Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 330: Recovery, Joint Health, Light Weight Training, Fat-Loss Macros + More!

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to episode 330 of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, we're going to be discussing a variety of things that can improve your health, well-being, how you feel, how you move. As always, the questions I'm answering today are fielded from over on my Instagram, so be sure to follow me over there and toss me all kinds of questions. When I throw up that question box, I tend to pick the best ones. In this episode specifically, we're going to be talking about recovery, how to know that you're recovering well, what might be some things you can look out for to make sure that you might not be on the path to overtraining. Joint health and whether or

not specific movements can lead to long-term deterioration of the joint should you take breaks from things like squatting and deadlifting. How important is protein for weight loss and where your fat loss macros should roughly be if you're looking to change your composition, as well as growing muscle with light weights, whether or not it's possible, what you can do if you don't have a ton of access to equipment. I think you guys will learn a ton, so enjoy the episode. This podcast wouldn't be possible if it wasn't thanks to support from our awesome partners, one of whom is Vivo Barefoot. Vivo makes the best barefoot training shoe on the market. For years, I stayed away from barefoot training shoes, despite knowing the benefit of low cushion, wide toe box shoes for

the health of our feet, the intrinsic musculature that helps support everything that we do. I stayed away from these shoes because I thought they were ugly. But that was until, of course, Vivo started producing some absolutely gorgeous barefoot training shoes. These are low cushion, lightweight, breathable trainers that have a ton of bend, a ton of flex, low cushioning to provide for optimal stimulation of the proprioceptors at the bottom of your foot. Fun fact, 70% of the proprioceptive cells in your body, the cells that tell your body

where it is in space to help you be coordinated, to help you create movement, balance, stability, all of these things, they're located on the bottom of your foot fighting to make contact with some kind of surface so they can get the tactile feedback they need to help you optimize and coordinate movement. That's why when you're barefoot, you probably feel more stable and more connected to the ground and i have never found a shoe that feels better to train in not just train my clients and stand around in for eight hours a day but literally train in tons of fantastic mobility out of my toe box the ability to spread my toes all in one beautiful climate friendly package. I'm a huge fan of the Primus knit lights. I have them in

obsidian. I have them in bright white, and I absolutely love this shoe. I have been raving about it for three or four weeks straight. I've never had a better training shoe in my life. You simply can't beat these. They feel great. They look great. My fiance even said, wow, those shoes, and I quote, make it look like you know what you are doing, which that's all I need to hear. Not sure exactly what that means, but I'm guessing it means good things. All the trainers and coaches at my studio said they make my calves look great. And I think this is because when you're wearing a barefoot shoe, you're using more of the intrinsic muscle of your foot and ankle complex that is so imperative for movement. Trust me when I say you've never had a better pair of training shoes than you will when you try

Vivo Barefoot. You can't beat these. And Vivo is offering listeners of this podcast a special 10% off order by using the code Danny10 on VivoBarefoot.com. You can just scroll down to the show notes and grab a pair. But these shoes are fantastic. They're beautiful. They train incredibly well. They're durable. And I promise they'll be the best pair of shoes you've ever had in the gym.

Again, that's VivoBarefoot.com. And check out using the promo code Danny10 to save 10% on the best pair of shoes you've ever had in the gym. Again, that's vivo barefoot.com and check out using the promo code Danny 10 to save 10% on the best pair of shoes you've ever owned. Okay, folks. So getting into some of the listener questions here, this one comes from Linda and Sep. And the question is, how do I know I'm recovering correctly from my training? So when it comes to gauging recovery, we have to remember that recovery is a skill. So the more you train, aka the more you challenge, overreach, or damage your body, the more recovery is required. So a novice lifter with limited training experience, which is to say with limited experience damaging their tissue, will typically have a worse recovery

capacity than a very well-trained lifter. I want you to think about the best athletes in the world. I want to use the NFL, for example, the National Football League. How long do you think it would take? Because we know how long it takes. We know damn well how long it takes to recover from an NFL game. There are teams that play on Sunday that have to turn around and play again on Thursday. So four days. Now, you're not a genetically elite specimen, on Thursday. So four days. Now you're not a genetically elite specimen, but how long do you think it would take you to play 60 to a hundred snaps in a game? Let's use 60. Let's say you play on offense and you're getting hit, you're getting pushed, you're hitting the turf, you're getting tackled, you're getting smashed. It would probably take you if you survived,

if you lived two, three weeks to not feel bone crushing soreness in your whole body. And so like I use that as an example of it really has a lot to do with one, the athlete and to the task. But like, let's say you're just looking to recover optimally or better from typical general population fitness training. Could be CrossFit, could be Zumba, could be lifting weights, could be taking some classes, could be riding the Peloton. I'd say the first indirect marker of recovery is going to be mood. Are you completely just agitated, irritated, angry, lethargic? I guess we could call this like subjective well-being.

