Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 211: How Many Sets Should YOU Do? Recomping, When to Take a Rest Day?

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

 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!RESOURCES/COACHING:  Train with Danny on His Training AppHEREI 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, everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and today's episode is a two-part episode. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to have a discussion about training volume as it pertains to building muscle. We'll talk about a recent systematic review that looked at the effects of different volumes, so the different amount of work that different individuals might do, whether it's 10 sets, 15 sets, 20 sets, and what we can glean from that about how to best inform our fitness training for muscle growth.

And for those of you who want to lose body fat or just get in better shape, remember how important muscle growth is and maintaining muscle is for that. So a lot of value here in this podcast, regardless of your actual physique goals, regardless of what it is that you're looking to accomplish, right? So excitingly too, I'm going to dive into a Q and A. We'll talk a little bit about body recomposition, what you need to do to achieve that. And we'll talk about how to know when you should take a rest day or when you should push through. If you're feeling fatigue, it can be really, really hard for some people to gauge exactly when they should look to get these rest days in. And I've struggled with this myself. So I can't wait to break this down with you guys and have

a discussion today about all kinds of different stuff related to your training. So without further ado, let's break down this meta-analysis systematic review actually. This is from Baez Val, Bala Sobre Fernandez, Alex Vegas, and Santos Concero. So this is from a lab that there's actually a lot of training studies done in Brazil. I'm not sure where this one was done, but the name of the study is a systematic review of the effects of different resistance training volumes on muscle hypertrophy. So basically, this is a study that looked at a lot of studies to try to help us better calibrate exactly how much volume sets reps we would like to be doing in the gym to optimize muscle growth. Now, several years ago, Brad Schoenfeld, Brad Schoenfeld is one of the premier researchers in the muscle growth slash

protein synthesis space. This is an expert, one of the world's most renowned experts on muscle growth. And his colleagues concluded, I don't remember the name of the study, but they concluded that about 10 sets is ideal for muscle growth, or it's a good place to start. And I've made that recommendation many times on the podcast and more generally in pretty much every training program I write, whether it's programs for clients who have a physique goal specifically or a health goal where muscle is important, even for fat loss clients, I'm looking to give each client at least six to 10 sets per week per muscle group. I might go six if they're on the newer end, but I try to go closer to 10 if they can get to the gym three to four times a week, and they've been training for a while because I believe that being right around that 10 sets per week range is a-based community to really lean quickly into the notion

that anything more than 10 hard sets is wasteful or, you know, workouts where you do 15, 20 sets total is wasteful or 20 set volumes per week per muscle group is wasteful. And I just haven't found this to be true in training. I found that really applying volume diligently and effectively with a lot of intent and tenacity, quite frankly, to muscle groups that you really want to develop is the best way to get those muscle groups to grow. Now, this meta or systematic review found that 10 sets a week is great, but they were specifically looking at six studies, right? And these studies all came out after the Brad Schoenfeld kind of statement position. And what this study found was that 20 sets per week resulted

in more growth in the quads and in the triceps. They also measure the biceps, but there were no meaningful findings there. But we can still look at quads and triceps. We have elbow extensors and knee extensors. Those were shown to grow more when set volumes were higher, meaning closer to 20 sets. 20 sets is better for quads and triceps than 10 sets. So can we make the inference that 20 sets is probably better than 10? I would say yes, because one, the systematic review here can point us to a few well-conducted studies that would lead us to believe this. And then what I have seen in my training practice, working with clients at Core Coaching Method, whether it's in person, whether it's online, whether it's clients that I've prepped for competition, whether it's how I've trained for my own goals, how my friends have trained,

what we do in the app side of things with our train heroic programs, elite physique, and home heroes, I have seen that doing more than 10 sets per muscle group per week is going to be better for muscular development than sticking at, say, 10, 11, 12. And that doesn't probably seem like rocket science, but I think that can really inform your training. So what does this mean? Well, I think that each and every one of us has a relatively limited amount of time that we can spend in the gym. We can't allocate hours and hours and hours to being in the gym all the time, right? Most of us are pretty limited. Well, if you want to hit 20 sets per muscle group per week, that's going to be pretty darn cumbersome,

