Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 352: How I'm Training, Eating, and Supplementing, for PERFORMANCE in 2024

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

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Welcome, everybody, to episode 352 of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and in today's episode, we are kicking off the new year with a breakdown of how it is I am training, eating, and supplementing to fuel performance games in 2024. Over the years, my goals have bounced around many different fitness modalities, clicks, camps, etc. I've done powerlifting, I've dabbled in bodybuilding, I've done tons of sports performance training, and now I'm considering my training a little bit of a hybrid. My focus is on muscle growth and strength acquisition while maintaining good aerobic fitness, multi-planar strength and capabilities, as well as twitchiness, speed,

and explosiveness. So I'm going over everything that I'm going to be doing today, as well as announcing the launch officially of my new app-based training program, Forever Fit. Forever Fit is a four-day-a-week training protocol that takes 45 minutes to 60 minutes per session, two days focused on strength, two days focused on hypertrophy, with daily sub goals in the categories of mobility, multi-planar strength, explosiveness, and aerobic fitness. This is an amazing unisex program, meaning for both men and women who want to take their strength and fitness to a new level. Elite Physique, our premier women's bodybuilding program, and Home Heroes,

our premier home minimal equipment program, aren't going anywhere. We are just adding a new training team to the app. That is exactly the program I've been doing for the last six months, and I think you will really enjoy it. We're going to break down why I'm doing it and talk all about the different things I'm doing in my training, eating, and supplementing, so you can borrow from them, apply them to your own training, or better yet, I hope to see you inside Forever Fit. All of that is linked in the show notes. 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 re-enter 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, a cover. It's portable and durable, and it comes in a beautiful matte black and a gorgeous tan. I have the matte black out on my patio, and I absolutely love the way it

looks with the fencing I have around the yard, but you can put this inside, outside, on the front porch, on the back porch, in the side yard. It's quite portable. It's very durable. Like I said, the design is super, super sleek and it's very easy to drain to make sure that you are only getting in to cold, clean water designed to help you improve your performance, improve your recovery, enhance the way your brain feels and functions throughout the day. This is an amazing one-time cost tool that once you have it, you use it a couple of times a week. It is one of the best investments you can make in your health. And again, if you want to improve your cognition and performance, and you have those midday lulls, or you want to be more present for your family or

for your friends when you get off of work, and you don't want to caffeinate, temperature modulation like ice baths or cold exposure or sauna heat exposure can be really valuable for increasing that subjective sense of well-being and bringing you back to a place of alertness in a really chaotic world. It's also great for just cultivating resilience. I find I'm much tougher. Again, this is a more anecdotal thing, but I find that I am much tougher, ready to face the day's tasks when I am consistently exposing myself to the elements. Call it bromeopathy, call it anecdote, but I will tell you one thing is for sure, cold water immersion has made a huge difference for my health and wellbeing 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 breaking down how it is, I am going to be training in the year 2024. The first big change to my training protocol this year is going to be building the entire routine around training just four times a week. I think it is incredibly beneficial for most people to train somewhere between three and six times a week with resistance. But for me,

right now, with the stress that I have running my business, catering to the clients that I work with one-on-one, whether that be in person or online, the dogs, my new marriage, all of the tasks that come with maintaining my home life. I think that five and six days a week of training is really challenging to commit to each and every week. So I'm actually going to be building my routine off of four weekly training sessions. This is the least scheduled training per week I've had in quite some time. For many years, I trained five to six times a week. Recently, I have found not because of scheduling, but just because of life, many times I'm forced to train three, even four times a week. So in the new year, my goal is to train four times a week minimum. If I can, I will add a fifth day of supplemental hypertrophy work to the muscles I most want to develop. But I am

starting my training routine in the new year with four weekly sessions. I think one of the most underrated things you can do for your fitness is to commit to four training sessions a week. I think a lot of people jump in well-intentioned training five, six, even seven days a week. However, the problem with training that much is it's very difficult to recover. But four sessions a week allows you to stimulate the upper body and lower body twice each, two upper body days, two lower body days, makes four total sessions. And it eliminates the likelihood of accumulating a ton of fatigue in the nervous system, making your fifth, sixth, and even seventh session kind of draggy. It allows for

four intentional, meaningful, well-executed sessions that allow you to take advantage of the principles of both training frequency and intensity to drive results. So I am all over four time a week training in 2024 for most people, myself included. Additionally, this is going to leave me with three days to do more steady state aerobic training. That is a central tenant of the Forever Fit program. And it's something I really want to focus on. It gives me tons of time to build muscle by recovering. It gives me tons of time to work on getting my food where I want my food to be. It gives me tons and tons of time to incorporate things like sauna and mobility, both of which I'm really big on. But most importantly, four times a