So energy, lethargy, irritability. Those are the first things I like to look at to make the determination. Am I training too hard or am I recovering from my training? Cause a lot of times with people, what happens is the training input isn't too much to recover from the nutrition's. Okay. But it's the extracurriculars, the non-training stressors. The stress that you incur from training is not the only stress you're going to incur. Here's a fascinating way to learn about the human body using muscle soreness. I love to tell this story. So I know this is true. A lot of you probably have had this happen where you absolutely destroy a muscle group. You're so sure that you are going to be sore the next day. You get to bed early, you sleep a good night's sleep, you wake up the

next day and you're not sore at all. Miraculously, you have recovered from this hellacious workout. And you're almost bummed. You're like, damn, I was hoping I would be a little sore. And I bet you've had the flip side happen to you too, where you get in, everything's rushed, everything's stressed, everything's chaotic. You're like, God, I don't have a lot of time. Well, let me just get a quick little crappy workout in. And you do a very below standard workout with not a ton of intensity, not a ton of volume, there's too many things going on and you wake up the next day sore as hell. What happened? I didn't even train that hard to get sore. It's what's happening around your training that really matters. You have to take this into account. Training is just one of the stressors you're

probably going to deal with in your life. But if the other stressors are sky high, kids are doing crazy in school, works nuts. My wife's nagging at me because I blew all my money on fantasy football. That level of extracurricular non-training stress goes into one bucket. You have one bucket for stress. Training goes in there. Life goes in there. School goes in there. Life goes in there. School goes in there. Work goes in there. And if the stress is just too high, even if the training stress isn't where you'd anticipate it to be, to be that sore, you might not recover well,

especially if sleep's not there. However, if you have all your stress inputs managed and that metaphorical bucket isn't constantly overflowing, you can train really, really hard and not overshoot. So one of the things you always have to remember with your training is where am I at with the rest of my stress, your allostatic load, the total stress on your body, always take that into account. And if your mood's shot, if you're irritable, if you're sleeping poorly, if you're sore, there's a good sign that the overall amount of stress is too much. And you can dial back your training or you can try to dial back stress overall. But if you're feeling occasional soreness, general soreness, it

doesn't subsist for one to two days, your mood is fairly stable, your appetite stable, your sleep is stable, I wouldn't worry too much about your recovering. A follow-up question from the same person, and I'm sure these two go hand in hand, but it's just a really good question. Is taking a break from certain lifts good for the joints? Example, squats. So everybody has a different orthopedic considerations and limitations. And orthopedic here means related to the joints. And if you have, let's say, low-grade arthritis in your knees and doing really high volumes of squatting causes those joints to feel agitated, it might be in your best interest to take a break from squatting until that pain subsides, re-engage with it until you feel, okay, I'm starting to overshoot. Now, I might, instead of framing it that way, think, hmm, can I just allocate volume across my body in a way that doesn't allow me to overshoot on any given joint? Meaning, if I'm training legs, I'm working my hips just as much as my knees. If I'm training my upper body,

I'm working my shoulders and my elbows equally, which basically just looks like training your quads, glutes, hamstrings, chest, back, shoulders evenly. And you'll put a relatively even amount of stress on your contractile muscle tissues, your non-contractile soft tissues, tendons and ligaments, and your harder kind of calcium-based bone tissues like your joints. I do think a lot of people are overly concerned about joint deterioration. They think that doing too much of a lift would be bad for your joints. And I will sit here and tell you that you probably don't want to do 10 sets of 10 squats every single day if you care about your joints, specifically your knees,

but the human body is super adaptive and super resilient and doing too little, not challenging a joint enough is probably more likely to lead to problems in that joint long term. So I want you to think like, what's better for a joint stressing it occasionally or never stressing the muscles around it enough that it becomes weak, unstable, and doesn't have the structural support of the muscle. So it's not a bad idea to take a break from certain lifts. I don't deadlift with a barbell very often. I only deadlift with a squat or I'm sorry, I only squat with a barbell for a couple cycles a year. So probably spending like, let's say I train 52 weeks a year, maybe 50. I take two weeks off.

