Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 328: Fitness for 50+ Mobility Routines, Finding Peace with Weight Gain + More!

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome into another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. In this episode, we'll be discussing how it is you can get started with getting in shape if you're over 50 years old with no training history. So for anybody who's new to this, who's deconditioned or who's just trying to find a place to start, awesome episode for that. We're also going to be answering listener questions about dedicated stretching and mobility routines, how to deal emotionally with weight gain after a bodybuilding competition or figure competition. I think we'll just have a nice dialogue about becoming more comfortable with changes in appearance.

We'll discuss the best places to learn more about fitness and training. We'll also discuss the risk of heavy metal poisoning and contamination in supplements, which is a very real problem, as well as managing daily fiber intake for optimal health, well-being, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood lipid, and gut health management. So lots of fitness, nutrition, training, and wellbeing to discuss today. I'm sure you'll enjoy the episode. This episode is brought to you in special part, thanks to our awesome partners over at Ice Barrel. If you're like me, you want to get the absolute most you can out of your fitness and out of what

it is that you're doing in life. I like to make sure that I'm recovering well and prepped for hard workouts. I like to make sure that my cognition is sharp and I like to make sure that I'm doing what I can to maintain my long-term health. And cold water immersion is a phenomenal tool I use and have used for a while to help me do this. Cold water immersion or taking ice baths is a great way to improve your recovery and performance. Just a few short sessions a week can really make a difference in how you recover. It can increase and improve your heart rate variability. It can enhance performance.

It improves mood and brain function. It also provides an awesome boost of energy and focus because when you hop in an ice bath and you get this amazing vasoconstriction effect and your body starts releasing epinephrine and norepinephrine, it kind of lets you reenter the world awake, energized, excited, and enthused. And I would much rather take an ice bath in the mid-afternoon, especially if I had a hard training session in the morning, than consume more caffeine. Ice Barrel allows me to do this 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,

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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 where 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 kicking this podcast off with a robust discussion about how to get in shape if you're

completely deconditioned and you are new to this and you're looking to improve your health and your fitness. And this question's inspired by Joni Hannah Miller, who asks, I'm a 51-year-old woman. I've been overweight most of my life. Where do I start to get fit and healthy? I've been overweight most of my life. Where do I start to get fit and healthy? And I think that this is a demographic that is so underserved by fitness influencers, content creators, personal trainers are people who have no athletic background. It's always kind of baffled me how many coaches and trainers don't have a lot of experience working with non-athletes. I spent a ton of time in my early training career working at 24 Hour Fitness, which is a big box gym. And I can tell you just how many people show up at the gym for the very first time,

overweight, deconditioned, and with little to no formal exercise experience. A lot of trainers are detached from this. And this is one of, I'd say, the biggest disconnects between why so many people are out of shape with the number of trainers are out there. And that is most trainers have a predisposition for fitness and movement. They like to move. They like to be active. They like to engage with physical activity and they have for quite some time. There are a number of people who have just never been in that position. I want you to think back to high school. If you're somebody who's been fit your whole life, I bet you played sports. Well, you know, there were kids that you went to high school that didn't, and maybe that like dreaded physical education class. There's a lot of people who would show up at the gym, literally in their middle age,

between 40 and 60, heavily overweight, heavily deconditioned with no exercise experience. And they're basically like, I haven't really exercised since high school, since somebody made me, um, and I'm here to change. And that is just a hugely underserved population. But the good news is, in my opinion, training for general fitness and wellness. If you are fresh off the street, literally never exercised in your life, you're overweight, you're out of shape, it really comes down to three big things. The first, you need to find an exercise protocol that you're going to enjoy. It can be lifting, it can be walking, it can be running, it can be any combination

of protocols, but you have to pick something you're going to show up and do on the days you least want to show up because consistency is key. The second thing, especially for losing weight and getting healthier, you're going to want to eliminate ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods that don't have a lot of nutrients, the things you overeat, the chips, the candies, the cookies, the cakes, and you want to build your diet around fiber, around protein, around fruits, around vegetables, and include some of the stuff you like, being mindful of the portions. You can try a crazy fad diet, but I really wouldn't recommend it because they tend to be so, so rigid and so, so constrained. So get your training right, get your nutrition right. And the third and probably the most important thing is be consistent with this process. Give it time, give it months, maybe even years, zoom out, take a 30,000 foot view of this thing and give yourself time to get in shape. So for those of you who are listening and Joni who asked the question, the first thing is identify an exercise protocol that you're going to be willing to engage with.

