Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 306: How to find PEACE with rest, turkesterone, dietary fat + MORE!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome in everybody to another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. What I hope is one of your favorite fitness, health, performance and productivity podcasts. The goal here with each episode is to bring you succinct, concise, no BS advice that you can put into action immediately to improve your life, your health, and hopefully the things that you want to get done. This is a Q&A episode. We'll be discussing putting together a home gym, how you can build a home fitness space on a budget. We'll discuss whether or not you should be training around illness or injury. the beta-ectosteroid terkesterone for performance enhancement, muscle growth, and more.

Starting point is 00:00:51 We'll talk about the essential amount of dietary fat you need to thrive and whether or not you can actually get dinged or get in trouble on a low-fat diet, as well as some tips for managing the challenges that come with body dysmorphia in a landscape where social media and comparison is so, so prevalent. Okay, folks, this is episode 306. I hope you 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

Starting point is 00:01:46 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 looks like a rare gemstone. I love taking my seed every morning because it just looks so damn cool. But the other thing that's amazing about seed is it's delivered on a basis that allows for all of the microorganisms to be alive, meaning they're active fluorescent units. So when you look at them, you see, oh my gosh, these microorganisms, these probiotics are actually still alive by the time I ingest them. So I can get the most benefit possible from my probiotic supplement. And again, seed uses the most clinically proven to work strains,

Starting point is 00:02:28 clinically proven to work in humans. For example, seed has 3.3 billion AFUs of dermatological health promoting probiotics. 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,

Starting point is 00:03:16 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

Starting point is 00:03:55 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. So our first question comes from Abe Sickers. And the question is, good budget stall mats for home gyms. And I thought this would be a great opportunity to segue into just talking about a budget home gym or different types of budgets for home gyms. So we'll start with less than $1,000, less than $5,000, and more than $5,000. So to answer the initial question, as it pertains to stall mats or flooring, this person is asking the best option for budget flooring in a home gym. Typically, people will buy horse stall mats and budget flooring options to create a little bit more of a gym effect. You want that right flooring, especially if you're going to be dropping weights and such.

Starting point is 00:05:00 That can be really difficult to manage. But what I will say is the density and the thickness is really, really important. So the horse on mats that you can buy from places like Harbor Freight or any really livestock supply store are good. And they come in different densities and thicknesses and they come in different floor styles. So some of them have smooth bottoms. Some of them have bubbled bottoms. Some of them are thicker. Some of them are thinner. Some are three by four. Some are four by six. I've used both. I think both work great. That's probably your best budget option for flooring. Another option you can do if you're using a garage space is to epoxy the portion of the floor that you are not going to be lifting or dropping weights on and to create a small like kind of panel of maybe four to six of these stall

Starting point is 00:05:55 mats. You don't need to have your entire garage gym floored. I have one now that's entirely commercial gym flooring. But in my previous house, I did have a stall mat floor throughout the entire garage, and I believe it costs less than a thousand bucks. So great option there, hard to beat. But if you want to go really low budget, epoxy the floor for like two to 300 and just use enough stall mat to cover what it is that you would like to lift on, probably with barbells or maybe an area where you might drop weights or dumbbells. To clean these, you just pull them out and spray them down. Now, in building out the rest of the home gym, like I said, you can really build a home gym

Starting point is 00:06:36 for less than $1,000. I would recommend if you are looking to go budget that you purchase a TRX, amazing way to hit your upper back and shoulders, a pull-up bar, some bands, a pair of adjustable dumbbells, and that's probably where you're going to want to start. The next place up from that is going to be barbells, is going to be things that allow you to load a little bit more weight, but most things in fitness are priced by the pound. So to get a really, really big, uh, bad-ass, you know, weight set, say you went rubber dumbbells that go up to 80 pounds, that's going to cost you a couple thousand dollars, but one pair of adjustables might be between six to $800. So, you know, not only do we want to optimize

Starting point is 00:07:26 for efficiency, we want to optimize for cost. But let's say you have a budget that's a little bit closer to $5,000. You should definitely do some flooring, still recommend a TRX, still recommend a pull-up bar, still recommend bands. At this point, I would recommend a squat rack and an adjustable bench, as well as a barbell and some weight plates. I think you could also include a couple kettlebells and a hamstring roller machine to work on knee flexion, which is more challenging than you might expect. On top of this, I think it's important to just give people the balls to the wall all out option. If cost is not an issue, I would recommend adding to that a cable machine, preferably some type of functional trainer. Oftentimes these are called dual cables where you can adjust a cable up and down.

