Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 362: How to Travel and Not Lose Gains

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

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Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, we will be discussing how to travel and enjoy the world outside of the gym without losing your gains. I've worked with hundreds of clients over the years who are fortunate enough to be in the position that they can travel fairly frequently. And for many of them, traveling and not concerning themselves with losing progress takes practice. And I know for many of you who are planning travel or want to travel, but you're invested

in your fitness, you are wondering, what can I do to hold on to muscle, hold on to strength and not backslide? So I'm going to share with you all of the tips and tricks that I think work best and give you some perspective that will allow you to really enjoy the benefits of being in shape while traveling. That way you're not saddled with the guilt of not having access to a gym and you can actually enjoy your vacation. Enjoy the episode. This episode is brought to you in part thanks to some of our amazing partners like LMNT. LMNT makes the best electrolyte product on the market. In fact, I've actually started drinking my LMNT each and every morning before I have coffee so as to optimize my circadian biology, make sure that I'm hydrated, and make sure that I'm hydrated and make

sure that I'm getting ahead on my water intake throughout the day and not reliant on stimulants, but instead being somebody who's reliant on hydration and the proper balance of minerals and electrolytes. If you want to feel your best all day, mentally and physically, it's imperative that you stay hydrated. LMNT provides a balanced ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to support brain and body hydration. This combination of electrolytes improves health, performance, body and brain performance, mind you, helps to reduce cramps and soreness and get you more hydrated. There's no sugar. LMNT is sweetened with stevia. It's perfect for exercise and perfect for the sauna because the flavors are natural, tasty, delicious,

and not overpowering. And if you're like me, you'll use them multiple times a day across your training sessions to get hydrated early to replenish after sauna use. And again, it's not just me. LMNT is the official sports drink of Team USA Weightlifting, and it's used by athletes in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, as well as athletes like you and I looking to take your on raspberry and citrus. And when you put your box together, you can get a free sample pack containing all of elements, amazing flavors like mango, chili, citrus, raspberry, orange, and more to get access to this free gift with purchase, scroll down to the show notes and check out using the special link for dynamic dialogue listeners. Okay. so getting to the first and, in my opinion, most important factor or thing to remember when it comes to traveling or, you know, getting outside of your normal routine and how that's going to affect your progress and your gains, so to speak, is actually kind of the nuts and bolts physiology that drives progress in the gym in the first place. I think one thing people really get screwed up is somewhere in the infancy of their training career, they conflate work and time spent in the gym with building tissue, with building strength.

And of course, it is the case that you need to train very hard, you need to train with intentionality, and you need to train close to failure to develop muscle, to build muscle, to drive progress. But it's not the actual workout itself, the stretching and contracting of the tissue, the loading of the tissue, the progression of that loading that builds muscle. That is what breaks tissue down. And then, of course, that tissue is supposed to grow back stronger and bigger. And that will happen if you're able to recover. So remember, our sessions in the gym are not opportunities to build muscle as much as they are opportunities to stress muscle, damage muscle, and put it in a position where if

the recovery factors are in place, we will grow and recover from that training. And this is the kind of foundational component of what drives resistance training progress. It's the stress and the adaptation to that stress. So you go to the gym, you break down muscle, you damage the tissue by essentially creating tears in the tissue. And then you go home, you sleep, you eat enough protein, you eat enough carbohydrate, and you will have the fuel you need to hopefully recover. And one thing that has always really helped me when it comes to taking time away from training is remembering that I am damaging my tissue. I'm loading my tissue. I'm overloading, if I'm doing this right, my tissue in the gym. And 7, 10, even 14 days outside of the gym in the context of an entire training year

is very, very small. And it may in fact be a window for enhanced recovery. Many of you are concerned with, can I go on vacation and not lose my gains? And to you, I would probably say, yeah, you can. In fact, it may be the case that vacation is going to be really good for your gains because many of you suffer from this addictive, borderline, compulsive, neurotic, obsessive training thing that you can barely prevent yourself from going to the gym seven days a week. Many of you train five, six days a week, which is okay. It's not going to hurt you. It's a lot of opportunity to accumulate volume. But man, if you ever take a rest day, are you just saddled with guilt in this