week is something I can stick to and hit with an extremely high rate of compliance. I work out both weekend days. I usually take off Monday and Friday because those are my highest volume days in my studio, which leaves me Wednesday, Thursday, typically Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to just find space for two sessions. So I'm training twice, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and always Saturday, Sunday to get to my four sessions a week. Again, this is going to give me time for sauna, cardio, mobility, recovery, and it's super simple. This programming is something that I can do at home, at 24-hour fitness by my work, at my actual studio, or at the really nice gym by my house. There's no reason that I can't modify or adjust small things to make this training work pretty much anywhere. And so that is another thing

that I've really focused on is just making sure this training is versatile. It's mostly free weights of the machine work that is in versatile. It's mostly free weights of the machine work that is in there. It can be substituted around, but again, super flexible, minimal excuses. I'm training four days a week. Now, breaking down how those four sessions look, I'm going to be doing two sessions that are focused on strength and speed and two sessions that are focused on size, mobility, and aerobic fitness. So there are four training sessions, two of the upper body sessions, two of the lower body sessions, one of each of those. So one lower, one upper are strength and

speed focused. So they have plyometric warmups, they have technique warmups, and they have lower rep, higher intensity work. That's pretty typical of a strength hypertrophy program. The other two, lower and upper sessions, have a little more volume. They're a little closer to failure, a little more high rep hypertrophy style training, and the supplemental work there is often mobility or multi-planar. So across those four sessions, often mobility or multi-planar. So across those four sessions, most of the volume is allocated to strength or hypertrophy work with some trickle volume kind of just melted over the top, if you will, for these other sub goals that I think are super important. But having two days that are about strength acquisition and power and two days that are about hypertrophy allow me to dabble in both of those adaptations

and not fully lean into either one so I can still maintain the function that I really want. Now, there are four sub goals in my programming, and this of course appears in the Forever Fit app programming as well. Aerobic fitness, mobility, multi-planar strength, power, and explosiveness. These things all show up in pretty much all of the one-on-one work I do with clients. I always have mobility couplets, mobility fillers, aerobic warmups, things that I think are really important for developing and driving these specific adaptations. However, I've never worked them this thoughtfully into a program for general population fitness.

So the four things that I really think people need, and again, this is myself included, because this is literally my program, are aerobic fitness, specifically the development of your aerobic base and your aerobic peak. That's done through warmups and the inclusion of occasional sprint work. The second is mobility, not just passive flexibility, stretchiness, but mobility, active control in end ranges and unique ranges in strange ranges of motion, building resilience in the tissue. That's big. I think the more mobile you feel, the more in touch you feel with your athleticism, the more in touch you feel with your ability to control your body, the more resilient you will feel in the face of strange, novel,

unique positions. I like the inclusion of mobility work throughout the training protocol throughout the week. The third thing is the inclusion of work in the frontal and transverse plane. Most of the work people do in the gym is done front to back. And if you want to improve your athleticism very rapidly, or at least the feeling of athleticism very rapidly, I would do this. In your training, include two to three movements a day, either in your warmup, your core training, or your priming work that are a multi-planar, meaning they're not just sagittal front to back, but they might be in the transverse plane, the plane of rotation, or the frontal plane, this lateral side to side plane. Adding in more frontal and transverse plane work to a mostly

sagittal program will expose your tissues, your body, and your nervous system to moving in three dimensions, to moving more athletically. And I think just making those small inclusions can really improve your coordination, your fitness, your ability to feel good on your feet, to feel nimble, to feel coordinated in all planes of motion. And that is something many people lose when they just do a resistance training program. Not because resistance training makes you less athletic, not at all. It makes you more athletic for sure. But most of the best moves occur exclusively in the sagittal plane. So a lot of our movement becomes sagittal plane dominant, and we just lose touch with the transverse and frontal plane. So include some frontal plane work and some transverse plane work, and that will help you inject more athleticism into your

program without necessarily needing to turn it into a athlete-style program. But I'm really big on the inclusion of multi-planar work, and so that shows up quite a bit, especially the transverse plane in ForeverFit and in my programming this year. The last piece is power, explosiveness, speed, twitch, call it whatever you want. But this is that athletic kind of movement property that is present in basketball players, football players, soccer players, that quick explosive twitchy power, the ability to convert speed into power. You see this a lot in athletes. And much of this is driven from plyometric strength, from the ability to produce speed very quickly. And this shows up in the program in the form of explosive work, plyometric work, low-level plyos, jump rope,

all kinds of stuff to just develop and retouch base with that twitch. Now, this can be fairly fatiguing, so it's something that I'm only having myself do and putting in the program one to two times a week, but I think it will make a really, really big difference. What's going on, guys? Coach Danny here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for Core Coaching Method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is

certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person, online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macro nutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your

coach's email, or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with accountability in the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't, we'll put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today.

