Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 302: Massage Guns, Supersets, Shoulder Pain, Benefits of Pre Workout

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

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Hey folks, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and I want to thank you for tuning in to what is hopefully one of your favorite health, fitness, performance, and productivity podcasts. I aim to keep each episode reasonably long, as if you're anything like me, you listen to multiple podcasts, multiple audio books, do some form of reading, and probably engage with other forms of media. So I realize how fortunate I am to have your attention, and I'm very grateful for it. In this episode today, we are going to be discussing the utility of massage guns and percussion massage devices for strength acquisition, recovery, mobility. You've definitely seen these around. They're very, very popular.

We'll talk about how to use supersets and intensifier and type of technique to build more muscle, to lose more fat, to build more strength. We'll talk about what the heck to do if you have a shoulder injury or shoulder pain while still attempting to train hard, to maintain fitness, and to minimize pain. This is a very common pain and injury for a lot of people. We'll discuss what the benefits are of pre-workout supplementation outside of caffeine. Is it something that you should honestly consider taking? And I will give you a very, very detailed and in-depth look at how I structure my food intake throughout the day to maintain about 10% to 12% body fat year-round while still having energy, the ability to train

hard, libido, and be an entrepreneur. Okay, folks, thank you very much for tuning in. I promise you will enjoy the episode. This is 302. Crazy. All right, enjoy. This episode of the podcast is brought to you in proud part thanks to our partners, Seed. Seed makes the best symbiotic on the market. A symbiotic is a prebiotic and a probiotic. It's not just a supplement or a pill loaded with random bacterial strains that may or may not be clinically proven to work in humans. And it's not just fiber. Seed is a symbiotic capsule that contains a unique pomegranate husk prebiotic fiber that feeds the clinically proven to work in human microorganisms inside the capsule. It's pretty amazing. Actually, it's this unique emerald green capsule that It's pretty amazing, actually. It's this unique

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That means 3.3 billion microorganisms who have been shown in the research to clinically enhance the health of your dermatological microbiome, your skin, not just your gut. 5.25 billion for cardiovascular health. 8.05 billion for micronutrient synthesis and nutrient absorption, and of course, 37 billion AFUs from specimens shown to improve digestive health, gut immunity, and gut barrier integrity. Seed is amazing, and in addition to being so evidence-based, it's also vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, nut-free, shellfish-free, sesame-free, glyphosate-free, corn-free, and does not use binders, preservatives, and is compliant with Prop 66. So that is one hell of a product that you can get shipped directly to you. They even have a brand new PDS-08 formula. This is their new pediatric

symbiotic formula that is specific for children and teens with no observed side effects of GI distress. It's engineered to survive digestion, even in your kiddo's stomach, and it contains five grams of prebiotic fiber per serving. So an awesome thing you can work in there for your kids. When you go to seed.com, listeners today are going to save 15% off their subscription by checking out with the code Danny15. This is the only probiotic supplement I would consider taking. And if you're interested in improving the health of your gut, skin, and overall wellbeing, I'd look into Seed as well. Okay. So first question comes from Phil V1 over on Instagram. All of these questions actually

came from Instagram. Best place to go if you'd like to have me answer your question. In fact, many of the questions I field on Instagram get answered right there. But when I come across one that I've gotten multiple times, I always make an effort to be sure to set it aside to answer it here. So Phil V1 asks, is there any point to massage guns for recovery? So the first thing we have to do is we have to consider what the heck does recovery mean? Are we using esoteric metrics of inflammation? Are we using multifactorial things like pain that can be influenced by training, but also might be influenced by sleep, stress. And of course, they are quote unquote, biopsychosocial, meaning there is a biological,

psychological, and sociological component to pain. Are we going to gauge readiness for the next session? And so, I think just using the term recovery without definition can be tricky. So let's use a few different metrics. We'll start, of course, with soreness. Having a physical therapy slash strength and conditioning clinic that I get to go to work at every day, I see an awesome clinician and a bunch of awesome trainers at work managing soreness, helping their clients recover. Of course, I've done this for 10 years. And I will say, I do think that the massage gun can help with decreasing soreness for a couple of different reasons. The first is just the percussion and tactile response, feedback, if you will, that comes from doing or applying or applying rather percussive repetitious pressure to a tissue.