to engage with. My favorite and the protocols that I have had the best luck with with clients, be it in person, be it online, are hybrid protocols that are heavily biased towards full range of motion resistance training. I include aerobic work. I include some mobility work, activation work, warmup work, of course, but the majority of the exercise programming I give to the general population is resistance training with essentially homework cardio. I think that works fantastic. Now, things get a lot more advanced for one-on-one clients and for the app-based trainings that we have, you know, that are tailored towards people who might be a little more advanced, but for general population clients, people who come to the studio, people who are working with us online, who are totally new, we're looking at some combination of aerobic training and

anaerobic training, a little bit of steps, a little bit of walking, a little bit of running, swimming, something to increase movement and create a healthy, robust cardiovascular system. But most of the time is going to be allocated to some form of resistance training. It can be using dumbbells, barbells, free weights, machines, a full gym, body weight, TRX, suspension training. Since the pandemic, people's gym situation has really changed. And one thing I've seen that's really awesome is as long as you're engaging with resistance of some kind, even if it's body weight, even if it's home workouts, you name it, you're going to see tremendous increases in blood pressure.

You see an acute rise in blood pressure, but over time, your blood pressure will decrease. Your A1C, markers of blood sugar control, will get substantially better. You will build muscle and probably have better sleep and better energy throughout the day. That's just from exercise. And that's a huge way to start feeling healthy. I think you get a lot out of resistance. You feel sore at first, which is for some people a great thing because it gives them a little bit of instant feedback that, hey, this is working. And some people are heavily motivated by that kind of thing. But I think a resistance protocol paired with some type of aerobic training that you're

willing to do, again, walking, spinning, hiking, cycling, these are all things, swimming, that are more than fine. There's no perfect way to do this. If you are completely and entirely deconditioned, you've been overweight your whole life and you just want to get fit and healthy, we want to eliminate as many barriers as possible. So one thing, and I'll use myself as an example here, one mistake I made very early in my training career was, and I think that a lot of coaches still make this mistake, is in their own pursuit of what's optimal and what's best, you of course learn what does and maybe doesn't work so well when it comes to exercise. But it's not my job or anybody else's job to bag on some modality of exercise so heavy

that it discourages people from taking action. Like, oh, Zumba, that's silly dancing. Oh, CrossFit, extreme fast-paced Olympic lifting. God, what could go wrong? Those trite little jabs at other exercise modalities actually discourage people from working out. And I have my opinions of what works and I have my opinions of what may be a little bit silly and unproductive. But at the end of the day, I just want people to move more. So I would encourage any exercise you're willing to do, even if it is something that might not be as chic as say, you know, what I like resistance training. But I think there's so many ways to do resistance training. I already mentioned one in CrossFit, you could do a typical bodybuilding protocol. That's not just for people who want to get on

stage. You know, a lot of the programming I do for general population is borrowing from bodybuilding because the importance of full range of motion resistance training that, you know, is essential for building muscle. It's also fabulous for building strength, range of motion, intramuscular and intramuscular coordination. So even just going to the gym, plugging into machines, doing some free weights, that's wonderful. Taking a CrossFit class, taking a Zumba class, which is not very resistance heavy, but it's aerobic. Like these are all things you can do. So for anybody who's just getting started, the number one thing is identify what you'll actually want to do. If you can hire a coach to hold you accountable, that's probably the top thing.

