healthy people get horrifyingly unfortunate diagnoses all the time, but that's the very, very rare exception to the rule. Most people who get diagnoses that change their health forecast for the essentially rest of their life are getting for are getting diagnoses that are heavily correlated with the lifestyle decisions

that they've made and so i like to think that a little bit of movement and a little bit of nutritional competency in the earliest part of my life will hopefully help me push those kinds of diagnoses or battles off altogether, or at least down the road. But the idea that you can avoid them altogether is misguided. You will have to pay the piper. It will come a knocking. And so if you don't make it at least, let's say an arbitrary number here, a top five priority in your life, your health and nutrition, I could almost guarantee that you will have a period of your life where fighting for the quality and duration of your life becomes a number one priority. Which if you have no experience prioritizing that at all, what a fucking miserable life that is. Oh, you know, I made it to 60 and I had catastrophic liver damage from drinking my whole life. And now here I am sitting having to entirely reorder how

I eat. I have to start exercising for the first time and I can no longer indulge in this, you know, habit that I'm entirely physiologically addicted to, that's going to fucking suck way more than any tiny ass sacrifice you make with your diet or moving. And it's like, listen, I have seen this. I have seen people suffer through this when they didn't have the choice. You do. I don't want you to suffer like that. It's horrible. It's terrible to watch. It's not fun. I know it kills my dad every day knowing that when I was in high school, we couldn't shoot hoops. We couldn't play catch. He couldn't go to games. That was hard for him. He did nothing to deserve that, but it can come a knock in any fucking time. And you never know when it's going to come a knock,

but you can really, really make it less likely that it comes to your door. If you do a few simple things on the front end. So I try to remind people of that as much as I can. Yeah. Similarly, my dad was diagnosed with MS in 2014, likely has had it for likely had it for 30 years prior to actually

being diagnosed again. That's not really a lifestyle related disease, but I think it's important to realize that, you know, for your dad, for my dad, for people in these situations, cancer is different cancer because cancer can be so rapidly life altering and rob people of so many years of life. Parkinson's, MS more often rob people of quality of life for an extended period of time, unfortunately, which there's an argument for what's better, what's worse, but we don't have to go there. what's better, what's worse, but we don't have to go there. Um, but you know, I'm thankful. And I know that my dad and my brother and my mom are thankful that it wasn't MS on top of right. Heart disease, diabetes. Like there's a reason that my dad has not probably had a ton of like relapses in his MS and that he's still relatively mobile and that he doesn't need a full-time caretaker, right? And that he can do almost everything for himself. And when he got that

diagnosis, a lot of lifestyle stuff on top of the unavoidable. Yeah. And this is the thing. Some people get a diagnosis and they rise to the occasion. Some people get a diagnosis and they become a victim of their circumstances. If you get diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and MS, it's not the end of your life. There are things you can do, but you immediately have to prioritize those things. There are people who get diagnosed with diabetes

who continue to just do what they do. There are people who have diabetes that don't know they have diabetes because they probably know they have diabetes, but they have no interest in getting a diagnosis and treatment because changing their lifestyle is very, very hard. And so I think that like, essentially what the, the message there is, is you're going to be asked to rise to the occasion one day or another. Um, and if you choose to rise to the occasion voluntarily, you might not get

called out down the road. And so you can either start fighting now or you can fight like hell down the road. But if you have to fight like hell down the road and you never fought before, you're probably going to get knocked on your fucking ass. Yeah. That is a great way to put it. Absolutely great way to put it. Urgency. Like there's such an urgency. People skip the gym, they skip cooking, they skip grocery shopping. People skip the gym, they skip cooking, they skip grocery shopping. Very few people skip chemo, right? Nope. Because it's like, I'm going to die.

Right. What's the alternative? And you could make the argument that the alternative for skipping these things voluntarily in your youth is setting up for a date with disaster down the road. And again, not all these things, you can't forecast perfectly. There are always outliers. But the general life trajectory for a sedentary human being who does not put much effort or energy into the maintenance of their health is not a trajectory that I'd like to align myself with personally. Agreed. So speaking of all these lifestyle things that can improve the trajectory of my life, your life, everyone listening's life, I want to move to the closing question for the day. And that is for you, Danny. So this being the Essential Strength Podcast, we start with your personal definition of strength.

In closing, what are three essential elements of your day-to-day life, little routines, activities, or habits that you try not to go a day without? Okay, so I have a dog. I have a dog, and that dog loves me unconditionally. And I try to, every day, for at least 60 seconds, when he is laying on the ground with his butt in the air, wiggling his little nub tail. I try to get down on his level and transfer. This sounds really hippy dippy, but it's not through my hands to his little head by rubbing his body and telling him I love him. I try to transfer unconditional love to that animal who is showing it to me. I think one thing I try to go every day or one thing I don't go without every day is giving genuine, true, passionate love to either something as simple as my animal or my girlfriend or my friends. I try to pause, take a break,

and realize that like that transfer of genuine emotion, whether it's from person to person or person to dog, like that's what life is all about. And if you're not taking time or making time for that, you know, you're not experiencing everything that life has to offer. So I try to slow down, show affection and really live in the moment with those simple things. That's something I do every day with my dog. I literally stop and I'll be like, has it been a minute yet? No, keep rubbing that motherfucker's belly. He deserves it. He loves you unconditionally. Live in that space. Do that. Something else I try to do every single day is like, I try to identify moments where I'm like, I don't want to do this. So for example, yesterday I was helping somebody move some furniture and then I had to go back by

the studio. And on my way back by the studio, I saw the UPS truck dropping off these lockers that I ordered. And I was like, fuck, I can stop right now and assemble those or I can wait and do it tomorrow. And one of the things I try to do specifically is catch myself in those moments and go, no, go do it now. And so something I try to do every day is specifically find a task that theoretically could wait to be done tomorrow and do it today. The old Benjamin Franklin quote of don't put off till tomorrow. What can be done today? Those are things. And I would say like exercise, but truthfully, I don't exercise every day.

I would say eat healthy, but truthfully, I don't eat healthy every day, but a health practice that I do try to commit to every day that sometimes can be a workout is getting outside, being outside, whether that be playing golf, whether that be taking the dog for a walk, whether that be just getting some sun. Those are three things that I would say that I do every single day that make my life a little better. Get outside. Don't put off for tomorrow what could be done today and love someone or something unconditionally for at least 60 seconds.

It's one minute. It's amazing what that does to my mood. And I know in my room right now, my room's full of garbage. That dog is sitting outside that fucking door right now waiting for me to open it. And he's going to roll over on his belly the minute I get off and I'm going to rub his belly and he's going to be the happiest guy on

earth and i get to like when you realize how simple it is and how little effort and energy it takes to change the mood of any animal whether it's a dog or a human you live your life like a little bit differently because if i can do that for him with one minute, like in one smile at the grocery store goes a long way, you know, like one door being held open for somebody goes a long way. I think it just starts a cascade of me being a less shitty person. So I try to try to get that done every day. Right on, man. Hey, I appreciate your time. Appreciate the conversation. Um, you know, the amount of thought you clearly put into all your answers, right? None of this is just shallow. This is legitimately wanting to express ideas.

I'm throwing it at you from wherever it's coming from this morning. It's probably the two espresso shots I had. Bingo. Well, man, that dog's going to get the best belly rub of his life. Aggressive belly rubs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He might ask you to stop. All right, dude, I'm going to hit the stop button, but hopefully we can do this again sometime.

Yeah, dude, anytime. Happy to pop on.