Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 272: Best exercises for seniors, box jumps, how to crush your soreness + more

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, we're discussing how to optimally recover from your workouts and minimize soreness. We'll discuss exercise selection for older adults and seniors, how to make sure you're picking exercises that optimize for efficiency and effectiveness while being safe for people who have, let's call it orthopedic and age-related physical deterioration. We'll also be discussing how one can put together the perfect training routine if you only have three days to train. What I typically do for our clients when we've got such constraints, we'll be discussing the box jump specifically as an

exercise. Is it safe? Should you do it? If you do it, how should you do it? And a few other things. But before we get into the episode, guys, I want to say special thanks to our awesome partners over at Ice Barrel. Ice Barrel makes what I believe to be the most aesthetically pleasing cold water immersion, cold water therapy product on the market. The Ice Barrel holds almost 60 gallons of water. It stays cold all the time. You don't even have to put ice in it as much as you might think, but when you do, it'll stay cold, especially during the fall, winter, and spring months. Two things I've been using my ice barrel for lately that kind of go above and beyond, let's say, the prototypical

helps you recover from your workouts, helps you feel less sore, kind of obvious stuff that people have known about ice baths, specifically cold water immersion for a long time. The first is using it pre-workout. This is something I started doing more recently after listening to Andrew Huberman and Andy Galpin discuss Stanford sports teams using pre-workout cold water immersion as a way to excite the nervous system in the absence of something like a stimulant. And so I have been on a no caffeine kick here for the last week, and I've played around with two pre-workout cold water immersion sessions. Works pretty simple, guys. I get my gym clothes out and a towel. I hop in the ice barrel, towel down, throw on my gym clothes, go to the gym, warm up as per usual, get into my session. But that dunk,

be it 30 to even 60 seconds, has a really, really tangible impact on my nervous system. I feel awake, I feel jolted, I feel alert, I feel ready to train. And a lot of people are concerned with post-workout ice baths, potentially blunting, hypertrophy. I like to keep my ice baths either right before the session, which I've been playing with recently, or all the way removed from my training sessions on non-training days or in the evenings on days that I train. And I keep my session short for like two to three minutes, let's say, and I haven't noticed any loss in strength or any loss in muscle gains. And I've been doing this now going on six months strong. Additionally, the second way I've been using cold water immersion that I absolutely love and find to be

quite fantastic is simply as a pre kind of middle of the day pick me up. So this again works really well. If like me, you've kind of stepped away from caffeine and you're looking for something to kind of bring you back into a space of focus, alertness that can be quick. So sometimes when I get home after a long day at the studio and I want to be present with my fiance or I want to be there with the animals, I'll just pop in really quick, one minute ice bath, jump out. I feel like a completely new human being. It's like I'm being born again into the world. I absolutely love it. I've been enjoying the crap out of my ice barrel and ice barrel has been kind enough to extend a special discount to dynamic dialogue listeners. If you want to save

over a hundred bucks on your ice barrel and get yourself what I believe to be the most practical, aesthetically pleasing and convenient cold water immersion experience on the market, head over to icebarrel.com slash Danny. Use the code Danny, save some money, get in on the cold water immersion therapy. It's changing the game. I don't think it's going to hurt your gains too much. I think it can help you work away from stimulants. And more than anything, it's an awesome health promoting behavior that boosts adherence to a lifestyle that is aligned with better fitness, better health, better recovery, better health, better recovery,

better cognition, and all the things that I know my listeners are after. Let's get into the episode. All right, folks. So the first question on this episode was asked by at mama underscore Hodges over on Instagram. Again, guys, if you want to have your question featured here on the podcast, Again, guys, if you want to have your question featured here on the podcast, the best way to do that is to follow me over on Instagram and pay attention to the twice or so weekly stories I post in which I open up the opportunity for questions. It's simply a little question box. You can drop your questions there. And if I don't answer them on here, I'll probably get to them or at least have a chance of getting to them on Instagram as well. So that's definitely the best way to have your question answered. So Mama Hodges asks how to get over soreness, muscle soreness from a workout two days ago. So what Mama Hodges is