Without a doubt, if you're brand new to something, you get to quite literally cut in line if you hire an expert. It just moves you so far ahead. It saves you so much trouble. So many of these small, frustrating things that pop up when you're learning, you can just shoot right through that. If you're working with a professional, I mean, I wasted like probably the first three years of my training. Cause I was trying to figure out what would work from all these different sources. And quite frankly, back when I started training a lot, a lot of people have, you'll

probably laugh at this, but you know, for those of us who started training in the mid to early 2000s, you know, and for me, this was more like 2000, I want to say, you know, 2011 even. So like for anybody who started training after like 2010, there was a little bit of a vacuum between when the internet fitness scene showed up and when the internet fitness scene like kind of got good. And at the beginning, it was for all intents and purposes, the wild west, like the absolute wild west. You had the bodybuilding.com forums, you had like Flex Magazine, Muscle and Fitness, the infancy of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. And after that, nobody really knew what to expect. It got crazy very, very

quickly. You couldn't necessarily find a ton of evidence-based research. A lot of things were what I will call anecdata. These are just things that... They're data you know, things that we can borrow from other people. Sure. But they're not, you know, we, we don't have a high degree of confidence in the data. Cause it's just somebody on a forum or on a YouTube video. Like back in the day, it was so hard to find what worked. And I just pieced together two years worth of crap from what I thought sounded good on the internet. So if you start working with a coach, they're going to insulate and protect you from all that and help you start and probably identify these things. But you've got to find movement types that you will do and engage with them at least three days a week. I think if you start

with three days a week, that's great. Four or five would be even better, but you got to make it a habit and you got to do it consistently. And right when you feel like this is probably the single best fitness tip I could give that has nothing to do with training and nutrition, but 90% of people, when they start, they start working out, they maybe go for like one to two weeks and they seem to kind of consistently run into this block, this period of time where the motivation wavers. It's like right around the two to three week mark. If around the two to three week mark, instead of like decreasing your attendance, becoming less engaged, you double down, you actually start exercising a little more. You start adding a

few more things in from a nutrition standpoint that cast a vote for being a healthier person. When you feel yourself kind of hitting that bottleneck, if you just push a little harder and break through, you can actually make the habit stick. I see a lot of people make it like two to three weeks until, and they hit that initial friction. And that's when you have to push through. And so for you guys, it's who are new to this, it's probably going to show up, you know, in week one and week two and week three. And if you can make it like past that 21 to 28 day mark, turn this thing into a habit. You've got a shot, um, with nutrition. I recommend eliminating fast food, uh, processed food and alcohol and sugary

beverages, anything with sugar that are any drink with calories, it's not a protein shake. Those are the biggest sources of caloric leak. So no more processed food, uh, except for in small pre-measured quantities, ultra processed food is definitely off the table. Like if you cut an apple, it's processed. So everything's on a spectrum here, but, you know, optimizing for whole minimally processed foods, doing as much of that as possible, trying to make better choices. You know, if you could use chicken thigh and you want to lose body fat and reduce calories, switch to chicken breast. You know, if you could cook a filet mignon, um, a little bit fattier and more expensive than like a sirloin, get more sirloin and prep it in advance. You know, there's so many ways to just change the existing dietary patterns you have to be 25 to 30% healthier without making huge changes. And so the big way to do that is to cut the junk, cut the main sources of caloric leak to quite literally stop the bleeding. And I use that

phrase a lot with clients and I've, I've heard other people use it. I'm not saying I invented it, but that term caloric leak really makes a ton of sense. It's the places where calories are leaking in that you maybe didn't necessarily think about. Things that you might have been grazing on or picking at. Things that you were snacking on. It can be things that you're sipping, even something that you're just tasting. Almost all can be things that you're sipping, even something that you're just tasting. Almost all the time, the caloric leak is happening. It's through additives as well, things like condiments and sauces and syrups. And so when you reduce exposure to hyper-processed foods, you just say, hey, I'm going to chill on the ultra-processed foods. A lot of the caloric

leak that exists in the traditional Western diet kind of disappears. And you find that that's such a huge cache of calories that when you eliminate your exposure, reduce your exposure, that weight loss seems to happen a lot more easily. So you've got to put some barriers up around those kinds of foods, focus more on protein, focus more on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and then try to be consistent when it's tough. That's really where you should be starting. That's your action item for the first six months is creating consistency around those foundational behaviors for movement and for training. 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. Okay. Question from Brayden Smith, getting into the Q&A. Brayden wants to know, do you recommend regular dedicated stretching or flexibility work? So I have a little bit of what I would call, I have my own strange philosophy when it comes to mobility training. And it's that you don't need a mobility day. You don't need a huge, long, crazy pre-workout mobility warmup, but instead you're probably better off breaking your mobility work up and quote unquote microdosing it across the day. Take small pockets of like two to three minutes to work on a couple key movements or postures or positions and breathe when you're in those positions, break up the amount of sitting you do, incorporate that mobility work into your

