Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 299: Zone II Cardio, Weighted Vests, Vegan Protein + More!

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about walking as a form of exercise, weighted vests, zone to cardio. We're going to discuss whether foods like bread and bagels are fattening, inflammatory, or bad for the gut. We're going to discuss options for getting your protein intake up if you're following a plant-based diet or just don't love to eat meat and maybe you want to rely a little less on protein powders. We're going to discuss nuts,

seeds, and other high-calorie foods that might be making it challenging to lose weight. We'll be chatting about how to stay up to date with all the latest fitness knowledge with everything that's out there on the internet, if you can put on muscle lifting just a few times a week, and how to optimize a routine for doing so, as well as how to prevent burnout from training, weight loss, or just pursuing good health as it is challenging. So please enjoy the episode today. If you're listening on the go, be sure to tag me and share this on your Instagram story so I can say thank you. I love that the podcast is growing. We're getting it out there. We're getting more downloads each and every week, which is super encouraging. And I want to thank each of you for helping me do that. So let's go ahead and get into it.

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in a super sleek, aesthetically pleasing packaging. It's a beautiful barrel that comes with a matching lid for keeping the ice cold and water inside clean, a nice step-up stool, a cover. It's portable and durable, and it comes in a beautiful matte black and a gorgeous tan. I have the matte black out on my patio, and I absolutely love the way it looks with the fencing I have around the yard, but you can put this inside, outside, on the front porch, on the back porch, in the side yard. It's quite portable. It's very durable. Like I said, the design is super, super sleek, and it's very easy to drain to make sure that you are only getting in to cold, clean water designed to help you improve your performance, improve your recovery, enhance the way your brain feels and functions throughout the day.

This is an amazing one-time cost tool that once you have it, you use it a couple of times a week. It is one of the best investments you can make in your health. And again, if you want to improve your cognition and performance, and you have those midday lulls, or you want to be more present for your family or for your friends when you get off of work, and you don't want to caffeinate, temperature modulation like ice baths or cold exposure or sauna heat exposure can be really valuable for increasing that subjective sense of well-being and bringing you back to a place of alertness in a really chaotic world. It's also great for just cultivating resilience. I find I'm much tougher. Again, this is a more anecdotal thing, but I find that I am

much tougher, ready to face the day's tasks when I am consistently exposing myself to the elements. Call it bromeopathy, call it anecdote, but I will tell you one thing is for sure, cold water immersion has made a huge difference for my health and well-being in just a few short sessions a week, and Ice Barrel is the sleekest, best-looking, cleanest, and most affordable way to do it reliably. You can head over to icebarrel.com slash Danny to take advantage of their 100% satisfaction guaranteed with again, a 30 day money back guarantee and save 125 bucks on your ice barrel using the promo code Danny. So again, icebarrel.com slash Danny and check out using the promo code Danny to save 125 bucks. Okay. So first question, uh, and this one is from Jordan Codillo nine,

and all of these folks come from over on Instagram. So if you want to have your question featured on the podcast, I strongly recommend you head over to Instagram and follow me there. So you can make sure to catch my stories where I drop the little question sticker where you can have your questions answered. Okay. So Jordan wants to know walking with a weight vest, does this count as zone two cardio? So it could, cardio. So it could, I think it's important to go over what the cardio zones are folks. So you could get into zone two cardio without a weight vest, and you might not reach zone two cardio with a weight vest, depending on your fitness. So zone one, all right, is moving very slow at about 50 to 60% of your maximum heart rate. This is the recovery cardio zone. This is walking to go get something out of the fridge. This is walking to go over

to the bathroom, right? These are slow, unintentional forms of movement that generate a heart rate response that's only the equivalent of about 50% of your maximum heart rate. To figure out what that is, just take the number 220 and subtract your age. So if you're 30 years old, it would be about 190. If you were taking 50% of that, it'd be a heart rate of about 95 beats per minute, which is probably just walking generally. it'd be a heart rate of about 95 beats per minute, which is probably just walking generally. Zone 2 cardio is a much bigger range. We're talking 60 all the way up to 70% of max heart rate. So again, let's say you are 30 years old, 70% of 190, okay, 220 minus your age. So you're going for about 70% of that. Now, with a weighted vest and a brisk pace, I think most people are