Starting point is 00:08:18 You might also try a lat pull down cable row dual function. I really, really like the one that I have from Titan Fitness, who's not known for making the highest quality of fitness equipment, but they do a fabulous job with their adjustable lap tower. And that's less than 2000 bucks. And I'm pretty sure that the shipping is free. So tough to beat there. They also sell things like adjustable kettlebells, which have the potential to be pretty damn helpful. But that's about it, folks. I don't think that you need too many different things, too many crazy things. I think you can start small, you can supplement your current gym membership. And if you're not paying a gym membership and you're like me, I am paying multiple gym memberships, my fiancés. But if you're like me

Starting point is 00:09:12 and you enjoy working out from home and you want to invest in it, you will not be sorry. It's been one of the best things I've ever added to my home. Okay, question from Zara underscore Hassan Zara. And the question is, how to be okay with not exercising? Even sick and injured, I feel bad. So this is a form of guilt and a form of negative self-talk that a lot of people suffer with. And the best way to temper this is to understand your physiology, which is that you are likely not building much muscle when you are training way too hard. Okay. So if you're training too hard, too often to recover, you're probably not building as much muscle as you want. So imagine guilting yourself into more and more and more training and additional sessions that

Starting point is 00:10:03 might not even be productive. They might not even be stimulative. They're just born out of an incessant kind of compulsive desire to train and the guilt that comes out of not training. That's not very healthy. And it's actually going to hold you back from reaching your full potential in the gym, which is super shitty because I would bet you want to get all the results that you possibly can for the effort and time you're putting into it. So you need to get really clear on the stress adaptation cycle. Anybody who understands that knows intrinsically the value of rest, that makes this dialogue, this negative self-talk around not training so much easier. When you are sick and when you are

Starting point is 00:10:51 injured specifically, your body is allocating precious resources to the reparation of whatever is injured or your immune system if you're sick. When you are training, training, training, training, training, you're diverting energy away from those processes. Now, with injuries and with illness, there's a certain degree of exercise, depending on the injury and illness, that might actually expedite healing. But what most people do when they suffer from this type of psychology, this type of framing, they aren't going to just go do the gentle, the stimulative amount of movement that's going to enhance healing. They're going to go too far. And what happens is they usually delay the rate at which they recover from illness. They open the door for secondary

Starting point is 00:11:37 infection or the illness to linger longer. And with injuries, they can either make them worse or slow down their healing. It's probably a less is more situation. It's okay to move. But if you are guilting yourself into prolonging an injury, prolonging an illness, and truthfully, not making any fucking progress because you don't give yourself any time to recover, then you're making a huge ass mistake because you're allocating more and more and more time to training to get less and less out of it, all because you aren't comfortable with taking a break. And here's a way to make sure that that over time gets better. When you are in the gym, be intentional. Think about the fact that you should be able to get

Starting point is 00:12:27 the physique you want in four to five sessions a week. And if you can't, those four to five sessions probably aren't stimulative, hard or hard enough. I've heard a lot of people say, I train so hard that I look forward to my rest days. And I really respect that. I really appreciate that. I've really connected with that myself as I've matured as a lifter and become more capable of training hard. That's a skill that you develop to be able to train hard, to be able to push yourself. And so what I'm hoping you get from this is it's okay to take breaks. In fact, you need to take breaks. You need to be able to relax and unwind. You need to be able to chill. And if you can connect with that and make that okay, you're going to actually get way better results than if you