desire to get back in the gym and get back to it and push harder and harder and harder? And you never really take the deloads you promise yourself you're going to take. You never take those rest days. You hear yourself needing in the back of your mind. And a vacation can actually be a great opportunity to do just that. Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. I love training on vacation. In fact, when I go to Hawaii, I always find gyms to train at. But if you train five, six, seven days a week all year long, maybe that vacation you're nervous about missing training while on, that might be the very best thing for you. And so I think for a lot of you who are in that more neurotic borderline obsessive cycle of training, and let's be honest of the neurotic borderline

obsessive behaviors to have working out is one of the better ones. A week off, 10 days off might allow for super compensation to occur. Even something like delayed super compensation, months and months and months of accumulating training stress and not having adequate opportunity to recover, followed by a week vacation where you don't train at all, you might have a ton of gains come surging in that you never actualized because you never had the time to recover. So I would really recommend that you kind of drop the stress you might have around the idea of taking a week off of training, because for many of you, a week off of weight training may very well be the best thing you could possibly do for your gains. It allows your

nervous system a chance to recover. It allows for super compensation to kick in and for you to actualize the gains you've been really chipping away at in the gym. It's good for your soft tissues. It's good for your kind of drive. And by the time you're back from that vacation, you'll be hungry to get into the gym again. So just drop the fear around it. Could very well be excellent for you to just take the entire time off of training altogether and allow some of these gains to manifest, so to speak. Now, we will talk plenty about training strategies and things you can do depending on equipment availability, but let's talk about nutrition specifically for the maintenance of gains. And when you're on vacation, if you're like me, you probably want to enjoy that vacation.

You know, I know that's a bit of a leap, but I'm going to make some assumptions that like me, you work a lot and you probably want to enjoy your vacations, little work hard, play hard kind of thing. So I would never advise that you, you know, stick to a incredibly rigid diet. Um, you know, a meal fucking packing Tupperwares on the airplane. That is personally not for me. And it's not something that I really recommend to my clients. I think it's very restrictive. And unless you're competing in a bodybuilding show, I don't know how much you're going to benefit from it because, you know, bodybuilding show, I don't know how much you're going to benefit from it. Because, you know, I think about it like this. I'm often asked, you know, what do I do to stick with my diet while I'm on vacation? And there's some things you can do. Admittedly, it definitely helps to focus on

eating more protein. It definitely helps to focus on enjoying some of the fresh seasonal fruit that might be available to you in many of the vacations we like to travel. For example, when I'm in Hawaii, I'm loading up on poke and mango and pineapple and things that we don't have as fresh where I live. That said, I really don't recommend that most of my clients even bother with dieting while they're on vacation for this exact reason. They are going to die one day. You and I are going to die one day. And I bet money that when you're laying in that deathbed, so to speak, thinking about all of the vacations you took, thinking about all of the amazing places you've been, all of the travel that you've done and the cultural things you've experienced, one of the things that's going to pop into your mind is the food you've enjoyed and the meals that you've eaten. And I can't imagine

being so chained to my diet that I would miss out on an experience like that knowing I'm not going to live forever. I have, you know, let's say you take two weeks of vacation a year. That gives you 50 fucking weeks a year that you can be on your diet. For that two weeks, you might as well enjoy yourself. Yes, you can focus on protein. Yes, you can focus on eating healthy and drinking water and, you know, being mindful of your alcohol consumption, but like packing Tupperwares and, um, you know, ordering chicken and broccoli while you're in Ibiza or all of the, I don't know, wherever the hell you people go. Like I would not want to do that to myself. I think the future version of myself would be pissed off at me for not just working a little