going to be between zones two and zones three. Zones three are 70 to 80, four is 80 to 90, and five is 90, all the way up to the maximum kind of heart rate you can sustain. So you can think of zone five as essentially like maxing it out. And I think it makes sense to do some training in zones four and five to kind of build what is other, in other words, kind of your aerobic peak. And a lot of you have probably heard about zone two cardio and how good it is and wondered why is it that zone two is somehow better than zone five because zone five is the peak and wouldn't it be the case that I should just shoot for the peak, which is reasonable, but think about it like this, folks. That's like

maxing out in the gym and you don't want to do all of your work in the gym maxing out. You actually want a lot of the work you do to be done with weights less than your max. So you can avoid injury, train through the fullest range of motion possible for a long enough duration to stimulate a lot of tissue. And that's what zone two cardio lets you do. It lets you kind of sustain output. It lets you push. kind of sustain output. It lets you push. It lets you kind of work for sustained periods of time without really exerting yourself. So zone two cardio takes a little bit of a kick in the pants, but nothing like going out for a run, which I think would put most people in like zone three to five, depending on how their aerobic conditioning is. So zone two could be like a walk.

And yes, the addition of a weighted vest can help. Funny enough, if I walk with a weighted vest with the dogs, I'm in zone two. If I walk around the house, I'm certainly in zone one. So you might make the argument that it is the vest's additional weight pushing you from one heart rate zone into the next. And it could also be that you tend to walk with a little bit more speed with a vest than you do like doing zone one activities. But I don't think you need a vest to turn walking into a zone two activity. You just need to walk fast. And again, a huge, huge thing here is what your initial aerobic capacity is. Okay. This question comes from Angie last to the question is how come you can eat two bagels and get lean and all get a

pudgy belly? So this is a good question. I was speaking the other day on the podcast about my recent stomach issues that I've been having. I've had a lot of real, real problems with my stomach for like two weeks, super random, came out of nowhere. I think it started with food poisoning. Um, and then my stomach just could not get right for two weeks. I'm on my like fifth or sixth day of feeling substantially better. Um, so, you know, while I don't feel I'm totally in the clear, I definitely feel like I'm close to being in the clear. Um, which feels really nice because quite frankly, it was stressing me out. And I had switched to a diet of a lot of simple carbohydrates, which included bagels. And I get questions like this a lot specific to multiple different bread products,

be it bread, muffin, bagels, donuts. Why is it that I cannot eat these? Or why is it that when I do eat these, I feel like I'm so bloated. And I think one thing to always keep in mind with bread is what you're eating typically with the bread. So a lot of people will eat butter with bread, oil with bread. They'll eat a sandwich with cheese, lunch meat, multiple condiments, all of which contain sodium, all of which contain fats, which can slow down the rate of digestion. Oftentimes, sandwiches and such contain fiber. So, there's a lot of things that we, certainly they contain protein. Oftentimes, there's a lot of things we consume when we consume bread products. With the bread products, think about the cream cheese that's often consumed with bagels. And what you'll see is people conflate the bloating, abdominal

distension, the quote unquote heavy feeling of a big meal that included bread. And they will kind of, and again, this is for lack of a better term, conflate those feelings with the bread and they won't do what I think is the most reasonable thing to do, which is assume, Hey, you know, I ate a number of different things in that meal. Um, so, you know, no real single ingredient in isolation is worthy of, you know, let's, uh, of crucifixion here, but it's very rarely the bread. And I say this as somebody who, when I had a very, very difficult time keeping foods down and needed things that sat really easily in my stomach, I actually went to bread. Now, for many of you, you might have a sensitivity to gluten. I could say it could be as many as like seven to 10% of

these listeners on the high end, of course. But understand that gluten sensitivity does exist. Celiac disease is rarer, but I think it's about 1% of the population has celiac disease and up to five to seven, maybe even 10% has a gluten intolerance or sensitivity. So if you feel like crippling pain, abdominal pain, severe gas, severe bloating, you should definitely go to your general practitioner and try to get a referral to a gastroenterologist so you can determine whether or not you have a GI sensitivity or a gluten sensitivity. Now, for a lot of you, I don't think you're gaining any weight when you eat these bread products. I think this is just an old wives tale that sticks around because think about the foods that you eat with bread, the types of meals