day more frequently. And much like learning a language, you become more comfortable with it the more you use it. The same thing can be said of these positions, of these stretches, of these mobility exercises. Simply clustering them all on one day or just before your training doesn't give you a ton of opportunity to really be in those positions. And long-term, that's kind of how mobility works. You have to actually spend time in the position, breathe in the position, get comfortable in the position to actually quote unquote own it, especially if it's something more active than passive. So sprinkle your mobility up throughout the day. That's the best mobility routine I think I could ever give you.

I'm constantly sitting in a deep squat. Like I will just, if I'm about to send a long text, it might seem strange, but I will just pop a very deep squat with my phone out in front of me, sitting back, chest tall, practicing extension, typing away, knowing I was going to send a text, but why not send it from this position here? Or the same thing can be said of a 90-90. I regularly just get into a 90-90 or a couch stretch. Tons of T-spine rotation work, just small habitual things. I oftentimes do the Michael Phelps shoulder slap that he did before he got in the pool. I'm constantly putting these small injections of movement in mobility and throughout

my day. And I find my body responds much better to that. Um, if I were super hypo mobile, just like very, very rigid, I might allocate like 15 to 20 minute chunks, uh, pre or even post-training post post-training would be good if you wanted to do some static stretching, because you felt like you had a tissue that was just like nasty tight. Um, that might be better for people who are super hypo mobile, but for a lot of you, I recommend, you know, do your mobility prior to training, allow your full range of motion resistance training to help you, um, you know, know the limitations of your mobility that are skeletal, meaning like, okay, I'm, you're not going to squat any deeper cause you're, you know, hip sockets are only so deep or so, so shallow or, um, you know, whatever those limitations may be. Um, but you know, if it feels like it's tissue,

like malleable tissue, and that it could be a tendon or a ligament or a muscle and it might respond well to rolling, stretching, mobilizing of any kind, go for it. But I don't really love like dedicated full days for this, like warmup and post-workout windows for this. Yes. Sprinkle throughout the day. Yes. Hold days for it. Not my favorite. Okay. From Coluccio underscore G question is best tips on dealing with necessary weight gain after being show shredded. Okay. That's a good question. So I think this happens to a lot of competitors and, you know, because we shift the goalposts all the time, when you're first getting in shape, you just want to look a little better.

When you're looking a little better, you want to look really good. When you're looking really good, you're thinking about competing and you want to look like a competitor. When you're a competitor, you want to look like the top guy at the show, not the bottom. And so the goalposts move in perpetuity until you end up like looking at Mr. Olympia entirely unsatisfied with your physique. So what is one to do to find satisfaction with their physique in a world where anytime you open your phone, you're going to see physiques that are probably substantially better than yours. And it's like a never ending kind of deluge of just like, holy shit, I thought I look good. I guess I don't. I think the thing that you really have to remember, and a lot of people are guilty of

this, so I bet you do this, like you probably post your very best stuff, your very best pictures with your very best angles and your very best lighting. And, you know, that's 99% of what you're comparing yourself to is like the best single photo of 15 photos that was taken by a very attractive, perhaps genetically gifted person who has an entirely different lifestyle than you, who you have no business comparing yourself to in the first place. Like you have to acknowledge the insanity of that behavior. Like you will probably never find peace with your body until you can acknowledge that picking up your phone and scrolling through people who look incredible in incredible lighting and incredible angles, like quite literally a human highlight tape of people looking their best. That's a really destructive behavior. So you have to