So we've gone over kind of the first three big rocks, which is how many sessions a week I'm going to do, the focus and emphasis of those sessions, the primary stuff, the big rocks, and the icing, the sub goals of those sessions. Now, to supplement this, I am going to be doing 150 minutes a week of zone two cardio. This is going to be primarily done as my warmup cardio, 10 minutes a day before each session, walking the dogs with a rock or weighted vest and jump roping. I should have no problem clearing 150 minutes a week, period, even in the winter, because of how frequently I walk the dogs. I'm a big fan of rucking or just walking with a weighted vest as a way to go from

traditional zone one cardio and bump it into the zone two. I really like jump rope for building that tendon stiffness, building your calves, building your twitchiness, and getting some aerobic effect. So that's a big one. We're going to be driving for 150 minutes a week of zone two cardio. I will say, given how much I walk the dogs, this might be a little bit of a low bar, but I think for most people, this is going to be pretty good. And some of this is included in just steady state work in the program. However, I do supplement on top of that with more cardio to get to that 150 minute total because I don't like doing tons and tons and tons of steady state cardio during my workout time. I think there is a unique benefit to kind of dusting it or sprinkling

it across the week so that you get the opportunity to get up and get moving more often. As for how I'm going to be recovering from this program, I think there's two really big things that I'm going to be focused on. The first is making sure that I'm eating one gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now, everybody's different depending on your dietary preferences or your needs. You might not need to go as high as a gram per pound, but when it comes to body composition, you don't want to go much lower than 0.6 grams per pound or 0.7 grams per pound. So if you're a hundred pounds, somewhere between 70 and a hundred pounds, if you're 150 pounds, somewhere between like 130 and 125 pounds. If you're 200 pounds, somewhere between like 135 and 200 grams, I should say, of protein, grams of protein.

So 0.7, 0.6, 0.7 to one grams of protein per pound of body weight. I'm going to be going all the way up to one gram. I think that's going to help me recover. I think it's going to help me change my body composition positively so I have more muscle and less fat. And I think it will help to keep me full and help to keep me making good food decisions writ large. Another thing that I'm going to be including, and this is something I'd recommend for any of you who just want to allow your training to kind of take a jump up your mobility, the way you feel is evening mobility sessions. This is just low level mobility work done at night when I'm normally just watching TV

or chilling. It gives me the opportunity to incorporate one more movement to, to cultivate mobility, strength, and enhanced range of motion and all kinds of different positions, which is something that to me makes a really, really big difference. It might not matter that much to you, but getting more mobility in and kind of sprinkling across the day works better for me than having like a full hour session. So picking like two to three, maybe even four movements to do one to two rounds of in the evening when I'm winding down, really great way to enhance my mobility. Another thing that I am doing to just improve my general well-being and overall health is I am doing

three 20-minute sauna sessions weekly. That is easier for me to do than it might be for many of you because I'm in the luxurious position of having a sauna at my house. But many of you do have saunas in your gym. So if you would like to kind of take and follow my lead here, I would recommend picking a couple of your sessions and including a 20 minute or so long sauna after each one of them. It really does not need to be much longer than 20 minutes. In my honest opinion, I think you're going to get more than enough of the kind of circulatory enhancing benefits of sauna, the cardio protective benefits of sauna, all of these things that really, really matter, um, in terms of like generating good circulatory aerobic and brain health. That's, that's big. That's really, really big for me. I think that the sauna allows me to do this

in a way that nothing else can. I'm not against cold water immersion, cold exposure. I have an ice barrel. I use it occasionally. But what I am scheduling each and every week more than anything are these 20-minute sauna sessions. And if you're looking to add them, I would add them post workout. That's a, that's a fairly common question that I get about including the sauna in your routine. And it's like, okay, do I do sauna before my training session to get warmed up? Do I do sauna after my training session? I would definitely do it after your training session for two kind of scientific reasons. The first is I think the redistribution of blood flow that you get from the sauna, the dilation of your blood vessels, you might get more nutrient rich blood to the tissue you

just trained and pull some of the metabolites that kind of linger in that tissue after you're done training. So a good blood flow redistribution effect post-workout could be beneficial. The second thing I really like about sauna post-workout is I find it helps me get from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state much faster. When I just leave the gym, it takes me a while to kind of wind down. But when I go to the gym and finish that session with a sauna session, or when I walk outside and jump in my sauna, I find that while I am stressed in the sauna, I much more quickly reach a place of relaxation and parasympathetic tone, allowing