where bread comes first, right? The things that we eat on top of bread, like the sheer volume of calories we eat when we eat bread. And when you pair that with the kind of just general communication around bread, oh, bread is so fattening, bread makes you gain weight. You know, when you eat bread, bread is something that absorbs water well, especially in the digestive tract. Bread is something that absorbs water well, especially in the digestive tract. And it's one of those things that like you, when you eat bread, it doesn't take up a ton of space unless it's like very fibrous bread. So you can eat a lot of bread. So you could, you know, you could predict that the scale might go up after eating some

bread in a way that, you know, might, it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. So what I would tell you, and what I would tell anybody listening who's been confused as they navigate their fitness journey around bread, multigrain breads, breads that contain fiber, breads that contain whole grains, particularly grains that have not been processed are going to be very fibrous and very filling. They're very nutritious. White breads, breads that are more refined, don't have the same nutritional quality. They're easier to overeat and we often eat them with foods that are high in calories. So don't demonize the bread itself. Think about the context in which we see bread appear in the meals. And if you'd like to eat more bread, you have to make room for it calorically. And you have to make sure that it fits within the goals you have for your

carbohydrate intake. And you can do that with simple carbohydrates. You can do that with more complex forms. If you want to make bread a very regular part of your diet, and I think you could have it every day. Like for years, I would have English muffins with peanut butter and jelly post-workout, and I'd use an Ezekiel muffin or a multigrain muffin because I was doing it five days a week, and I just wanted to be conscientious. So the more you eat bread, the more I'd focus on getting nutrient-dense forms of bread. But the truth is, if we were all in a calorie surplus of, let's say, 500 calories and the extra 500 were all coming from bread, we would probably all get a little pudgy. But if we were all on a deficit, which included bread, and none of us had

sensitivities or we're eating foods that were really fattening or not fattening, sorry, fatty on slow digesting with the bread, then hey, we might all see some pudginess and distension. might all see some pudginess and distension. Okay. L Bella boo. Oh, before we get to this one, also I'm a, I'm a muscular dude who gets 15,000 steps a day. Um, so that's another reason why I have a little more wiggle room with my diet. Okay. L Bella boo 69. I'm a vegan and I'm really struggling on getting my protein up. I'm relying on protein powders. Is this okay? So first things first, I think protein powders are fine. I think the vegan protein powders are fine. I have no reason to complain about, you know, protein powder supplementation for general health. I look at high quality protein powders, similar to the way I look at foods. Um, you know,

I've been taking a protein shake probably twice a day for as long as I can remember. Um, like I can't think about, or I'm sorry, two scoops a day, which I guess is like one scoop twice a day, but I take two scoops in the morning, like pretty much every morning. And I've always enjoyed that. I've always had really good luck with that. I've always felt that, you know, even though it was a dairy product, if it was a whey protein isolate, it was fine. And I haven't seen too many complications over the years. Can't think of a single one from having protein shakes made by a high quality manufacturer.

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 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. There's plenty of vegan protein shakes on the market made from a high-quality manufacturer,

but I think it is important to remember that anytime you get protein from a supplement, you might be missing out on getting it from other sources. There's an opportunity cost. other sources. There's an opportunity cost. So you should know and have a list of go to, you know, high protein, um, vegan or vegetarian friendly protein sources. And, you know, I think that if you try to get 80 grams a day, 40 grams a day from, or let's say 10 to 40 grams a day from a shake, that's probably okay. But if you're having to push into like 60, 70 grams a day from a shake, that's probably okay. But if you're having to push into like 60, 70 grams a day from a shake, you're going to have a nutritional portfolio that's not very diversified. So remember you have tofu. That's one of my favorites. In terms of protein sources,

