Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 198 - Q and A: Best Macro Split, BCAA's, reverse diets

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. This is episode 198. And as always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. Today is my first episode back feeling fully recovered from COVID. I did release episode 197 where we talked quite a bit about glute training. If you haven't heard that one, go back and listen to that one. That one came out on Monday, June 6th. But today is a Q&A episode. I'm feeling 100% improved. My training is back to 100%. My recovery feels awesome. Generally, I thought it was very manageable, although I certainly wouldn't recommend going out and getting it, and I won't minimize what I believe to be the severity of it.

Starting point is 00:00:52 I will just say that it is not what I expected it to be after two and a half years of being extremely mindful and doing everything I could, within reason, to avoid getting it. and doing everything I could within reason to avoid getting it. Um, if you are on the way back from it or you have had it, uh, one thing I will say after having done some research, uh, into, okay, what, what's my return to exercise, uh, going to look like is that it's very different and depends on the situation in the person. And while I was able to work out basically the entire time, although I did have to dial back the intensity, I would say on days one and two when my symptoms were the most intense, and I was able to resume rigorous working out immediately after those first two days and get back to pretty hardcore

Starting point is 00:01:44 training this week. One of the things I stumbled across in my research was that not everybody is going to respond the same. So blanket exercise advice like stay moving, stay active might be applicable for a large swath of the population, but not for everybody. And with COVID being fairly ubiquitous and it being different from the flu and a cold because it is a respiratory pathogen of a novel and unique origin of which we're still relatively uncertain, I'm not going to say like, oh, do this, do that, do the other thing. What I will tell you is I was able to stay active. I think it made a difference. I focused on eating nutrient dense foods as I always do when I'm sick. I don't think that made any difference here or there. Perhaps it did, but I didn't notice like, oh my gosh, I got over this so much faster by eating only nutritious foods. I've never felt that made a huge difference when

Starting point is 00:02:40 I'm sick. I do think that things generally have to work through their course. I did contrast showers, hot and cold, which I do felt made a difference in helping me better manage my fever, which was gone after two days. All of this to say, at this point, I think over half of the United States population has contracted some strain or variant of COVID-19. It's very likely that you will too. It's much more likely if you are not vaccinated that it will have symptoms that are more severe, which might make it harder for you to train. If you do get it, don't go to the gym and train. But for me, staying active, focusing on nutritious foods, getting sun and taking hot, cold contrast showers helped me feel better more quickly on a purely subjective, non-expert, non-medical basis.

Starting point is 00:03:29 Just going to throw that out there because that is why podcast releases have been more sporadic over the course of the last several weeks. I have been kind of down and out, And I generally don't like how my voice sounds anyway, because I have a deviated septum and basically allergy six months out of the year, but it sounded even more obnoxious when I had COVID. So getting into your guys' questions, which I fielded from my Instagram, my Instagram, of course, being the primary social media that you have access to me on. My handle is danny.matranga. And at least twice a week on my Instagram stories, I give you guys the opportunity to engage with me and ask me any questions that you might want, a handful of which I answer right there on Instagram, specifically those that I haven't answered before.

Starting point is 00:04:21 And many of them I save for the podcast because I think that the podcast is a great medium for going into greater detail in a way that I can't when I'm talking or using Instagram as that medium. So this first question comes from Liza underscore Jane, and she asks, do I follow any specific macro splits? And a macro split, for those of you who don't know, is basically just a kind of arbitrary division or ratio of how many protein grams, how many carb grams, and how many fat grams do you eat per day. Basically look at your total calories and give me a rough percentage of what percentage of total calories that give me a rough percentage of what percentage of total calories that you eat in a day come from each of those three macros.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And so there are many commonplace macro splits that people will follow. For example, if you are on a ketogenic diet, it's not uncommon for protein and carbs to represent like carbs oftentimes are less than 5% of total calories. Protein sometimes can be as low as 10% with 85% of calories coming from fat. That would be like a more traditional ketogenic diet. So that would be an example of a macro ratio. A very common macro ratio is the 40-40-20 ratio, where you get 40% of your daily calories from protein, 40% from carbs, and 20% from fats. I find that to be a little bit of what I would describe as overkill, particularly in the protein department. But on a more general level, I would say consistently, I get about 50% of my calories from carbohydrates, about 25% from fat,