bit harder during all of the other time of the year I could be dieting from the comfort of my home. And instead I'm out here on vacation eating tilapia and broccoli at a restaurant while people are enjoying their food because I am dieting while I'm on vacation. Like I said, unless you're competing, I wouldn't do that. But for the purpose of preserving muscle, if you are going to be in a down training period or a period of the year where you're training less, which I would not ding you for at all, if you're taking a vacation, protein intake matters. But I don't think you need to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight. I just think it makes sense when you're on vacation to

set a bar at 0.6 grams per pound of body weight. So a pretty easy way to do this, just take your body weight, cut it in half and add 10 to 30 grams of protein. 10 if you're small, 20 if you're medium sized, 30 if you're larger. That should do it. That's the main thing that I would focus on nutritionally to preserve muscle tissue. Few things are going to help you hold on to muscle quite like getting adequate protein intake. And that is something that you can do on vacation, in my opinion, without really quote unquote feeling it. If you are vacationing many of the places that I like to vacation or I have vacationed, protein is out there. In fact, you know, I'm

looking at some of the trips I have planned in the next six months. I've got Vegas, I've got Seattle, I've got Maui, I've got Washington DC and I have Japan and then I have Europe. And so I'm thinking about all of these places and I'm like, okay, Vegas, some of the best food in the world, never had a problem getting protein, tons of amazing fish, tons of amazing steak. Vegas, some of the best food in the world. Never had a problem getting protein. Tons of amazing fish. Tons of amazing steak. Seattle, incredible access to great fish. Tons of protein. Hawaii, incredible access to great fish. Great protein. Washington DC, again, amazing restaurants. Tons of opportunity to find protein. Japan, literally probably the best place in the world to get beef and fish. Love that. Not going to have a hard time. Europe. Okay. Yeah. Am I going to have a

croissant? Sure I am. Am I going to have pasta? Sure I am. But can I find protein? You better believe they have eggs, they have yogurt, they have all different kinds of proteins, especially in Spain and Italy where there's tons and tons of seafood. So just with like 15 seconds of thoughtfulness, I can go, all right, there's going to be plenty of protein in the places that I'm traveling. I can spot that. I can look for that. I can find that. I can aim for 0.6 grams a day. And that right there is going to make a huge difference with helping me quote unquote maintain my gains. And we already spoke about the potential for super compensation that might occur due to the absence of training. Oftentimes, if you train a lot, not training can be good, which brings me to my third tip when it

comes to travel. And that is lean into the sleep, lean into the rest and the relaxation that you so often kind of skip when you're at home, when you're in your routine, when you're grinding. So many of you are ambitious. You're grinding on your fitness. You're grinding on your career. Maybe you're saving up to buy a house. Maybe you have a house and a couple of kids and you're saving up to send them to college. Point is you're grinding, grinding, grinding, hustling, hustling, hustling. And so many of us cut back on those areas of self-care, like sleep, like recovery. And vacations are oftentimes the only chance we really give ourselves to sleep in, to have a nap in the middle of the day, to lay out in the sun

and just chill and relax and unwind and let our nervous system kind of decompress and untangle from all the bullshit and the stress in the world. And I would imagine that many of you would love to get or be in a situation where you could get an extra hour of sleep because you listen to this podcast and you know how important sleep is. You follow me on social media. You know how important sleep is. You follow me on social media. You know how important sleep is. Maybe you follow other health and fitness influencers like Andrew Huberman's a great example of somebody who's really championed sleep. Matthew Walker, somebody who's really championed sleep. Sean Stevenson, Max Lugavere. There's lots of creators who are actively creating content and exploring the link between sleep and human health. And we're learning a lot about it. And one thing seems clear, the more sleep you get, the healthier your brain, the

healthier your metabolism, the better you perform in almost every aspect conceivable. That said, you guys all probably shave off sleep in a preference or preferentially cut back on sleep to make room for your ambitions. I do this. I've done this for years. It's probably not healthy. However, on vacation, that would be the time to sneak in that extra hour of sleep you know you need. And it's why for years I have had so many clients go on vacation and they come back feeling better, looking better, looking younger, having lost body fat, having a complete 180 on their mood. And I really believe that, yes, stepping out of your routine is huge and going somewhere new is huge and experiencing the cultural milieu of a new place is huge.