disengage with that. If you ever want to find some happiness with your body, you have to be able to go. Fitness isn't zero sum and anybody who looks better than me is on their journey. And I'm only going to allow that to inspire me. Not going to compare myself to them because the truth really is there's absolutely no cap on results. Like fitness results are not zero sum. There's enough to go around. Somebody else's success should motivate you, but that's it. And if you catch it demotivating you, or you catch yourself perpetually shifting the goalposts in never acknowledging your own hard work and essentially never being satisfied, you're going to run into problems in the long term. You're going to have a very

difficult time finding happiness as you pursue health and fitness. And that's, that's not, um, you know, that's not something that in the longterm is going to be particularly sustainable. One of my favorite quotes is if the price of your dream body, let me make sure that I get this right. Uh, the quote goes, it's my own quote. So this happens all the time. But if the cost of your dream body is your peace of mind, then it isn't worth the price. Which is to say that if the habits and behaviors that you're engaging with to look a certain way, maybe it's not getting adequate sleep, definitely overdoing it on the exercise and on the stimulants, being hyper restrictive with your

diet. Um, if your physiology is going to be disrupted by your efforts to look better, it's only a matter of time before you start to pay for it. So if the cost of looking how you want to look is one going to give you like overwhelming body dysmorphia and completely detach you from like being proud of what you've already accomplished, but two, it's going to require behaviors that are genuinely bad for your health. Like that's a cost that I don't think you should pay. And I think a lot of people think they should pay that because of what they see on their phone, what they see other people look like. They think, okay, if it's, if that's what it takes, you're probably not going to be that much happier. You might be more confident. You might be a little

happier, but if you're going to pursue that level of success with your fitness, with your physique, with a chasing a certain aesthetic, you're going to make some trade-offs and you have to keep your health front of mind. And so it's very difficult to compete and to have this balance. It's very difficult, you know, and it probably will cost you your peace of mind. And so I would definitely recommend getting some type of counseling on board, some type of mental health professional, somebody to help you kind of balance this. The competitors that I work with and have worked with all struggle with this to a certain degree. So get the help you can in that area. All right. Question from at lifting lawyer dad, beyond the CSCS, what training do you have? I'm interested in learning. So I have a lot of formal and informal training. I have a bachelor's

degree in kinesiology. I have tons of certifications. I've listened to every fitness podcast you can think of. I subscribe to a couple of different research reviews. And a lot of my great friends in the space are intelligent coaches who I follow. So I'm constantly absorbing their material. I work at a dual purpose clinic that I own. So it's strength and conditioning and physical therapy. So I see strength and conditioning coaches, personal trainers, physical therapists doing their thing. And, you know, I'm with my clients. I'm training myself. I'm, you know, making content, whatever I'm doing in the space

that day, right? Like, so I have that exposure, that cross exposure to those people too. So the best thing you can do is just live in it. And this is somebody who has a degree, who has research review access, who's scientifically literate enough to read some things and glean some information from them. You know, I've, I've done it really formal. I've done weekend workshops. I've done certifications. I've done a degree. And I still think the best thing you can do is to just get in the gym and train yourself and train other people. Try the moves out, uh, right. Write your own program, uh, for the first time. If you're new to that, uh, see how it goes, hire a coach. Definitely an awesome way to, to learn a ton there. Like you can just learn from being like, Oh my God, I would have totally fucked that up. Or, oh, I would have never thought about that. Or, oh, that's perfectly put together for me because this person sees blind spots I don't

see, or they're kind of holding me back from my own mistake. Example like, oh, I'm so excited about training. This happens to a lot of newbies. I'm going to train six, maybe seven days a week. An experienced coach will be like, you have literally no business doing that at all. You're just completely one, not ready. And it's too entirely unnecessary and going to cause overshooting, like connecting with other professionals, finding people you can trust, meeting and hiring and working with coaches who are qualified to help you. So many amazing ways to learn. I just think you have to be like a student of the game. Um, and one thing that I've noticed happens with fitness, but it happens a lot with coaches and personal trainers is you get into the fitness industry and you have a particular niche click