Starting point is 00:13:21 have a neurotic, borderline addictive approach to how it is that you are going to train. Okay. This question from evolve fit underscore Marie, did you ever mess with terkesterone? I did try, uh, I bought two bottles of terkesterone. I tried a half a bottle of it. Uh, I felt as though it was doing literally nothing. I know you might need to take a lot of it. This is a beta-ectesteroid. It is the most hilarious thing now that I think about it. Not a steroid, not a SARM, a purported anabolic. Some people like it, some people don't. My read on it is it's cheap to produce and sell to people who are probably too big of a pussy, for lack of a better term, to take actual anabolics. You can fucking throw my ass in that group for sure. And a lot of people have been asking, so I said, fuck it, I'll throw 60

Starting point is 00:14:14 bucks at this. I'll try it. I'll see what it's about. I did not experience any meaningful increases in strength or muscle when taking terkesterone. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:57 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

Starting point is 00:15:40 community. Back to the show. I think it's hilarious that I thought I would. I feel like I should know better by now, but it just didn't work very well for me. I understand wanting to take supplements like this. I understand looking for an edge. I understand wanting to stay away from potentially more harmful compounds, but to me, this felt like flushing money down the toilet to the fact that when I ended up moving out of my old house, I just threw the old capsules away with a bunch of shit that I was no longer taking. Now, this might work for some people. There might be a rationalization for taking it that I just didn't see. But from personal experience, I would say that I literally messed with it and got almost nothing out of it. And yeah, I could have kept taking it, but I think I just forgot. I think I was just like, this is doing next to nothing. doing next to nothing. The more I expose myself to the intelligent takes on this or what I believed in the most principle and reason takes on this, the more I was like, well, I don't really even

Starting point is 00:16:50 see a pathway for this to work. And this is important to do with all supplements. If you hear somebody hyping them up, you should at the very least expose yourself to the position that somebody might have who's a little bit more skeptical or, you know, short of cynical. Sure, we don't want people who are overtly negative and hating on anything. But, you know, if there are people who are giving rationalizations for why something works, there might be people out there as well who are going to give you a rationalization for why it doesn't. And your job as a consumer is to take the information and use an evidence-based approach to making these decisions. And the evidence basis is, of course, who says it works?

Starting point is 00:17:31 Who says it doesn't? What does the science say? What do I see? And maybe a little bit of experimentation. Okay, this question comes from Katie Lynn, 77. Is a certain amount of fat in your diet absolutely necessary, especially for fat loss? So this is a absolute yes. Now, here's the thing. You will hear this a lot. Protein is a necessity. Fat is a necessity,

Starting point is 00:17:52 and carbohydrates are not required by the body. This is true. Your body can survive without carbohydrates. If you do not get enough dietary fat, if you do not get enough dietary protein, you will die. Now, the amount of those are lower than people who want to be optimal or live optimized would normally consider. What you can live on in terms of fat and protein is probably lower than what you should try to live on. If your goal is fat loss, having a low calorie diet makes a ton of sense. But you shouldn't go so low fat that you lose out on the benefits of having at least enough fat to function optimally. And it's dangerous to go below too little. I'd say if you get less than 20% of your daily calories from fat, you could be in the

Starting point is 00:18:40 danger zone. Men will start to experience a loss of libido, a loss of drive, but the quality of your skin, your hair, your eyes, your joints will start to deteriorate. Your body uses fat for a lot of different things. And it's very important to get enough. Now, because fat has nine calories per gram, it is the most energy dense macronutrient. Fat has nine, alcohol has seven, protein and carbs have four with protein having less by the time it's fully digested and assimilated on a per gram basis. Because fat is the highest, if you reduce your fat intake markedly, for example, removing 20 grams of fat is about the equivalent of removing 45 grams of carbs.