When you use a percussion gun, what you are doing ultimately is applying force to the tissue, not unlike training, not unlike lifting, not unlike massage, right? Tissues speak one language. They speak the language of force and stretch. And, you know, when you apply force to a tissue, you get a pretty strong response. Now, here's the problem with the massage guns. They are not particularly, um, they are not particularly effective at producing a lot of force or applying a lot of force. You'll hear the same argument made for foam rolling. There's simply not enough impact at the actual tissue level. So a lot of people have made body tempering devices, which are extremely heavy metal foam

rolls, because what they'd like to do is apply that much more pressure. So think about it like this, folks. The more pressure you apply to the tissue, the more stretch you apply to the tissue, the greater potential you might have to change the physiology of the tissue. And while massage guns provide enough percussion, movement, and force to the tissue to maybe decrease soreness and maybe increase readiness, I'm not quite ready to say they will actually facilitate faster recovery from hard training, but I don't think they'll hurt. How I would use them is similarly to how one might use foam rollers for readiness. So if you feel like you have chronically tight ankles and you have a very, very difficult time training through a full range of motion,

allowing the knee to maybe travel over the toes when doing things like squatting and lunging, doing a foam roll or a percussion massage treatment on the calf and the ankle complex could certainly loosen the tissue and prepare you to train. And after the fact, you can do the same thing. You do some combination of stretching, rolling, or percussion, right? That's really valuable. That's really cool. That's, it's kind of easy. You know, it's, it's low impact. It's not stressful. A lot of, one of the cool things about this too, is you can do this from home. You can do this at the gym. You can do this at work. A lot of these massage guns are small. Now, many people also use them to manage pain for the same reasons, right? Like simply, let's say you have neck pain, simply sitting around, not training your neck

muscles, not training your rear delts, your lower traps, your rhomboids, your upper traps, not strengthening or having any input or stretch into that tissue, it's probably going to stay shitty, low quality, painful tissue. So, you know, a little bit of a light massage or percussion could help with pain management. I've seen many people use it for that. As for, you know, better blood flow, facilitating better recovery, facilitating better muscular contraction. You know, I have heard of this many times from many people, uh, that, you know, subjectively they think that the massage gun can help them with all these different performance metrics. And if you're one of those people that believes it,

then it probably will work. Um, and I think that's really, really good there. That's really, really valuable. Um, you know, that's, that's kind of like all I can say about these without bashing them. I think that part of how they work is in your belief that they work. So yes, you might call that the placebo effect. In fact, that's a pretty straight across example of the placebo effect, but there's an opportunity cost with everything. And these devices cost between two to 400 bucks. They're now getting made much cheaper than they used to. So you can find them for under a hundred. And I wouldn't recommend spending the big bucks on one until you've tried it and see how you respond. And importantly as well, if you're actually going

to use them semi-frequently. Okay. Next question from Jenna Tellia. Question is, should supersets be agonist or antagonist? Let's start off with a kind of explanation of terms. So you guys have definitely taken an English class or a structure of, you know, film class, or a structure of film class, or I guess one might call that film study, or rather just story study. You are probably familiar with the term antagonist. An antagonist is a person who's actively working in opposition or outright hostile to the protagonist, aka the good guy. In the body, the term antagonist is used a little bit differently. So an antagonist is a muscle that works essentially in opposition or in direct, let's call it, it's a literal mirror in that it will do the opposite function of the agonist muscle, not the protagonist muscle.

We don't, we don't say protagonist and agonist because there's really no morality attached to your movement. There's no, um, you know, you don't have a good guy and a bad guy here. You have a muscle that pulls, you have a muscle that pushes. So an example of antagonists and agonists would be the calves and the tibialis. The tibialis pull the toes to the nose, the calves pull the heels towards the bum, okay? The biceps and the triceps, perhaps the most obvious agonist and antagonist pairing. Flexion and extension of the elbow, less some flexion and extension of the shoulder, painted for each one of those muscles. So, when you look to superset, okay, should your supersets be agonist or antagonist? And the

short answer is both. It's just knowing how and when to deploy them. So an antagonist superset that I like is a upper body push into an upper body pull. I really like using that kind of quote unquote antagonist superset where we might train the lats and the pecs or the low traps and the shoulders or the upper traps and the triceps, you know, pairing a pushing tissue with a pulling tissue so that when I'm working my push, let's say that's the agonist, my antagonist, the pullers are resting and I can go right from my push immediately into my pull, taking only one rest period after the fact. That's a superset by definition. A superset is doing two muscle groups or training two movements back to back without rest. If you want to get into the very, very nitty gritty, and I think