right? You'll probably have to have at least four to six training sessions a week to make that happen. And those training sessions are certainly not going to be short. They're probably going to be quite long. In fact, so long that you might actually slip into a state of not particularly performing your reps and sets well. So the actual volume might not be as optimally aligned with muscle growth, right? Because remember, we want to train hard with good form, close to failure, all things that are quite frankly, more challenging the longer you have been in the gym, just thanks to our short attention span and things like stress hormones, like cortisol that tend to trend upward after around, let's say the 60 to 90 minute mark in the gym. So what can you do? This is what I like to call specialization

training. You can call these specialization blocks, but what you'd like to do ideally is what I'd like you to do. Ideally, I should say is pick two to three muscle groups, preferably one for the upper body, two for the lower body, vice versa. Ideally, you know, you'll pick a large muscle group, an intermediate size muscle group, and a small muscle group, generally due to the fact that like large muscle groups are going to be very, very demanding when it comes to training and overloading them. So maybe you do, if you're going to do two large ones, you always do an upper large and a lower large paired with like something secondary, like calves, arms, shoulders, that tends to be smaller. So what you do is you pick two to three muscle groups that you really want to focus on. And you

see this a lot in how I program. You'll see that the volume kind of shifts around so that trainees get the opportunity to really emphasize different things. So I'll use elite physique as an example. One block, we'll do a lot of delts and we'll do a lot of hamstrings. The next block, we'll do a lot of glutes and a lot of triceps and biceps. There's ways to really kind of play with the volume, but we're clearly overreaching in certain areas. So you pick a couple of those muscle groups that are most important. And those are the muscle groups where you flirt with that 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 sets per week range. That's where you really apply a lot of the volume. That's where you really apply a lot of the

progressive overload. And if you have muscle groups that you like how they're developed, or they're already really strong, or you don't care to get them any more muscular or, you know, increase their work capacity, those are the ones that stay closer to 10. And they can always stay around 10. If you just say like, just have genetically incredible lats and there's really no point in training them because if they got any bigger, you'd be upset. You can do 10 sets a week for lats, probably as low as four sets a week, as long as they're hard and still maintain them. So that's what a study like this or a systematic review like this helps me do as a coach, what it helps me do as a trainee, how it helps inform my programming decisions. It really validates a little bit of how I already programmed

and it puts it to ease kind of the fear of potentially overtraining people because you oscillate back and forth between worrying about, okay, is this too much? Is this not enough? and forth between worrying about, okay, is this too much? Is this not enough? What can I really do here? How can I maximize my client's results? And a lot of times you suffer, or I have a tendency to suffer from paralysis by analysis. So reviewing the literature like this, staying up to date on the literature like this can keep you informed, but the too long, didn't read version of this is, okay, when training, if't read version of this is okay. When training, if you want to maximize muscle growth, you're probably going to want to do more than 10 sets a week, not rocket science there. But if you do more than 10 sets a week per muscle group,

it might be inefficient and hard to recover from the better trained you are, the closer to failure you can train the more, uh, you know, high quality training you have. You might not need to flirt with this as high, but it's worth playing with and definitely don't be afraid to go a little bit above and beyond 10 sets per week. Getting into some Q&As that I have from you guys, because I think that whenever we talk about muscle growth, we're talking by and large about body composition. So sticking with the theme of training here, we have a question from It's Sydney. And It's Sydney asks, of training here, we have a question from It's Sydney. And It's Sydney asks, can you still change body comp or recomp during a surplus by maintaining? So this is really, really a good way to kind of break down what some of these terms mean, because this is a question that on its face doesn't

necessarily make a lot of sense. So can you change body composition or recomp during a surplus? In theory, if we are in a surplus, we are eating a number of calories beyond our total daily energy expenditure. That kind of disqualifies us from being in the recomp category because from a, at least mechanical definition perspective, being in a phase where you're focusing on recomp, you're probably attempting to eat right at maintenance with a high protein intake. You're not attempting to be in a surplus. So if you're asking, can you still see body composition changes in a surplus where let's just say like, okay, we're talking about composition changes in terms of building muscle, losing fat. Probably not unless that surplus came like exclusively from