Very rarely do I take seven days off, but like, let's just say I'm training hard for like, you know, 12 month long cycles. And in those 12 month long cycles, I might feature squats two out of the 12 months, front squats, two out of the 12 months, leg presses, two out of the 12 months, split squats, two out of the 12 months as my primary knee dominant exercises. I'd rather do that than just be like, Oh, not working my knees this month because they need a break. I think that is a recipe for deterioration more. And if you want to rotate exercises, that's never a bad idea. Okay. Question from AMS underscore zero to zero. And the question is, should we still focus on protein when trying to lose weight? Does it matter more if strength training? So yes, protein always

matters more if you are breaking down muscle tissue, because if you are in the gym training with resistance, doing strength training, you're actually breaking down muscle tissue. You're not building it up. And I know you might know that, but it's really important to crystallize in your mind that kind of central philosophy of resistance. When you train in the gym, you're not building muscle, you're breaking it down. And as is the case with a house, if you have a, let me give you this example. If you have a cabin in the woods made out of logs and a big gust of wind comes by and blows a couple of those logs down, you need to put logs back up to build the cabin. Well, if you're in the gym training, breaking down skeletal muscle tissue, which is, you guessed it, made out of protein, you need to eat enough protein to rebuild what it is that you broke down. Very, very simple concept. If you are training with weights and eating less than say 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight,

it's possible you might not be doing enough to build muscle. And with clients, I like to have them all the way up to as close to a gram per pound of body weight as we can get, because it also helps with weight management to eat more protein because of how satiating it is. So getting to this question from Ams underscore zero to zero, should we focus on protein when trying to lose weight? Heck yeah, you should. And should you be trying to focus on it if you're strength training? That's an even better reason. So if you're lifting weights and trying to lose fat at the same time, you're already making a lot of good choices. Just make sure the protein is where you need it to be. 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 plan 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. All right. This question from Rach underscore E L Z Rachel's. That's what that is. Can you effectively grow muscle and looks slash size with time under

tension slash low weights? So when it comes to building muscle, your muscles do not have eyes. They cannot see the weight on the bar. They do not know how much you are lifting. Your muscles have no capacity to determine what exercise that it is that you're doing. So it's not like they say, oh, I'm going to grow because you're doing this mass gaining skull crusher and not grow because you're doing a triceps rope extension. Your muscles detect a few different things. Cumulative load, AKA mechanical tension. Am I feeling a stretch mechanically through this full range of muscle? Huge driver of muscle growth. The second thing that they kind of detect is work output or proximity to failure. Like

how close was that bout, that set, that exercise to causing actual failure? And if it was close, that muscle is going to grow a lot more than if it wasn't. And the last thing they can detect is metabolic stress, which is the accumulation of lactate, creatine, and hydrogen in the muscle. You're pumping, you're pumping, you're pumping, you're pumping. Lactate's accumulating, hydrogen's accumulating, creatine's accumulating. Those three things, mechanical tension, proximity to failure, metabolic stress, That's what drives muscle growth. Not necessarily the weight on the bar. More is usually better. Not always the range of motion, but guess what? More tends to be better and not always the volume, but guess what? More is probably better. If muscle growth matters to you, you need to focus on accumulating mechanical tension,

training close to failure, getting a metabolic kind of pump here and there, and hopefully training with more weight through a fuller range of motion across, you know, your whole training career while you gradually accumulate volume. That's the recipe. Do you believe that that can be done with low weight? I do. I think it can be done at lower weights if you focus more on what you already said, slowing down, doing more of a, you know, a time under tension emphasis, your sets can take longer. And if you're doing less weight over time, you know, if that sets, like, let's say you do 10 reps with 10 pound dumbbells for biceps. And you're like, well, that's not hard at all. Well,

what if you did one minute? And instead of doing, and I do this a lot with Home Heroes, my home app-based training program, because people just don't have a lot of equipment when they're training from home. Higher repetitions, longer times under tension, time-based sets to allow people to accumulate greater fatigue in the target tissue and thusly be able to create more metabolic stress, more mechanical tension, and greater proximity to failure without as much weight. So it's always better to have more tools in your toolbox and going heavy is probably a great thing to do, especially if you want to optimize for muscle growth. But if that's not in the cards, you're definitely going to have to make the most of time under tension and controlling each rep to make sure that it's stimulative.

All right. Follow up. No, not a follow up. Another question from a different user. This is from Mary underscore Elizabeth underscore Anderson. Do you track your calories and macros daily, even in maintenance mode? I always track two things, folks, calories and protein. Usually I track fiber about two days ago. I sent out my core coaching method, kind of healthy habits tracker. This is

something that we use with clients. Um, and if you're a client and you're listening and I haven't gotten to you, it's just because I forgotten it went out with all new clients who we onboarded after July 1st. Um, but I haven't necessarily, I think I've gotten it went out with all new clients who we onboarded after July 1st. But I haven't necessarily, I think I've gotten it to pretty much everybody at this point, but those healthy habits are eating four protein rich meals across the day, eating 20 plus grams of fiber every single day. And I use that tracker pretty religiously. And after, you know, 10 years of tracking my macros, I definitely know how much fibers and what. So at the very least, I make sure that I get four servings of protein, 20 grams of fiber, and don't overshoot on my calories. So yeah, even when I'm maintaining, I'm tracking. And I kind of scoff at the idea that tracking macros is like this huge ask, you know, like if somebody were to walk up to you and