Starting point is 00:06:11 and about 25% from protein with the most likely variability coming between the carbs and the protein. Oftentimes, I will get a little bit more protein than that, closer to, I'd say, 30%. Whereas on the back end, I might get a little bit less carbs, closer to, say, like 40%. But I'm generally hitting those ratios on average for a variety of reasons. One, I do think getting adequate dietary protein is important. But if I eat a gram per pound at 180 pounds, that's only 720 calories from protein. And if I eat 3000 a day, that's like 25%. So I can get about a gram per pound of body weight in protein and still only have it equal about 20% of my daily intake. If I were to eat more than that, I'd feel so damn full. I don't think I could get the rest

Starting point is 00:07:03 of the macros I need in to perform my best because protein is so satiating, particularly when you get it from mostly whole foods, which I have a tendency to do. So I also do use protein shakes on occasion. So that's one reason why my protein is there. Another one that might stand out to you is my dietary fat intake being a little higher. That's mostly just due to general preference. I like foods that taste good and have fat in them more than I like foods that are extremely high in carbohydrate with less fat. Although, don't get me wrong,

Starting point is 00:07:35 I love like a bowl of cereal or oatmeal and things like that or rice, but I definitely like foods that are both carby and fatty, those hyperpalatable, hard not to overconsume foods. I have a hard time staying away from those 100% of the time. So I always leave a little bit of extra wiggle room in the fat department. And so that is the closest thing I can give you to a quote unquote macro split. This next question comes from at jail b brooks good workouts at home if i can't go to the gym so this is a really good question i don't think um you know just because the infancy of the pandemic has passed uh i don't think home workouts are going anywhere. And as somebody who is fortunate enough to have an entire home gym,

Starting point is 00:08:27 please take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt because I will try to work backwards from where I'm at and what I have access to, to what I would describe as more generally applicable. But a well-equipped home gym with some dumbbells, some barbells, bands, a couple plates, is very, very effective and efficient at driving a substantial amount of muscle growth and results. It will not be the same as going to a gym where you have greater access to machines and probably substantially more weight

Starting point is 00:08:57 to play with in the long run because obviously the longer you have been training, the greater stress you will need to put on your body to continue to elicit adaptations that will drive greater growth. But for novices, or even intermediate weightlifters, being able to train from home with dumbbells and bands is probably going to be enough to continue to potentiate results, especially for newbies or complete novices. If you are not training at all, just bodyweight training can be extremely challenging and productive. And there are avenues of bodyweight training like calisthenics, which offer basically limitless potential for progression with just the weight of your own body, assuming you keep an extremely lean body mass because advanced calisthenics athletes are all extremely fucking lean because you have to be stupid lean

Starting point is 00:09:52 and light and have extremely high relative strength to succeed. But calisthenic or body weight exercises like squats, lunges, pushups, pull-ups, or inverted rows, various forms of core stability work, all can be done with just the weight of your own body and can be very stimulative to a new lifter. If you can layer in or add in a set of adjustable dumbbells or a handful of different dumbbells, I recommend a light pair and a heavy pair if you can't get adjustables, and some bands, you can train from home and make phenomenal results. In fact, my Home Heroes group programming pod, the group of people that I have in my training app that train

Starting point is 00:10:30 exclusively from home with bands and dumbbells, they're following a four-day-a-week program using just those two pieces of equipment, making awesome results for like 35 bucks a month. That's what the app costs. It's free for your first week if you just want to try it. So that is an extremely low barrier for entry. Basically like, okay, spend a hundred bucks on a set of dumbbells, light and heavy, spend 50 bucks on a variety of different bands, spend 40 bucks on a yoga mat. And for about 200 bucks in setup costs and 30 bucks a month, you can train from home in less than 40 minutes and make substantially better results using dumbbells, bands, and bodyweight training than just doing a random amalgamation of shit that you see on Instagram. Structure will help you to continue

Starting point is 00:11:18 to drive results at home with less equipment. It is absolutely possible to make progress. You just have to be realistic that once you hit that peak or once those dumbbells or weights or body weight starts to become easy that you're not pushing yourself, your results will slow and you will need to stress your body in a unique and novel way, whether that's with more weight, with newer exercises, with more volume, with less rest, you know, you have to kind of go back to that central tenant of progressive overload. 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

Starting point is 00:12:02 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.