this is interesting because you do not hear this almost ever. But a superset is technically per the NSCA, National Strength and Conditioning Association's definition, two exercises that are done back to back for antagonist muscle groups. Okay. An agonist superset will always fall under the umbrella of a compound set. That's two exercises done back to back for the same muscle group. So it might be a little bit easier to ask, do you prefer compound sets, which are supersets for the same muscle? So like close grip bench into tricep extension or walking lunges into leg extensions versus supersets or antagonist paired sets, doing a push with a pull, a bench press with a row, a chin up with a dip. Okay. So here's what I'll say. Both are awesome. I like to use supersets

and antagonist paired sets to increase exposure to different muscle tissues, to get through higher volumes of work with general population clients to really make sure that we're hitting every muscle and making the most use of their time in the gym. That's really big. For 80% of people, most of their quote unquote supersets or most of the quote unquote sets done back to back will be antagonist in fashion because of the increase in efficiency. The compound sets, the agonist supersets, two moves for the same muscle. I like that for more advanced athletes, for people who have a weak muscle group, for people who want to develop a certain muscle group, for people who, again, are at a high training level and need a little bit more intensity to punish tissues that they've been training for a long time. So maybe you do a

Romanian deadlift, which trains the hamstrings in a very lengthened position into a lying hamstring curl, where you train them in a very shortened position, going from technical heavy exercise to a stable and machine-based exercise. Dumbbell chest press, more of a shoulder adduction thing, across the midline, bringing the shoulders together. Cable fly, same arm path. One's a little heavier, one's a little lighter. Eight to six to eight on the chest press, 12 to 15 reps maybe on the cable fly, get a great pump. That's how I would use the agonist supersets. Okay. Mary Avila asks, oh, Mariah Avila asks, working with a shoulder injury, it's discouraging any tip. So my first tip is to remember that I am not a doctor. And while I have worked with a number

of clients who have had everything from rotator cuff tears to frozen shoulder to impingement. I've seen it all. That doesn't qualify me to give umbrella medical advice on a podcast. What you need to remember is I am not in a position to diagnose your pain, nor am I in a position to make any broad strokes, conclusions about what it is that you need to do to heal your pain. However, one thing I can say with a very high degree of certainty is that not moving is a really bad idea. And when many people get one injury and one body part, they get disgruntled and discouraged, understandably, but they then proceed to, and this is the unfortunate part, stop moving all of the uninjured areas. And so what's really important for you to remember

as an athlete, as somebody who takes their training seriously, is that you in a perfect world will probably never get injured, but it's unlikely. There will be injuries. There will be pain. As somebody who's training, whether it's for a really intense marathon or you're just looking to get in shape, you have to challenge your body, period, end of story. And in challenging your body, things are going to happen. But the one thing you should never do when there's pain or there's an injury is you should never think, okay, well, I am just going to put the whole body, the entirety of my body on what we might essentially call just relaxation mode, chill mode. You're shutting it down. You're not doing anything at all. What's going on guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit

about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my home heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells or elite physique, which is a female bodybuilding focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels, but what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's

updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training

community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the Core Coaching Collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. I can sit here and tell you this right now, folks, that almost always, almost always makes things worse. And, you know, I really understand like wanting to practice an abundance of caution when you don't know an injury. So like the first piece of advice I always give you, if it's been lasting for a while, go see a physical therapist, just jump straight through to a cash-based physical therapist, say, fuck waiting a million years for my insurance to give me the A-OK on this. Just go do it. Just go do it. Just make it happen. It's totally worth it.

You'll feel like a million bucks just getting a rough approximation of what the heck is going on. But for people who don't have like a diagnosed pain in their shoulder, you know, you don't know what's going on. You might be looking to find ways to still train. One thing I have found is that shoulder extension, things like rowing, pulling the arms back, okay, tend to be very friendly on the shoulders. Training the triceps and training the biceps can also be very, very, very valuable and very, very helpful for providing movement into the joint, pain-free movement into the joint, stability in and around the joint. To put it simply, a lot of rehabilitation tactics are built on the fundamental notion that

if a tissue is injured, strengthening the surrounding tissues is helpful. If a joint is injured or unstable, strengthening the surrounding tissues, getting blood flow in and out of the surrounding tissue can be really, really valuable. And so just, you know, with the shoulder, remember you have the deltoids, the upper chest, the clavicular head of the pec, that's attached, of course, to the clavicle. You have the serratus, you have the rhomboids, you have the upper traps, lower traps, rear delts, lats, all biceps and triceps, which of course have a huge influence on moving the shoulder. These are all muscles that when you train them will get blood in and out of the shoulder. And yes, I understand maybe he won't train the deltoids with a lateral raise.