experiencing is something known as DOMS or delayed onset muscle soreness. I almost don't even like the term delayed onset muscle soreness because I feel that it's so common for novice to even intermediate lifters to experience some degree of soreness, not just one, but even two days post-training that it's only delayed if you are not expecting it. If you're expecting it, then it feels like it's right on time. But the truth is our recoverability, which is to say quite literally our ability to recover from our training, increases just like our strength, just like our muscularity, just like our mobility, just like our aerobic fitness. These pathways inside of our body that help us partition

nutrients to get blood where it needs to get, to get fuel to where it needs to get, to initiate these many pathways that promote the recovery of the tissues we use to train, that takes time. So for novice to intermediate lifters, experiencing pain one to two days after a workout is expected, but it's also at times debilitating. It can be really challenging if you had a big heavy back day or a day where you were pulling a lot and your mid to low back is still sore or still tender or tight as you head into a day where you have to do leg training that might involve hinging your hips and you need to recruit stability from that midsection. So what can you do to minimize delayed onset muscle soreness? So the first thing that I think we need to look at is sleep. I think sleep

plays a big role in muscle recovery as well as soreness and quite frankly, sensitivity to soreness. I'm sure you guys have all had times where you've had a lackluster workout, got poor sleep, and woke up way more sore than you ever expected to be. And I think you've probably also felt the inverse, where you've had an absolute annihilator, killer workout, I destroyed this specific muscle, or I destroyed these these specific muscles and I expect them to be sore. You go to bed, you sleep like a rock, you get great sleep, you wake up and you're way less sore than you'd expect it. And I think that that points me in the direction of believing that not only does the literature tell us sleep is critical for important, but I also think that sleep is

critical for our interpretation of pain and our sensitivity to pain and things like DOMS. So the first thing you need to look at if you're experiencing DOMS consistently, outside of the fact that, hey, if I'm still pretty new to this, I should probably be expecting this to a certain degree, but you need to get into position to look at your sleep, to examine your sleep. Am I getting seven to nine hours? Am I keeping the room relatively cool at night? So when I am in bed, I'm sleeping well and sleeping deeply. Am I having stimulants too late in the day? Things like caffeine, nicotine, or even things like alcohol, cannabis to a certain degree that can impact my REM sleep

or the depth and quality of my sleeping hours. Because I'll tell you what, guys, if you lay in bed for eight hours, but you never dip into those deep sleep cycles where a lot of the magic happens for recuperation and recovery, you're not going to feel the same as somebody or even a version of yourself that does dip into those really deep waves of sleep. It's those deepest waves of sleep that make time and space for the creation of new fibers of muscle to help us repair and regenerate our brain, to help us wake up feeling alert and rested. We got to pump all the adenosine out of our brain that builds up across the day. So you need that deep sleep. That's the first place I'd look. Another kind of easy, low-hanging lifestyle thing that we can look at if soreness

is persistent and it's not going away within one to two days is hydration. Are you hydrating? Remember, you've heard this a million times, but I'll say it again. Your body's like 70% water and your muscles are even more water than that. Your muscles are disproportionately made of fluid. If you do not have a lot of fluid in your body and you are trying to pump out all of the metabolites from hard resistance training that coincide with muscle damage and such such things that just build up and contribute to soreness. A big one of these things is hydrogen. Hydrogen accumulates in the muscle. That's what causes that burn. A lot of times that's what causes that soreness. Then we have

the micro traumas and micro tears that occur on the fibers, the swelling and bruising that one could expect, right? Like you're tearing your muscles at a very tiny kind of borderline molecule, not molecular, but microscopic level. Um, and those tears accumulated over large fibers, uh, you know, with the associated inflammation and bruising, like it's small, right? We're talking about the fibers. I get it, but you're going to feel that. And if you're not well hydrated, you're not going to be able to get the things that you need to get to those fibers to initiate the repair process. Whether it's just water in general, maybe it's the various amino acids that are required for muscular repair that come in via blood. If you're

dehydrated, you can expect poor recovery. So things you can do there are increase your fluid intake. Another thing I like to do is supplement with magnesium and potassium. That's in my LMNT. If you guys know, I love LMNT. There's a special gift for podcast listeners. If you want to try LMNT, they've got an awesome deal going for listeners of the podcast. And all you need to do to take advantage of that is just scroll down in the show notes. But anything that you can supplement with around your training or in the evening that contains magnesium could be particularly helpful for soreness. I think the most obvious thing we could do nutritionally is get enough protein throughout