But I think so much of it comes from the sleep. 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

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So let's say you're traveling. You're going to get the protein. You're going to get the sleep. But Danny, I am going to be honest with you. I want to train. It's good for me. It makes me happy. I am going to be honest with you. I want to train. It's good for me. It makes me happy. It's part of who I am as a human. And I already admitted to you guys, I train a lot when I'm on vacation. So I will give you an example that I think works very, very well and that I think is very, very practical. And I will go over some less practical, maybe more optimal options for you as we go. But that said, I think the simplest thing you can do on vacation, if you insist on training and you want to hold on to your gains, but you're not going to be going to the gym, is to microdose body weight training at a very high intensity. And I'm talking like one set of pushups,

one set of pull-ups, one set of Bulgarian split squats, one set of bodyweight hip thrusts, all taken fairly close to or all the way to failure multiple times on this trip, on this vacation. This could literally be, hey, I wake up, I do a set of pushups to failure, a set of pull-ups to failure, a set of split squats to failure on each leg, and a set of bodyweight hip thrusts to failure. Something to push, something to pull, something for the anterior chain of the lower body, something for the posterior chain of the lower body, and that's it. I just do enough every day for five to 10 minutes to stimulate the shit out of the tissues that matter most. And then I move on. And this actually works very well. I have done this recently with

two of my clients. One of them, Pedro, who went to Japan at the very end of the year for quite some time. We did these micro-dosed workouts with bands and body weight. And another for my client, Wendy, who's going to be spending some time in Kauai. We are implementing the same tactics. Now, both of them went to places in Japan and Kauai where there's quite a bit of movement that is happening there in Japan. There's lots of walking that tends to occur because of the just general walkability of some of the most common places to vacation. Kauai is known for its incredible mountains and wonderful hiking. My client who's going there will also be doing a lot

of surfing, which will of course challenge her tissues. She'll be doing hiking, which will challenge her tissues. But this strategy, this micro dosing, high intensity body weight training, I think it works very well. And the trade-off that you will make in terms of what I would describe as like the time invested, the volume invested, it's so minuscule, you'll probably barely feel it. Like if you can just carve out six to eight minutes to basically do one set of those exercises to failure, I don't even think you'll feel it. I really don't think you'll run the risk of overtraining at any capacity. Um, and yeah, so it's just like, that is a very easy way to do it. You could scale that up just a little bit

by packing something like a TRX or some bands with you so you can stimulate other tissues more easily. And if you can't do rows, or I'm sorry, if you can't do like pull-ups or push-ups, you could use TRX or bands to train those tissues in a regressed fashion. You could do things like banded RDLs. The point is with just body weight or body weight plus a TRX and plus bands, you can microdose these stimulating sets that might not be enough to progress and build muscle, but it's more than enough to help you hold onto muscle to the point where I would say you could probably do this for up to three weeks worth of travel before you ever even started to see any detraining occur. Now, on the note of packing things, I do tend to travel with a few supplements regardless of where I'm going. Protein powder, creatine, and vitamins, just so I can make

sure that I'm giving my body what I think it needs to hold on to tissue. And if in fact it's the case that there's lots of airport time or maybe layover time, I love the flexibility of a protein powder. Creatine, I've never had any problem traveling with. But if you're eating lots of fish, particularly lots of cold water, fatty fish, and lots of red meat on vacation, you probably don't need to pack any of these things. And if you are like myself and you kind of lean into the local gastronomy and all of the amazing fruits and vegetables that some of these destinations have that you might not have at home, your micronutrient density is probably going to

be there too. That said, it's not a bad idea to pack things like protein powder, creatine, vitamins, as well as TRX and bands to make things a little easier. We talked about the importance of leveraging frequency with these micro-dosed workouts. I also think it's important to talk about the intensity of those micro-dosing sessions. You might as well bump it up, make it close to failure just so that you know it's stimulating. But again, I really think one set per movement type is more than adequate. Now, another thing that I can really think or I've seen that really helps is if you know far enough in advance where you're going to be traveling and for how long, just schedule your deload for your vacation and train very hard leading up to it so that like your hardest week