Starting point is 00:12:45 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

Starting point is 00:13:19 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

Starting point is 00:13:56 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,

Starting point is 00:14:48 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

Starting point is 00:15:09 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

Starting point is 00:15:58 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.

Starting point is 00:16:35 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 T slash coach Danny. They'll send you every single flavor in an individual packet. You can try them out completely

Starting point is 00:17:15 free. Just pay shipping drink element t.com slash coach Danny. Get your sample pack today completely for free. Just pay shipping. Back to the show. Okay. Macro-friendly meal prep companies that I recommend. This question comes from Miss Gammon, and I am going to plug our partner, Chow Meals. Chow does a really good job of creating protein packed meals. I have tried a variety of meal prep companies and my biggest gripe is that they're extremely high fat and oftentimes very low protein. Because of the popularity of the ketogenic diet, many meal prep companies have gone full keto in how they prepare meals. Chow has keto options, but they also have a lot of really good high protein, moderate carb, moderate fat options that you can add fruit, rice, or toast to if you'd

Starting point is 00:18:06 like to increase the carbohydrate amount. Obviously, you can add different forms of dietary fat, but you'll very rarely need to add protein. A lot of their meals have 35, 45, even 55 plus grams of whole foods, high quality, well-prepared animal protein. That is my vibe. So that is generally what I recommend. I have found that these meals reheat quite well. They don't end up being cooked twice. They're just reheated via steam, which is extremely, extremely valuable and enjoyable. And you can literally just go to chowmeals.com, check out using the promo code Danny, save 10% on your order, all future orders, and get really high quality meals shipped directly to you. I've been in the middle of moving from one house to another while opening a studio, which doesn't have a kitchen. So, so much of what

Starting point is 00:18:57 I do is in the microwave and having these chow meals available to me every week has allowed me to get stupid lean and make extremely easy, low fatigue decisions. I understand that finances and money is extremely personal and unique, so I won't make the general recommendation that you should just do this. But if you can afford to have meals sent to you and you have the discipline to train and just eat that food, you have the discipline to train and just eat that food, you can get so lean so fast. It's stupid. And I know that that's restrictive and it's probably not sustainable. But for those of you who have the economic means to have your meals shipped to you, the difference that makes in eliminating one's proclivity or reducing one's proclivity for snacking on this or snacking on that or going out to eat here. It's remarkable. It is absolutely remarkable.

Starting point is 00:19:54 I have inadvertently gotten shredded only eating these meals because that's just what I have. I've just been having them shipped out here. I'm not going to the store. I'm not cooking because in my current situation, a lot of the items that I would be using to cook are packed up. They're in boxes. They're not at one house. They're on their way to the other house where I don't have time to come home and cook in between multiple clients at the studio or recording podcasts or, you know, communicating with clients on the app, there's a lot of things and responsibilities that I have, but going and being able to get a high protein meal very, very quickly and very, very rapidly. Um, and basically having it already ready to go. I don't have any excuse other than to microwave it for two minutes has allowed me to

Starting point is 00:20:40 get stupid lean in the easiest way possible. Obviously I'm being very busy and staying active, but like, it's remarkable. Like quite frankly, if, if a celebrity or somebody with a, you know, let's say, I don't even want to say a celebrity because it's really not that expensive. It's like a hundred dollars a week, which a lot of people spend eating out fucking every single week. So somebody said, yo, I got a gym membership. I got a hundred bucks a week. I want to get lean. What do I do? I'd say literally order your food, have it sent to your door. Don't eat anything fucking else besides a protein shake, apples, bananas, berries, various fruits, unlimited amounts of green vegetables. You can snack on any vegetables, fruits, or protein rich snacks you want and like protein shakes and pair that with only eating any like of the options that they send out,