I think soy gets a bad rap. Nutritional yeast has a lot of protein. Citan, also very high in protein. Many seeds, many nuts. You need to be careful of the fat content. We'll discuss that a little more later. Legumes are really a great source. Edamame, another form of soy. Green peas for vegetarians out there. Eggs are fabulous. I think I probably said quinoa, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, again, for the vegetarians, not the vegans, but a diverse portfolio of non-animal or non-meat protein sources is really, really excellent. And you can try to diversify where you get your vegan proteins from. Like you can do, uh, coconut protein, potato protein, pea protein, brown rice, protein,

spirulina, all of these things are rich in protein. And maybe you could throw together some crazy concoction of protein blends, uh, to try to diversify and get as much exposure to different types of nutrition as you can. Um, and I think you'll probably find that you do well, but I would recommend getting many of them from whole foods, but don't stress too much. If you, um, don't stress too much, if you can't get them and you need to use shakes. Okay. This question comes from Mayra Aliza. And the question is, I love sunflower seeds. Are they stopping me from losing weight? So it's a great opportunity to talk about palatability,

mouthfeel and food processing. So sunflower seeds are extremely high in calories. And many seeds and nuts are. Think about almonds, think about cashews. Think about peanuts. Think about walnuts. Think about sunflower seeds as all high calorie foods. Now, interestingly, almost all of them come shelled, but most of them are sold unshelled. Specifically, sunflower seeds are sold in like a small plastic tube that's often used to disperse them over salads. Almonds are almost always sold, hold, removed from their shell. Walnuts and peanuts are oftentimes sold in shells, but removed from shells is more common now. Pistachios was something that previously used to be shelled, but would almost always come out of its shell when you ate it.

And then you'd see them now more often being sold shell-less. So all of the convenience is remove the shells from nuts, which is difficult for humans because then we overeat them and we eat them very quickly because a lot of them are salted. They're incredibly rich because of the fat profile. So they have wonderful textures. and while being very nutrient dense and containing some fiber and some protein because of that really high fat content, the same thing that gives nuts, they're really nice texture. Um, what you'll find is they're very calorically dense. So they add up fast and if they're not in a shelled, so cool thing about like pistachios is you have to crack them open. But if you don't, you can eat a lot, a lot faster, a lot more, a lot faster. You can push them in by the handful.

Whereas if you have like, you know, really tightly closed up pistachio, you're going to be working on it for like 30 seconds to get it open. Um, so not only are you burning likely negligible amounts of calories and some brain power working on the puzzle that is getting the pistachio open. You can't just shovel handfuls down your gullet. You have to work slowly. And that's not easy for many people to do. In fact, I want you to think about the most popular snack foods. Almost none of them require work because it's really convenient to just, you know, open up the hatch and send it right back. And I don't blame people for doing that because that's how our brains are programmed.

I don't think it makes you a bad person by any stretch because you enjoy, you know, something like a little bit of, you bit of fat in your food. You enjoy that rich texture. You enjoy snack foods that are easy to overeat. And when we turn nutrient-dense foods like nuts and through multiple forms of processing, we make them shell-less, heavily salted, roasted, honey roasted. They're going to be something more like a chip than they are something like a nut. And I think with sunflower seeds, you see this a lot and you'll see them flavored with the seeds on. For baseball players, super common. I've tried

every flavor of sunflower seeds because there's something that you can pop in your mouth and you can kind of play with them and crack the shell open with your teeth and then spit out the shell and eat the seed. And that is slow and that can be enjoyable. But a lot of times people tear through a number of packs a week because they're very flavored and they're easy. So I would say if you want sunflower seeds to be helpful, allocate some low flavoring original sunflower seeds, um, to be helpful, you know, allocate some low flavoring original sunflower seeds, very much still in the seed or very much still in the, the hole and, uh, put them to the side and give yourself kind of a budget. Don't eat them out of the tube. Um, you know, cause that's how the calories really add up with these snacks is thinking

just because they're healthy, I can eat as many as I want. You're probably better off eating them slowly and just going slowly because they're so calorically dense because they're high in fat. Okay, this question from Danny Coats, 1402. How do you keep up to date with your knowledge? It's impressive. So I have always been a big proponent of maximizing learning opportunities in life. So I'm not a huge listener of music. I'm more of a listener of podcasts. I'm not a huge watcher of TV. I'm more of a reader of books and I'm more of a watcher of educational content on various platforms,