Starting point is 00:19:28 So you get a lot more bang for your buck in terms of creating an energy deficit or a calorie deficit from removing fat. But you can't go too low. It's dangerous. go too low. It's dangerous. I would recommend reducing by no more than five to 10 grams at a time and never going below. And I think this is important, about 20% of your daily energy intake. A lot of people will give you a number as high as 30. You need to check on that and see how you respond. Most people are not going to respond well to this, okay? I'm just going to tell you that straight up. Most people are not going to respond well to a huge production in dietary fat because we use fat for so many different things. And if you just straight up strip all of the fat

Starting point is 00:20:29 out of your diet, things are going to go south in a heartbeat and you need to be aware of that. So don't strip them out too fast. You'll end up in a whole lot of trouble and you'll be very, very much exposing yourself to the potential negative effects of not having what you need to live optimized. Okay. The final question comes from ZM Dyrox and it is how do you overcome bad body image days? Um, so this is something that is very common and it's very prevalent. And that is the comparison of one's current physique to either where you used to be, where you want to be, or worse, someone else's physique. And that is the number one way to create a dialogue around your physique that is negative.

Starting point is 00:21:22 If you want to have a negative look and viewpoint of your physique, constantly compare it to something else, someone else, yourself at a different time, or some ideology that you, I want to look like an influencer, right? Those are traps, straight up. Those are traps. If you can get away from that behavior, that's probably the longest lever you have in terms of overcoming bad body image days. That's the best habit, behavior, and trait that you can exhibit by far. Stop comparing and eliminate your exposure to things that elicit the desire to compare. Another thing you need to do is find things about your body that you do like. Find things about your

Starting point is 00:22:13 body that you can celebrate. Find the body parts that you're making progress on. Find the healthy components of your body and behavior that are worth focusing on. Too many people are critical of everything. Think about politics. There's people who could not tell you what they want the president of the United States to do, but they will tell you all of the things that they don't like. They don't have a single policy position on something that they would like done. They just want to bitch and moan. And we see this a lot. Politics is the best example I can think of. But there are a lot of people who love to be negative contrarians and just pick and criticize. And so if you are constantly operating from a place of criticism, your body

Starting point is 00:22:59 is definitely not going to escape your critical gaze. Okay. You will find more than enough things to criticize about your body, no matter how fit you get. I mean, for goodness sakes, even Mr. Olympia, even the best bodybuilders on the planet find countless things that they don't like about their physique that they quote unquote need to improve about their physique. So if you understand, okay, if you understand that this is, uh, you know, a lifelong relationship, this is the relationship that you have with your body and the way you talk about it. Imagine what it's going to be like when you get older and you just have a natural senescence that occurs with age. You see a natural reduction in the muscle mass, the youth,

Starting point is 00:23:54 the kind of elasticity of your skin, things start to change. Are you going to be able to survive that process if you can't even in your 20s and 30s go like a day without tearing your body down, no, you're not. So in the same way that we work out with the goal of improving our health in the long term, we need to do the same thing with our dialogue. Our internal dialogue needs to match. If you are constantly bagging on yourself, constantly nitpicking and finding things wrong, not just with your physique, but with your job, with your boss, with your relationship, with politics, with sports, whatever you're into. If you are just a criticizer, a nitpicker, a naysayer, that shit's going to leak into everything. Now, then you're going to wake up

Starting point is 00:24:44 one day, be 50, be old, look like shit, feel like shit, be tearing yourself down, hate everybody, and just be the most negative person ever. If you can find ways to communicate positively through the days you're struggling with your body image, it'll make you a more positive thinker. You do not need to be your own worst critic. I know a lot of people say that I'm my own worst critic and that can be positive, but for a lot of you, being your own worst critic is shitty. And I love the adage of like, hey, would you speak to your friend, your close friend, or say the things that you say to yourself to another person? And if the answer is no, that's a good indication that those are probably

Starting point is 00:25:25 harmful things to say that aren't going to help very much. Okay, folks, that does it for today's Q&A. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and remind you to leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and or Spotify. I'd love it if you do both, if you listen on both, wherever you listen, leave a review, share this to your story, tag me if it was helpful so I can say thank you and I'll catch you on a future episode.

Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 306: How to find PEACE with rest, turkesterone, dietary fat + MORE!

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