me to recover better and get to a place of recovery more quickly when I have that sauna after my workout. And again, 15 to 20 minutes is probably all you need. And given that you're already going to be relatively warm, you'll probably start sweating and getting the effect of that sauna even more quickly when done post-workout. One more thing I'm going to be doing is really tightening up my supplementation and adding in more supplementation. So I have for many years been a very simple person when it comes to supplements, protein, creatine, greens, powder, vitamins, that's about it. Uh, occasionally a probiotic we're going to

be at. And of course I like electrolytes, especially when I sauna, but this year we're going to be adding a few more things into the mix. So supplementing pre-workout with three different things. The first is LMNT's electrolytes. I just love the way I get a good pump from these when I train in the morning and I feel like I'm getting hydrated more quickly. So we're going to do a half a pack of LMNT's electrolytes. We will do a full pack if we're getting in the sauna split into pre and post. One before I train, one for the sauna or a half for the sauna, half before I train. With the LMNT pre-workout, I'm going to be including a scoop of Legion's stimulant-free pre-workout, two scoops if it's a hard session, and I might do a half a scoop of the stimulant free and a half a

scoop of the caffeinated version and then a scoop of their new product pump surge which contains some cool plant extracts and nitrogensine a form of l-arginine that's very bioavailable to help with pump so pre-workout we're doing leg Pump Surge, and Elementi's Staple Electrolytes. Post-workout, I'm going to be having two scoops of grass-fed whey protein isolate, again from Legion. I'm going to be including their Genesis greens powder. It doesn't taste the best, but I love what's in there. We're going to be including one scoop of Recharge, which is their post-workout supplement that includes a ton of L-carnitine to help the soreness and recovery, as well as five grams of creatine monohydrate. I'm huge on that.

I will also be adding about 40 grams of fast-digesting carbohydrate in the form of Rice Krispie Treats post-workout to minimize muscle protein breakdown. Those two things, that pre and that post are happening before every single training session. Okay. That typically means that my post-workout meal or first meal of the day of protein, greens, powder, and fruit will be my post-workout. So on days that I train, my post-workout will be meal one, protein, greens, powder, fruit, and rice crispy treats. On my non-training days, my first meal will just be the protein and the greens. We won't have the pre-workout. Now, in the middle of the day, I'm going to be adding some new stuff, and that will be fish oil to increase my omega-3 intake. I've been pretty bad about that in the

last year. I'm adding Legion's new B-Complex to increase my exposure to B vitamins, two tablets of their Triumph multivitamin, two tablets of their Fortify joint supplement. So those are going to be taken in the middle of the day with my lunch. And in the evening with dinner, I'm going to be taking their magnesium, sucrosomal magnesium, and a new form of magnesium that I find to be quite good. One tablet of their immune supplement, given the high volume of training I'm doing in the gym, not actually my own training, but training clients in the gym. One tablet again of their Triumph multivitamin, or sorry, two tablets to get to four. I only take a half dose

of that. Eight tablets is a full dose. I take a half dose a day and one more fish oil. So in the midday, we're doing fish oil, vitamin B, joint supplement, multivitamin. And in the evening, we're doing magnesium, immune support, fish oil, multivitamin. So we're adding into the mix daily magnesium, fish oil, multivitamin B complex, and immunity boosting supplements. That's a lot of things being added to the plate, but just trying to maximize this year, get the most out of my training, take it to the next level when I'm only going to be doing four very specific sessions. And if you'd like to follow a protocol just like this, you can join me. The link is in the show notes. The program is called Forever Fit. This is a really exciting,

cool program that I'm pumped to bring to you guys. I've been working on this for quite some time. I wanted it to be perfect and really just kind of play with this four-day-a-week format. And I fell into it around summer of last year and slowly built this thing out over six months of trial and error. And I'm bringing it to you now. The first week of January, we had what I called our preload, where I soft launched it, let people kind of join, see what they think. And now we are going full bore into week one, kicking off here with the first Monday in January, or not the first, but the second. So by the time you're hearing it, the preload week is done. We are officially in

week one, amazing time to jump in and join, uh, and carry it all through the first month of the year. And hopefully for many years to come as this is a kind of forever continuation, never need to change it up kind of program. And I think you guys will really enjoy it. So check out forever fit in the show notes or at corecoachingmethod.com or on trainheroic.com. And if you're interested in one-on-one coaching, you can always apply for that as well. My roster is open and it probably will stay open until the end of February before I close things off until summer. All right, folks, thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.