Maybe an overhead press is what causes the most pain. But if you can get an assessment and you can find alternatives to movements that are causing pain, I am firmly of the belief that you will be positioned to recover and heal more quickly than if you remain sedentary and do nothing. And I think far too many people, their initial response to an injury is, boom, shut it down, get sedentary, do nothing. And so, I didn't know your injury. I want to speak fairly general here with the shoulder. I find rows, biceps training, triceps training, oftentimes various forms of rear delt training to be helpful. Shoulder stability work always helpful. But if you don't know,

you're just guessing. So start assessing, get with a quality practitioner. If you need one, you can just send me a DM over on Instagram. I have a go-to guy for all things sports injury. He is cash-based. So you just pay and you get your appointment, you get your assessment, you get your rehab plan instead of just staying in pain for a long time, which is objectively depressing and kind of starts to wear down on your sense of fitness. Like how the hell are you supposed to embody, uh, you know, fitness and health and wellbeing and performance and productivity and lead your business, lead your family, live the life you want to live the way so many of the listeners of this podcast do. If you're in pain, you know, having a lot of pain, um, over the years has been a huge driver for me continuing to train. You know, it helps keep me out of pain. It helps me manage my mood. So if you're just living in pain and it's affecting your training, need to get in front of a qualified practitioner so you can start getting out of pain,

hopefully quickly, because that I'll tell you right now is no fun. Okay. Aaron miles three, three, four would like to know what are the benefits of pre-workout besides energy? So something that you need to remember about supplements is that not all supplements are created equal. Most pre-workouts in fact are quite crappy. Um, most of them contain caffeine and a heavy dose of other stimulants, but that's about it. And there's only so many ingredients that have a basis in science for saying, okay, look, we can definitively include these in our products to improve performance. We know caffeine is one of them. It is one of the products that can improve performance by reducing time to feel fatigue and energy, but it wears off quickly. So if you think that that's the only thing you should take to increase performance, then I just say don't take pre-workout because you'll,

you know, you'll have to, you should just save your caffeinated pre-workout for the days you need it. Cause if you use it all the time, you are not going to feel too much from it. You're going to see it wears off very quickly. Caffeine has a, we have the ability rather as humans to quickly become desensitized to caffeine. But there are a number of ingredients that are found in high quality pre-workouts. Most of these are either underdosed or not included at all in lower tier products that are looking to maximize on the margins of profit rather than the margins of performance. And the three main ones are citrulline malate, which improves blood flow. It becomes L-artrogenine after it's ingested and works to expand the blood vessels.

Think about how a sauna promotes vasodilation or the expansion of the blood vessels. Think about how a sauna promotes vasodilation or the expansion of the blood vessels. The hose that your blood travels through is getting bigger. It's stretching. It can carry more blood. Citrulline helps enhance that, which is great for blood flow and endurance while training. Beta-alanine is an awesome, awesome for high rep or endurance training. It works well to buffer metabolites that start to accumulate when you're training. It is the component in pre-workouts that gives you the quote-unquote tingles or that paresthesia sensation on your skin. Another great one that has a solid basis in evidence is betaine anhydrous. A couple of things I like about beta alanine and betaine, beta alanine, just like caffeine, reduces fatigue, improves anaerobic exercise capacity. So

lots of higher rep training will benefit from this, could increase muscle mass and workload, and it definitely decreases fatigue. While betaine is very, very cool because it's an osmolite, which helps to balance fluid levels inside and outside of cells. So this can really, really help with boosting endurance and strength and maintaining the right balance physiologically for optimal output within the level of the muscle. You maybe have heard of betaine under the name trimethylglycine or TNG. the name trimethylglycine or TMG. Also with caffeine, I'm going to be supplementing with caffeine. I like L-theanine. It prevents the crash of caffeine and keeps me mood stable. And as far as like training and getting a benefit from a pre-workout without caffeine, you can also consider types of choline like alpha glycerol, phosphocholine, or alpha GPC. Legion, a primary