or training style that you really lean into. Like, are you a mobility bro? Are you a hypertrophy guy? Are you a powerlifting guru? Like whatever it is that you're the most excited about and you, you follow that vein until you get tired of it. And then you leak into a new vein. And you know, um, eventually if you spend enough time in the fitness industry, not just as a coach, but also as an actual lifter, like you actually train, you'll find pretty quickly that your interests shift a little bit and you pick things up from just trying and learning from other people in different niches. So, um, you know, the people who kind of just sit back on their computer all the time and have nothing, but let's say, you know, uh, critical criticisms

to launch. They just, you know, they're constantly critiquing. Like I do have a lot of respect for the people who, who try things, who do them, who learn from them and who move through them and grow through them by trying different stuff. So that's probably the way to do it. Uh, last question. I like this question comes from Sammy DR. And the question is any risk of metal poisoning with whey or plant protein powders. So there is definitely the risk of exposure to heavy metals in a variety of supplements. You guys have got to remember when it comes to supplements, this is one thing that I just, it really boggles my mind when it comes to the fitness industry.

boggles my mind when it comes to the fitness industry. And this is without a doubt, one of the craziest things about the fitness and supplement space is there is, are without a doubt, some regulatory loopholes and issues that allow for, let's call them less than reputable manufacturers to pull some absolutely crazy shit on their consumers. The, the amount of supplements that are tested regularly, like they're constantly testing supplements, the amount of supplements that come back with stuff inside of them that was not on the label is always absolutely insane. So I pulled this for you guys because I think you'll find it interesting. This is from an article online. Heavy metals, which are known to cause cancer, dementia, and brittle bones, contaminate many

dietary supplements. One study of 121 products revealed 5% of them surpassed the safe daily consumption limit for arsenic, which is a heavy metal. 2% had excess lead, cadmium, and aluminum, and 1% had too much mercury. So in theory, if you have 100 protein brands to choose from, one to five could be containing heavy metals. That's kind of scary. That's a non-zero chance, as I like to call it so like one to five percent of protein powders supplements contains uh heavy metals let alone what's not on the label let us continue in june 2019 the fda seized 300 000 supplement bottles because their pills contained excessive lead levels bacterial and fungal contamination in supplements is not uncommon. One assessment

revealed numerous products exceeded the acceptable limit set by the United States pharmacopoeia. Fungal contamination of dietary supplements has been linked to serious liver, intestinal, and appendix damage. Liver failure actually happens more often than you think from supplements. And so it's for this reason, guys, that you just want to make sure that you're getting stuff from manufacturers who engage in third-party testing. Um, you know, even then stuff can happen. Um, I've never had an issue with a supplement and I've been taking supplements for a long time. Uh, I shouldn't say I've never had an issue with supplements. I've definitely had issues with

supplements, but for the most part, I've never had any serious issues. And I'm super thankful for that because it's definitely not something that I would wish on anybody, but there are a lot of people. And, you know, when it comes to, when it comes to finding good supplements, there is one thing that I always tell people to look for. If a brand uses a proprietary blend, meaning they have the ingredients on the back, but they don't tell you the dosages, you can usually see these little asterisks. They look like crosses. They call it the performance surge blend or the antioxidant boosting blend.

performance surge blend or the antioxidant boosting blend. If you see a company using a proprietary blend, I immediately would kind of pull back. That's not a company whose supplements I would buy for the simple reason that they have the choice to be transparent or not. And they choose not to tell you the dosages they use. And they all lie and say it's because they don't want their formulas to get ripped off as if people who manufacture supplements don't know the clinically effective dosages. So if you see a brand using proprietary blends for their supplements, I just turn my back on it right away, pretty much writ large, not interested. You could have been transparent with me, told me what you're using and what I'm paying for, but you chose not to because you're worried about your competition stealing your formula when most of the formula or most of what we know we would need to elicit the effect is open source. It's knowledge people

know. So definitely want to be conscientious with your supplements. Buy from reputable brands and manufacturers. All right, folks, thanks so much for tuning in. I appreciate it. I love each and every one of you for listening to the podcast. I want to make sure that if you're not yet subscribed, please do hit that subscribe button. Be sure to leave me a five-star rating and review on Apple and Spotify or wherever you listen and share a screenshot of you listening to this podcast, your Instagram story, take a picture with it, tag me so I can say thank you and share it to my story. It means a ton and helps more people find the podcast. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next one.