protein, meaning you were like 2000 calorie maintenance and you go 500 calories over and all 500 calories come from protein. That might be a way that you saw positive body compositional change while not being in a deficit or at maintenance, meaning you're losing body fat in a surplus, but that mechanically and chemically, meaning from the actual molecular and chemical level, that doesn't make any sense. I think that actually defies the laws of physics. So that might not be a particularly great way to approach changing your body composition or trying to lose body fat. Now, when you ask, can you still change body comp slash recomp by maintaining? That's where

the answer becomes yes. So this would mean you're going to eat at maintenance calories or exactly at your total daily energy expenditure, as close as you can get. Remember, that is the cumulative burn of the energy it takes to eat and digest food, the energy you expend exercising, the energy you expend doing your day-to-day tasks. There's numerous things that go into your total daily energy expenditure, the largest of which is the NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. You have exercise thermogenesis. You have thermic effect feeding. You have base metabolic rate, which is not something you really have a lot of control over, but that's obviously running your body's organs and whatnot. So if you're eating right around there, you should maintain your weight, but you can achieve positive changes in body

composition if you shift your macros around. So let's say you take two people, twins, identical twins, because whenever you want to make comparisons, and in studies, this is hard to do because finding twins is hard, but if you can find twins, it's always great because they have the same exact genetic profile. Identical twins, of course. So let's say we have two identical twins and we're going to name them Kelly and Carly. And so Kelly and Carly are identical twins and they both exercise five days a week with resistance and they both have a goal of achieving better body composition. So we're going to take Kelly and Carly, we're going to put them on the same training program,

same sleep, and we're going to have them both train five days a week eating at a 2000 calorie quote unquote maintenance. That is the maintenance when we calculated Kelly and Carly's maintenance, they both have the same maintenance. Here's the difference though. We're going to have Carly eat 0.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight and get the rest of her calories from carbs and fats. And we're going to have Kelly eat 1.0 or one gram per pound of body fat, getting the remaining calories from carbs and fats. So twin two, Kelly is eating one gram twin one. Carly is eating a half a gram. So Kelly has twice as much protein as Carly, but the macros, okay. Are still, we're still protein carbs and fats. We're not cutting any of them out. You'll see less carbs and fats for obviously for Carly.

She's eating or for Kelly, she's eating more protein and a see less carbs and fats for obviously for Carly, she's eating, or for Kelly, she's eating more protein and a little more carbs and fats for Kelly, or for Carly, because she's eating less protein. So what you have, same calories, one twin eats more protein, the other one eats more carbs and fats. You probably will see, I'd bet the farm on it, so to speak, see. I'd bet the farm on it, so to speak. The individual in this study, the twin that ate more protein has better body composition. This is the whole theory behind re-comping. You bring the protein intake up, you give the body everything that it needs to develop and build muscle. Protein is particularly unique in that it takes a lot of energy to digest and assimilate. So it has a very high thermic effect of food compared to things like fats and carbohydrates, which don't require as much energy to use and

metabolize, right? So what you'll see is you probably utilize more calories consuming a diet with higher protein than with lower. And over time, I would expect the higher protein twin to have more positive changes to her body composition because of the increase in protein. So that's how you want to approach a recomp. In my opinion, this is what we do with clients all the time. We put them at maintenance where we calculate what we expect their maintenance to be using several different calculators, several different models, and then just taking the average and then looking at weight. Most of the time when you do one calculator, it can be tough. So if you do two, three, four calculators, take the final

number for TDEE, add all four up, divide by four, take an average. That's a really good place to start. Try to stick to that. If your weight's bouncing up and down about a pound, but by and large staying about the same across a week, you're probably right around maintenance. So if you can hover there, bring your protein up to a gram per pound of body weight, you might want to use a lean mass if you're a little bit heavier, you're a larger individual, that should positively impact your body composition. So if you're looking to keep your calories high, higher than being in a deficit, which is obviously the best way to lose body fat and improve body composition, being in a deficit, which is obviously the best way to lose body fat and improve body composition.