sponsor of this podcast, has a pre-workout product called Pulse, which contains all three of those things, caffeine, L-theanine, and alpha GPC. And their performance matrix is citrulline, beta-alanine, betaine. If your pre-workout does not have citrulline, beta alanine, betaine, it has way too much caffeine, no inclusion of L-theanine, no inclusion of alpha-GPC, I would be curious as to whether or not the manufacturer is making that with your performance in mind or their profit in mind. And I think that that is very, very important to remember. mind. And I think that that is very, very important to remember. Good companies typically charge slightly more for higher quality products. They provide third-party testing that will allow you to see what's in their product. And if a company is not willing to do that, you should

practice caution as a consumer. Okay, last question comes from Sark Maydramont. And the question is curious how you structure your food intake throughout the day to meet your macro goals. So my macro goals are constantly fluctuating. But on a more general basis, I am always aiming to get about 170 to 200 grams of protein per day. I am always aiming to get 30 to 40 grams of fiber per day, preferably from fruits and vegetables that I really enjoy. I do get some from whole grains for sure. And I'd like to get about 60 to 80 fat in between 300 and 400 carbs. I understand those are huge ranges, but they're ranges that I can maintain my body composition and performance in. And you guys have to remember, I train five days a week. I still do upwards of 30 to 40 personal training sessions a week on my feet, putting

weights away, engaging with clients, walking around in the studio. I walk my dogs all the time, not just on small walks, but sometimes big walks, take them out often, pretty active, constantly, including things like sauna and cardio. So I am an extremely active adult. So those numbers might sound crazy to you, but it's all relative. Okay. So I don't want you thinking like, Oh, I'm going to follow his diet, look like him. That lifestyle is a huge factor here. But what I tend to find is in the evening, I crave carbohydrates and I crave fats more than I crave protein. I don't avoid protein in the evening.

In fact, I often have my largest serving of protein in the evening. But if I don't make a concerted effort to get protein in the morning, I may struggle to get enough protein throughout the day. So what I like to do first thing earliest in the day is I have a shake. I usually have my first meal as a protein shake that has two scoops of Allegiance vanilla and one scoop of Allegiance Genesis greens powder because I like the reishi mushroom and the added greens are certainly a plus. So that is a huge thing. I structure my day first and foremost with tons of fluids, electrolytes, protein, and greens in the morning. And I don't start caffeinating until about 90 minutes in. So if I'm training fasted, I'm using a stimulant-free pre-workout. If I'm training fed,

which would be later in the day, I will probably have a caffeinated pre-workout because if I'm training right away, I'd rather allow adenosine the opportunity to decouple from its receptor than to just jam caffeine into my mind and into my face without any real ability to metabolize it. I'm sitting here right now at 6.27 AM. I got up at five. I did five miles on the bike. I did 25 minutes in the sauna. I did a cold plunge. I came up here to record this and I'll have my first meal and my caffeine after. Then in the middle chunk of the day, that's where I load up on things like carbs and fiber. I love sandwiches. And when I'm at work, I will regularly get sandwiches. And I know a lot of people are like, what the heck sandwiches? Yes, I eat bread. I do. Because sandwiches also have protein and vegetables and things that are beneficial like

cheese that contain protein, calcium, magnesium. So I will often have a nice lunch with multiple pieces of fruit. I regularly bring yogurt and kefir to work, bananas, apples, berries to work. If I'm at home, I will oftentimes cook, whether it's protein, whether it's eggs. Sometimes I'll go out to eat. I mentioned sandwiches. Sometimes I'll even do fast food and I'll go to Panda Express and get rice, different protein-rich dishes. I'm not perfect, but the way I structure it is lots of water and protein in the morning, loads of carbs, fruits, and some protein in the middle of the afternoon, and then have even more carbs, protein kind of towards dinner with dessert and the snacking being predominantly revolving around

things like fat. I do try to stick to that 80-20 rule and I use some supplements, but that's typically how I structure my food. Okay, folks, thank you so very much for tuning in. I know you have a million podcasts you could listen to. So the fact that you choose this one means a lot. Please share it to your Instagram story. Leave me a five star rating and review on both Spotify and Apple podcasts. It really helps to grow the pod. And that's my goal for this year. And I want to thank each and every one of you for helping me, you know, make this thing a reality. We're growing the pod. Never thought it possible. Can't wait to see where we go as 2023 unfolds. Catch you on the next one.