the day. But I will say when a lot of people still knock on the post workout shake and the anabolic window, because it's been relatively sound science for quite some time, that the most important thing is the total amount of protein that you get, not when you get it, but the total amount that you get guys, that's what we want to focus on. Making sure, are we getting 0.7 to 1 grams of protein per pound of body weight spread evenly across the day, hopefully into multiple feedings so that we keep our muscle protein synthesis high and that pathway turned on and we keep our circulating pool of amino acids full and we're

constantly having access to leucine to build and repair muscle, right? If you're not doing that, we don't get to talk about timing. We don't have the luxury of talking about timing because we're missing out on a huge rock. Like that's like saying, hey, I'm going to teach you how to shoot a three-pointer before I teach you how to make a layup. We got to start with the fundamentals, right? Now I'll say this. I still believe that protein timing can be pretty impactful on recovery. Now, this is mostly anecdotal. I'm sure there's research that shows that this is the case, and I'm sure there's research that shows it's not as important when you factor in for things like total daily protein intake. But if I were experiencing extreme soreness, I would definitely want a post-workout meal that included some amount of protein and carbohydrates, probably in a two to one ratio

of carbohydrate to protein so that I get what I need to start the recovery process and blunt the continued breakdown of muscle. That's why the carbohydrate is important, guys. So that's tip number four here. Make sure you're getting your carbohydrates in adequate amounts of carbohydrates after your training session to increase insulin and decrease muscle protein breakdown. Excessive muscle protein breakdown can cause excessive soreness and what should surprise and news that should surprise absolutely no one. So those are kind of the big rock things, folks.

Those are like the, okay, let's have a seat. Let's sit down. Let's discuss the big ones. But what are the little ones? Well, we mentioned magnesium already. Another one I really like is L-carnitine. L-carnitine I found really helps reduce muscle soreness. I love that Legion went out of their way to include L-carnitine in their flagship recovery product recharge. It contains the five grams of creatine I like, but it also contains L-carnitine. Now you can get even better results with L-carnitine, and I'm not kidding you guys, even better results with L-carnitine if you inject it, right? Now, am I saying go out and inject L-carnitine? Heck no. Try oral L-carnitine for muscle so it, right? Now, am I saying go out and inject L-carnitine? Heck no.

Try oral L-carnitine for muscle soreness. I think it's going to do the trick for sure. Now, one thing you can do to make sure that you don't have excessive conversion of that L-carnitine into TMAO, which is a metabolite that many people are concerned about, is simply have garlic in your diet or take odorless garlic around your post-workout window. That's a fun little fact there. And that's for people who are taking in high amounts of L-carnitine, right? Like I wouldn't imagine that the dosage in Legion's recharge is enough to warrant this, but if you're going to supplement with even more L-carnitine on top of that, in the name of perhaps fat loss or in the name of perhaps increased workout recovery, I definitely consider an odorless garlic supplement because I think it can make

a really big difference in the conversion of L-carnitine to TMAO in the stomach. So let's get on to some of the more active things one could do to decrease soreness. I think stretching works. I think zone two cardio works. I think sauna works. And of course I think cold water immersion works. If I had to rank these, I'd say cold water immersion comes in for sure at number one, followed second by sauna, followed third by stretching and followed fourth by zone two cardio. I think all four do an above average job at reducing muscle soreness, but I don't think any of them are perfect. I don't think any of them on their

own, if your nutrition is shit, are going to help too much with the exception perhaps of cold water immersion. This appears to be pretty darn effective at reducing muscle soreness, but none of these are going to be effective at helping you develop muscle. Like if you don't have enough food, if you don't have enough sleep, and that's the whole reason if I had to guess that you're doing the training you're doing, that's producing the soreness in the first place. You're trying to train hard to build muscle, to lose body fat, to achieve something athletic, which is fabulous, but you will always be hamstrung by poor recovery and bad sleep if you don't focus on those things first. 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 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