Try maintenance with a high protein intake around a gram per pound. Trying to do this in a surplus kind of defies the laws of physics. And I suppose the only logical way one could get around it is with the utilization of performance enhancing drugs, because these change so many things at the physiological level that when somebody starts taking steroids, crazy things happen to their body composition that you just can't expect to see naturally. So we'll kind of leave that out of the equation here. If you want the body calm change and you don't want a deficit, re-comping with high protein intake is probably your best shot. Although I think a deficit, a high protein deficit, for example,

will obviously get you there quite a bit faster. Hey guys, taking a break from the show you there quite a bit faster. Hey guys, taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing sports nutrition partner, Legion. Legion makes the best evidence-based formulas for sports performance, sports nutrition, recovery, and fat loss. I don't recommend many supplements. In fact, I think you can get the majority of the nutrition you need from a whole foods diet. But let's be honest. Many of us are either on the go and need assistance,

or quite frankly, we're not going to settle for average, and we want to get the absolute most we can out of our training. So Legion is the company I go to for all of my supplement staples, whether it's creatine, which I get from their product Recharge, my protein that I get from either Whey Plus or Plant plant plus two of the best tasting proteins on the market they come in a variety of flavors and they don't have a ton of fillers and gum just way made from grass-fed cows from ireland in a plant protein blend with a fully comprehensive dose of amino acids i like to take a pre-workout sometimes i like it with caffeine sometimes i like to enjoy coffee in the morning

and have my pre-workout later without caffeine. Legion makes both. Both the pre-workout with caffeine and without come with a full dosage of clinically effective ingredients like beta alanine, betaine anhydrous, and l-citrulline to help you perform your best. They also make a phenomenal greens powder loaded with one of my favorite things, reishi mushroom, and a men's and women's multivitamin that contain a few different things that men and women might need for their unique physiology. So when you think of your vitamins, your fish oil, your pre-workout, your protein, all of the things that many of you take every single day, I'd encourage you to check out Legion. They have an amazing line, wonderful products, wonderful flavors, naturally sweetened,

no dyes and colors. You can't go wrong. You can shop using the show notes below or by going to legionathletics.com and checking out using the promo code Danny. That will save you 20% and it will actually help you get two times points towards future orders, which you can use the same as cash. Pretty cool, guys. So head over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code DANNY to save on all your sports supplement needs. Back to the show. What's going on, guys? Coach Danny here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one, fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for

Core Coaching Method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for core coaching method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need. With custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home,

the gym, around your limitations and your goals, nothing cookie cutter here, training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here. As well as easy to follow macronutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email or they'll text you or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals as well as provides you with accountability in the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support

possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option, and if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't, put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. 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 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. Okay, this question, I like this one. This one comes from Courtney Light, and Courtney asks, when to know if you should skip the gym or push through when you're tired? So I'm a big proponent of sleep. You guys know that I advocate for anywhere between seven to nine hours a night if you have a body composition or athletic goal. Sleep is huge. It's not practical

to recommend seven to nine hours a night for everybody because I understand people have split shifts. They have overnight shifts. They have irregular work schedules. They have kids. They have exams. They have social lives. It's not as though you're locked into seven to nine hours every single night and just hearing somebody on a podcast say that makes it easy to stick to. I'm not that tone deaf. Trust me, I get it. It's not easy. But here's something that is worth knowing. Too much training paired with too little sleep for too long will result in training that I think becomes actually counterproductive. You're not really getting anything out of it. And you're not really getting anything out of it. And you're really only maintaining the habit. And so I think you can use a few rules here. If you get less than four hours of sleep,

I would not train pretty much ever. Unless that's like just you're one of those rare people who can regularly get by on four hours. But if you normally get seven to nine and you get like three and a half hours of sleep, you feel like shit. I would not go to the gym and train that day because I think one, it will be relatively inefficient enterprise because you probably are going to need to caffeinate wildly just to get to baseline survive. Because for most people with busy professional lives, three and a half hours of sleep to try to get through a day, especially if you have things like kids or additional responsibilities, that's straight up hell. So if you're getting less than four hours of sleep consistently, you got to do something about that. But if you wake up after three and a half hours sleep, I wouldn't train. Okay. So let's say you get between five and six. I think you can train pretty regularly on five to six days, five to six hours of sleep. The problem is you're not going to

be set up for like optimal muscle growth, optimal recovery, like you are with seven to nine. So you can kind of slog through that. You can go through the motions. You can do your best. You can caffeinate. You can really push. And if you get seven to nine, you can pretty much train every day, assuming, you day assuming you're not going to overtrain any one muscle group. But let's say you're in the middle of it. You're in the middle of a training routine and all of a sudden your sleep just goes to zero. You feel like shit, but let's say you train legs on Monday, you trained chest on Tuesday and you're going in for a back workout Wednesday, but Tuesday you get three hours of sleep. I don't think I would go in and train in that situation. Five to six, I think I would.