say, Hey, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to be rich. And you said, Hey, you know, what would make a really big difference if you just track your spending? And that person looked at you and said, track my spending. That's going to cause me to become a neurotic, obsessive, and completely deranged lunatic. You'd say, well, then you obviously don't want to be wealthy. So I would just say, you know, re-approach this when you have the desire to track your spending. Because if you can't do that, the likelihood of you becoming rich is very low. Yet people will say on the flip side, I'm willing to do anything to lose body fat. And I would say to you, well, then definitely track your calories and protein intake. Those are the two most important things.

And it would probably take about 10 minutes a day to do it with a hundred percent accuracy and compliance. And those same people will look you dead in the face and say, I don't have time to track when like, why lie? Like, I know you fucking have time to track. You spend two hours a day on your phone. I really don't care. I don't care. Like I have yet to have somebody say that who, when I say, okay, show me your phone, show me your screen time does not go well, well, well, they get all like pushy. They get all like off put. And it's like, well, yeah, cause you're lying to yourself. It's not that big of a deal to track your protein and track your calories.

And like, maybe this is red pilling you a little bit too much, but like the trade-off is obesity. The trade-off is cardiovascular disease. The trade-off is diabetes. Like, you think you got this shit? You think you can intuitively eat? Because, you know, I'm watching 325 million Americans intuitively eat their way to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. My intuition says, eat the fucking pizza, eat the cookie, eat the fucking cake.

My intuition does not say, eat the fiber, eat the lean protein, eat the whole grains. I have the same reptilian human evolved brain you do. And my brain tells me, eat the shit that tastes good. It's my discipline, and it's this system that takes five minutes a day that makes sure I get enough of the right stuff. Indirectly, I don't eat nearly as much of the wrong stuff. Yeah, I'm tracking all the time. I don't think it's a huge ask. If that's something that you're not willing to do for yourself, I am sorry. Maybe you truly don't have time to track with high degrees of accuracy, but you can certainly track a little bit, and it makes a big, big difference. Last question from Caitlin 77 is a certain amount of fat in your diet.

Absolutely necessary, especially for fat loss. Hell yes, it is. Fat is an essential nutrient. If you don't get enough of it, you are going to see massive, massive negative health effects. Your libido will be shot. Your quality of life will be shot. Your skin will go to shit. Your libido will be shot. Your quality of life will be shot. Your skin will go to shit. Your hair will start falling out. Literally every cell in your body has a membrane made of fat. Your brain is mostly fat. If you do not get enough fat,

essential fat, like 25 to 30% of your total calories are coming from fat. After a while, you're going to start to feel it. A lot of people say, oh, carbs are not necessary. That's like a big thing in the keto community. Protein's essential. Fat's essential. Carbs are not essential. It's like, yeah, go no carb for a while and tell me how you feel, look and perform. They're not essential, but they make a difference. And if you deploy them correctly, they're very helpful for energy, for health, and for getting nutrients. But fats straight up are essential. And I know when you are trying to lose fat, because like this is a big fat loss mistake people make, especially women. They go low calorie. They do the right thing. Hey, I'm getting into that calorie deficit. We all know you have to do that to lose fat. And if you don't know that,

follow my page. And then they go high protein. They go moderate carb. Not a bad idea. And then they go way too low on fat, which is always very dangerous because fat is essential. We use it to regulate a lot of different things in the body. And if essential fat intake is too low, especially in women, you see one very common problem. Hypothalamic amenorrhea, aka your menstrual cycle gets totally dysregulated. It's not uncommon for women who restrict energy too low

to just, they tend to go too low calorie overall to see disruptions in their menstrual cycle. But when I've, I've seen this to be the case, even women who are eating enough calories, if their fat is just too low, you can also see hypothalamic amenorrhea. So make sure if you are dieting to lose fat, that you don't overly restrict fat intake. You have to get enough to hit that essential marker because if you don't, and you're in an energy deficit, you're going to have a double compounding effect of not getting enough of what you need. And that can be a problem. So make sure that you're getting enough fat. Thanks so much for tuning in to this Q&A episode of the podcast. It means a ton. Got

lots of exciting guests coming on, tons of health, fitness, and productivity-focused discussions to help you enhance the quality of your life. The way that you can help me as I try to help you improve your life is by simply sharing this to your Instagram story. way that you can help me as I try to help you improve your life is by simply sharing this to your Instagram story. Take a screenshot, tag me, share it. Be sure to leave me a five-star rating and review on Apple as well as Spotify podcasts. It helps other people find the show and helps more people get fit. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you on episode 331.