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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. Okay, next question comes from Jessica Harland. And the question is, what are the top exercises for people that are 70 plus? So I like this

question a lot because I've been fortunate enough in my career as a personal trainer to work with a number of clients in their 70s, 80s, and even well into their 90s who are still engaging with fitness and still quite in a position in their life where they can afford to contribute a good amount of their disposable income to seeing a trainer multiple times a week. So I get a pretty close eye on these folks and what they're up to. And I've developed a little bit of what I would call a formula for training this population, if you will, a kind of checklist, things that I like to do. But truthfully, I don't find training older adults to be nearly as cumbersome or challenging as many people make it out to be. In fact, I think a lot of people have gone way too far down the kinesiophobic rabbit hole thinking that all these exercises are dangerous for older

adults, when in fact, I find that older adults tend to be quite resilient, quite strong, and quite capable of recovering from very challenging workouts. Not only do they enjoy them, they have a recoverability that would, if you weren't familiar with it, probably catch you by surprise. And to me, this is awesome. This is encouraging. This is exciting. I've had very few older adults who are 70, 80, even 90 years old get injured while training with me, even when doing a lot of the movements that many people would consider to be advanced. For example, I often have my older clients do things like deadlifts, which many people would say, whoa, that's crazy. Why would you do a deadlift with an older adult? And the truth is, we're not doing barbell deadlifts very often. We do a lot of hex bar deadlifting, which I think is probably my favorite way to deadlift

with general population clients. It positions the lifter in such a way that they have a very, very low risk of getting injured. There's a very, very low ask, if you will, on the lower back. And so we do a lot of things like that. In 10 years of doing this, I've developed a little bit of a, let's call it protocol for training older adults. I know what it is that we need to work on. We need to train patterns that are functional for that person's life. So this is

oftentimes things like pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging, lunging, bending over, bracing the core, right? All of these things are really important and really valuable. Now, do we have to do barbell squats and barbell deadlifts? No, we can do goblet squats and hex bar deadlifts. Do we have to do pull-ups? No, we can do lat pull-downs, right? We're scaling these patterns of movement to the fitness level of the adult that we're training. And you'll find, guys, pretty quickly that not only are older adults capable of doing the exercises properly, they're also quite good at doing them safely and recovering from them. There's not too many differences when you're training older adults compared to when you're training younger adults. I'm going to shoot you straight. I just haven't seen as many

differences as you would be led to believe. I do think you need to take certain cautions, and I think that you need to be aware always of what it is that you're doing and have a rationale for what it is that you're doing. But I find that older adults tend to be really resilient. They tend to really enjoy training. They get a kick out of it and you can push them pretty hard. If you make the same changes and considerations that you would make when you're training anybody else, if they had like an orthopedic issue. So for example, if somebody who's older comes in and tells you that they deal with substantial and considerable knee pain when squatting, you're probably either one, not going to have them squat or two, you're going to modify the squat so that it has the lowest likelihood of agitating them. And what I want you to think about guys is ask yourself the question, would

you treat it any differently if it was a young person who had the same orthopedic things? Probably not. The truth is it's just that a lot of older adults present a lot more orthopedic issues, joint specific issues. They just have more wear and tear. So you get in a situation when you train a lot of older people where you get exposed to that wear and tear and you see how resilient people can be even with it still. And that to me is just kind of like, okay, that's what gets my attention is I've seen so many older adults come in to the gym, train their ass off super hard, kick butt, even with these joint problems. And when you work around them and work through them intelligently and creatively, they still make amazing progress. That's a testament to how resilient human beings are. joint problems, and when you work around them and work through them intelligently and creatively,

they still make amazing progress. That's a testament to how resilient human beings are. That's a testament to how incredibly adaptive the human body is, even at an old age. So while I do always make sure to make certain considerations, I'm always looking to include as many compound movements that I can through the fullest range of motion I possibly can with the most weight I safely can through a variety of rep ranges using exercises or let's call them variations of exercises that I would use with somebody who were much younger. I don't patronize people simply because they've reached a certain age. I genuinely believe humans to be super resilient. And I pay close attention when we're training to make sure that I meet them exactly where they're at. But when I train old people, just like when