Seven to nine, obviously that's a no brainer. So if you can, you can like put a hard cutoff on it like that. You can also look at things kind of more longterm and go, okay, if I'm consistently getting five to six hours of sleep and consistently trying to train five to six days a week, is there a way for me to get more sleep and bring my training volume down? Because for a lot of people, they train five, six, seven days a week habitually, and there's nothing wrong with that. But like I said, going back to the study we talked about earlier in the episode, I think you can get 10 to 20 sets per muscle group if you use a lot of compounded movements and train four days a

week. So you can always adjust your training accordingly. Now, if you wake up like completely flat, right? You try to have a cup of coffee and that does nothing. Or you're planning to leave, this is something that I see a lot with clients. They have an early flight, but they want to wake up even earlier to work out. I don't necessarily think I would recommend that kind of training. I think you're better off taking a rest day or giving your body the opportunity to rest a little more than you are stacking a poor night's sleep with a probably poor workout. Now, I could be wrong. There might be many of you who generally will do well, but that's if you're tired

from sleep. Let's talk about if you're just tired from life, like the extracurricular stressors of life. Like you got exams, maybe you have kids running around, maybe you have relatives visiting, maybe you're getting married soon and you got to coordinate a wedding. There's so many things that can pop up on your agenda and really take up a good chunk of time. I'll use myself as an example. I recently moved and it was a real big pain in the ass because over the course of four months, I went from seeing houses to offering on houses to closing on a house, all the paperwork and documentation that goes with that. While I set up an in-person training studio, got ready to officiate a wedding and then moved all within like a 90 day timeframe that was just a total fast paced, crazy ass, low sleep, high stress

period of my life. And normally I train about five to six days a week. I scaled back to four to five days a week because I knew and paid attention to where I was at in my life. So I think that's another thing you should do. If you know you're super stressed from work, super stressed from extracurriculars, super stressed from kids and family. You can plan ahead and be like, yo, I don't see this stress subsiding anytime soon. I'm in the middle of the drama. Let's train four times this week. That way it can be a little fresher for each session or three times this week. You can always call audibles or make adjustments on the fly. And I think that's really, really important. But I think more generally, if you're looking for signs and

symptoms, the lack of a desire to train, if you just love to train all the time and then out of nowhere, whether you're stressed, you don't want to train, that's a pretty good sign. If you feel cold all the time, if you wake up with a resting heart rate, your resting morning heart rate is a really good indicator of your stress response. If you wake up with a super elevated resting heart rate, meaning it's like five, 10 beats per minute above normal, that's concerning. That's a good signal that your body is sending you to tone things down, cool off, take it easy, and give yourself some rest. So guys, there you have it. A little bit of a discussion around training volume and how you might be able to allocate your sets and your reps accordingly.

If you don't want to do any of that planning, you just want to have somebody do it for you that knows the information, that knows how to apply the information and get it into a training program that's fun and easy to stick to and well-informed, me and my team over at Core Coaching Method would love to help you. We have one-on-one online coaching. We have our coaching app where we partnered with Train Heroic to give you access to the best tech and training where you can look at your data and your metrics and join people just like you who are looking to take their fitness to the next level. You want access to me and my coaching team. You can get it one-on-one. You can get it in the Train Heroic app. I want to

help you guys succeed. I still very much enjoy engaging with my audience and that's the best way to do it. And then again, when it comes to body recomposition, training, knowing how to recover, having a coach on board can really, really help with that too. But you've got to make sure that you're counting your calories. If you want to lose body fat, monitoring your macros, if you want to change your composition, these things tend to help a lot and never push through when you're totally exhausted, because oftentimes you'll just face diminishing marginal returns i want to thank you all so much for listening to this episode and i will catch you on the next one