whether that be YouTube or any of the other media. I just have always had a proclivity for this. So some of it is natural. But I think I have the ability now with the internet, like all of us, to have incredible access to some brilliant people. So I have access just through podcasts to, like, I think about the business podcasts I listen to, the politics podcasts I listen to, the fitness podcasts I listen to, and they're all incredible. So whether it's Stronger by Science, which I love for fitness, it's one of my favorites, Huberman Lab, which I love for general science, the All In podcast, Scott Galloway's podcast, Bigger Pockets, which I love for different sides of the greater economic space that is the stock market, the real estate market,

the venture capital market, the general trend of the US economy, getting a little blend of politics in there. I love for politics specifically to listen to the daily, to just try to get a general rundown of what is happening and politicology, to try to get a balanced kind of take from operatives, people who work on campaigns, people who are in the kind of DC hub of what's really going on, what's coming to a head, what of consequence is worth knowing as a citizen so I can stay informed. 50 years ago, I wouldn't have had access to these people because podcasts didn't exist. So simply having a phone is the number one way I keep up with knowledge. Like I just pop on a podcast from brilliant people, put the headphones in while I'm working out while I'm driving. I

have it on the car play while I'm taking the dogs on a run. I have it in my ears. So I take advantage of the spare time. That is the number one way. And I think all of us can do that. And it's something that I so, so, so recommend because if you aren't intentional with how you fill that time, you'll fill it with something stupid like social media that just kind of generally drains you of your energy and your brain's ability to process. And you kind of get flat and you kind of just feel like a board out of your gourd. I don't know. It's just like it drains your brain. And I feel like you get something from the other avenues of creation like podcasts and YouTube that are just so great. Okay. This question from Annie's Jewels M underscore six underscore 21. Can you still put on muscle

if you lift twice a week? You absolutely can. If you can only lift twice a week, you need to train really close to failure with a pretty good you absolutely can. If you can only lift twice a week, you need to train really close to failure with a pretty good amount of volume. You probably need to use a lot of compound movements and you probably need to make sure that you always train total body and really focus on your protein and your sleep. And you can do that. Okay. Last question from Pauline Dreyer. And the question is tips for feeling burnt out with weight training. I'm finding joy in cycle bar, yoga, et cetera. So you should always follow your joy. No pun intended, no corny hacky quote intended. Um, when it comes to your fitness, it doesn't mean that you dis

include things that are obviously helpful. So if you are a big fan of weight training, don't stop weight training just because you are finding joy or more joy in bar. Just find a way to do more bar while not discluding weight training. You know what you probably need to do to optimize your health, or you're putting together a portfolio of activities to help you optimize your health. But it's not always going to look the same. You know, when I first started training, I really loved powerlifting and I got strong on all of the big three exercises. Then I learned I was hypermobile and it was taking a toll on my joints and I started having

training injuries. So I switched to something more like bodybuilding and focus on getting big. And after years of doing that, I found a more hybrid style approach where I do a little strength training, a little hypertrophy training. I do a little mobility training. I make time to grow lagging body parts that I'm not content with and work on tight body parts that aren't as mobile as I want and take dogs on the walks and do things. And so through following my interests and what I'm passionate about, I created a movement practice that works really well for me. And that's what I want you guys ultimately to do. Take my best

advice and take what I've learned through 10 years of personal training and blend it into what's reasonable for you to do for the long term. Cause if you can find something that you can do for the longterm, uh, you know, then, then I've done my job. And while I think that weight training is certainly the best form of exercise for getting the most quote unquote bang for your buck and staving off a lot of preventable disease doesn't mean that there aren't other amazing options that you should take very seriously. Okay, folks, I want to thank you so much for tuning in and remind you to leave a five star rating and review for the podcast on Apple podcasts as well as Spotify and share it to your Instagram story so I can say thank you and I

can make sure that I share it to my story so more people see that you're listening. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. Go ahead and check out the rest of the episodes in the show tab on your podcast servicer, and be sure to stay tuned for more.