I train young people, we're training movements, pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, hinging, carrying, bracing, twisting, throwing, and such. And we're also making a point to go out of our way to train individual muscles that might be weaker or might need development on their own accord using isolation and biomechanically sound movements, just like you would for a younger person. All right. So this question comes from Tammy Hitchcock. And the question is, if you're training three times a week, is it better to do the

sessions as upper lower total or do them all as total? First thing I'll say here is we're already getting into the weeds. We're already in just having this discussion operating on the margins. in just having this discussion operating on the margins. I don't think there's a huge difference here. I think that if you took two identical twins and put them on identical training protocols, whereby each twin followed exactly the training protocol we're discussing here, one does upper lower total, one does total. I don't think if you followed up with these two sets of twins at the end of the year, you would even be able to notice a difference in gains. I think it would be really small. There are two camps here. So for those of you for whom movement quality, compound movement utilization, meaning the reliance on big multi-joint movements, and efficiency, for those of you for whom that is the most important, I would focus on the exercises we've talked about on the podcast many times, the patterns we've talked about on the podcast many times, pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging,

hinging, carrying. We talked about them in the last question and do those three times a week as three total body sessions. Now, if you specifically and explicitly know, I want to develop my lower body more, or I want to develop my can feature more arms and shoulders in your training. You can feature more arms and shoulders in your total day and in your upper day. When you're doing three total sessions, yes, you could technically have shoulders all three days, but I do think that eliminates the ability that you have to really play with some of the nuance and some of the smaller and more isolated exercises. But again, folks, I really think we're splitting hairs. I think both of these are really good and it's just going to come down to how you individually like to train. Okay. This question comes from Vivian Thomas, 91, 96.

This question comes from Vivian Thomas, 9196. And the question is, do you recommend box jumping and box jumps? So let's talk about box jumps as a single exercise, and then we'll talk about box jumps as a category of exercises. So there are a number of jumping exercises that utilize a box that aren't exactly box jumps, but they're still effective jumping exercises. For example, depth jumps and drop jumps, you actually are jumping off of a box and not up onto a box. And I love both of those exercises. I actually think they're awesomely effective exercises for helping people develop better strength, better vertical force production, better jumping power. So do I recommend box jumps with the way that they're typically done though, where people are jumping up onto the box over and over and over again to the point almost of straight up exhaustion? Now that's one I'm not a huge fan of. And this is typical of CrossFit. We see box jumps utilized a lot

as a conditioning tool, and it's an effective conditioning tool for sure. The problem that I have with it, though, is the likelihood if something goes wrong of you just absolutely skinning the ever-loving shit out of your shins is higher than I think a lot of people would like to admit. And I know this because I've had the misfortune of doing it myself and I've just peeled so many people's skin off of these box jump boxes over the years when I was working at 24 Hour Fitness. the number of people whom would absolutely eat shit when doing box jumps, like still to this day is crazy surprising how few, like, first of all, there's a little bit of a guarding mechanism that flares up when people

do something like a box jump, like their body kind of inherently goes, I'm not too sure I want to jump that high, dude. And your feet kind of turn into bricks and like anchor you. So a lot of novices who try them, they're like one rep away from just getting tanked. Now, from a safety standpoint, if you can clear the box, you're probably fine. But with each subsequent jump, you accumulate more fatigue. And therein lies the problem with using box jumps the way they're typically done, folks. It's one of the more dangerous forms of cardiovascular exercises that you can do with regards to ROI. So can you run on the treadmill pretty low at likelihood of getting injured? Absolutely. Rower, same thing. Stairmaster,

same thing. Now, if we're using box jumps as a conditioning tool, there's just a much greater likelihood of something going south. But I like them for verticality, vertical force production, the ability to kind of develop and cultivate athleticism. I think they're really good for all of these things, guys. Straight up. I really do. I think there's a ton ofism. I think they're really good for all of these things, guys, straight up. I really do. I think there's a ton of utility. I just think you need to know how to use them and program them appropriately. I prefer depth jumps and drop jumps anyway to things like maximum effort box jumps, like how high can I jump? Because you could do that same thing. You could test that same trait, that physical ability more easily and more safely simply using a vertical jump testing stack, like the thing

you see at the NFL combine where guys jump up and they swing their arms. And depending on how many of the pegs they're able to rotate off the center, it will tell you how high it was that that athlete was able to jump. Like stuff like that is pretty damn effective at gauging vertical jump and quite frankly, training it without the likelihood of even, you don't even have to create space or open the opportunity or possibility for something to go south as it pertains to like landing on the box negatively. Can't go wrong. All right, folks, I want to thank you all so much for tuning in to another episode of the podcast. And remind you, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, take one to two minutes, leave me a review.

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