Starting point is 00:21:23 which are all super flavorful and unique. No, they don't taste like they were made at a fucking five-star restaurant, but they do taste damn good. I finish every single one. Uh, just eat the shit that shows up at your house and things from this list and continue to train in a way that you enjoy and watch what happens. It's, it's pretty remarkable. It has made a big difference for me. I understand that option is not financially feasible for everybody or practical, but wow, is it convenient, versatile and working well for me. And Chow Meals is, as far as I'm concerned, no worse than any other option. But what they do well, extremely well, is provide you with a good amount of protein, which is what I want to be paying for when I do this stuff. I don't want to be paying for fucking rice and vegetables. I want

Starting point is 00:22:11 to be paying for high quality, well-prepared proteins. And that's exactly what's at the center of all of these meals. Okay. Here's a question that I have answered many times, but it's always good to review. It's from KiraGuardiaDVM. Best shoes for lifting. So when you are training your upper body, I don't think your footwear matters. If you have a mixed sessions, total body sessions or lower body specific sessions, I am massively in favor of a flat, minimally cushioned shoe like a Vans or a Converse and just generally like fitness specific shoes from manufacturers like Nike or Adidas or Reebok. Like they are doing a much better job as

Starting point is 00:22:58 a manufacturer of saying this shoe is for cross training and this shoe is for running. So like running shoes are better for running or upper body training. Many running shoes are very aesthetically pleasing. So somebody might choose to wear like a Nike ultra boost or an Adidas ultra booster and Nike Air Max 270, which Nike and Adidas might sell as running slash lifestyle shoes. They'd be fine for upper body training, but they're so cushioned. They'll probably take away from things like lunges, squats, and deadlifts. So flatter soled shoes like that are great. And if you want to take it to the like absolute max, you can get shoes specifically for Olympic weightlifting and movements that are really built around the

Starting point is 00:23:40 squat where a high level of stability, firmness, and ankle mobility are really what you're after. So those are kind of how I would look at weightlifting shoes. And I know I've answered this before, but it just seems to be a question that I can continue to expand on. And I know it's very, very broadly applicable for a lot of people. Okay, this question comes from SuperDuperCool. They ask, any tips for ending a caloric deficit and going to maintenance? So, it's become very popular over the years to perform what many people refer to as a reverse diet, which to define it in as simple terms as possible, is the gradual and slow reintroduction of calories after a diet. Consider it like, okay, I was eating, I'm going

Starting point is 00:24:26 to use arbitrary numbers here, 2000 calories. So I was 500 calories below my 2,500 calorie maintenance. And I'd like to go back to my maintenance. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add 100 calories per week back into my diet for five weeks. That is an example of a reverse diet. Many coaches will tell you that you need to do extremely slow incremental reverse diets where you slowly add carbs and fat in while paying very close attention to how your body responds to these things. I think that there can be a time and a place for that specifically for athletes or clients who are very, very conscientious about rates of change on the scale or rates of change with regards to body weight or water retention or things that are likely going to go into flux when you add more food back in after a prolonged period of diligent dieting. But in general,

Starting point is 00:25:15 I would say pay attention to how you are responding to your diet. If you are responding poorly, you are cold, your training is shitty, you're irritable, you've been in a deficit for what appears to be far too long, don't worry so much about reverse dieting. Just figure out what your total daily energy expenditure should be approximately based on your new weight and try to go right back to that closest you can get to that figure. Going back to your newly estimated maintenance or even above it for a short period of time might help you back out more, let's say, practically from a potentially negative, overly restricted, heavily dieted physiological space.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Dieting is a stressor and those cumulative effect of the stress of dieting can lead to some negative physiological impacts, especially for women. And slowly reintroducing calories like fucking five carbs and two grams of fat at a time for 20 weeks because you're worried about gaining a little bit of weight can be worse for you actually than just adding them back in. So if you dieted for a short period of time, you didn't experience any negative physiological impacts, and you'd like the benefit of being able to more closely monitor your weight and body composition as you reintroduce food, go ahead, reverse diet. If your diet was really restrictive, really aggressive,

Starting point is 00:26:40 and you're feeling it, calculate your new maintenance and go back to that. Hopefully you guys found value in these questions and in these answers. And I look forward to talking to you again in the very near future. So if you enjoyed the podcast today, please hit subscribe, leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes, and I look forward to catching you on the next one.

Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 198 - Q and A: Best Macro Split, BCAA's, reverse diets

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