of training is the week before you go on vacation. Obviously you don't want to like blow out a disc trying to deadlift the world like a day before you sit on an airplane for 15 hours to go to Europe. But yeah, just train hard leading into your trip so that again, you help to kind of dissuade some of that neurotic and entirely unnecessary guilt that so many of you struggle with. I struggle with this. I think it's nonsensical. I hate that I do it, but I still do it. Train hard going into it so you can absolve yourself of some of that. Oh, what if I was, you know, I wish I trained harder before my vacation. Don't allow room for that. Do train hard leading up to it and look at that. Um, look at that

training week as like your last chance to really polish things up before you go, you know, actualize all these gains with good recovery and maybe a microdose some sessions. Now, if you are super big on training while you're on vacation. Something that I'd strongly recommend doing is just booking accommodations that have gyms. This is very difficult with Airbnbs. And I am a big Airbnb traveler, especially here in the United States. Although more recently, I would say the value I'm getting on hotels has gotten much better. So I've kind of shifted more towards hotels. But for years, I was doing mostly Airbnbs and they don't have much if any gym accommodations. So I would always see what was around where I was staying. Are there gyms that I can access with my existing gym memberships? For example, if you have 24 hour

fitness, LA fitness, and many of these other big fitness chain gym memberships, they offer multi-club access where even when you are not at your home club, so to speak, the one you go to most, you will have access to gyms in your area that you can train at while you travel. That's kind of nice. Do you need to go every day and maintain the same routine? No, I would recommend again, doing something light, quick, and easy. And Do you need to go every day and maintain the same routine? No, I would recommend again, doing something light, quick and easy. And if you want to train like, Hey, I want to train two or three times, then make them total body and just spread them out across the trip. So you can take advantage of stimulation as well as that kind of frequency principle.

So if I were traveling somewhere for seven days and I said, I'm going to go to the gym three times, I would do total body three times with a day in between each one. And I'd keep my intensity high, but my total volume low, my time in the gym low, so I could enjoy my vacation. Now, when it comes to accommodations that actually have hotels on site, I find hotels and resorts are much better, especially when it comes to tropical destinations like Hawaii and Mexico, where there aren't too many gyms in general. Finding an accommodation or a hotel with a gym is a pretty good option. I'm also finding that as I kind of book my trip for Japan, where the gym culture and just kind of the fitness scene in general isn't as big of a deal or isn't

as present as it is here in the United States, finding hotels with gyms is pretty critical because I'm going to be in Japan for 10 days. So yes, I'll pack a bands. Yes, I'll pack TRX. Yes, I'll get lots of steps. But my plan is to probably lift at least twice and do two total body workouts and then try some of these kind of micro dosing things. And I think that two total body sessions with some micro dose stuff, some band work and some TRX, that'll probably be all I need for the 10 days I'm in Japan to hold on to all my muscle. That said, I have had a difficult time finding gyms in Japan or hotels in Japan that have gyms with any weight equipment. Most of the hotel gyms in Japan are all cardio equipment, maybe some machines. It's been challenging to say the least. Where we're staying in Kyoto,

there is a small fitness room on the property with dumbbells that go up to like 30. And I'll just make that work. I'll be in Kyoto for three days and I'll probably just do some dumbbell work, hit the TRX, a little body weight work, call it good. We're bookending the trip in Tokyo. So starting and ending in Tokyo and there's better options in Tokyo and there's decent options in Osaka, but there's truly not a lot to work with out there. But I'm not going to stress about this. I already know that each of the accommodations, each of the places I'll be staying, there will be some type of fitness room and I'll make it work. If I want to find a gym

somewhere in Tokyo or Kyoto or Osaka, maybe I will. But that honestly, to me, just sounds intimidating and like it might take away from the quality of my trip. So instead, I will be dropping into the gym at my accommodations and just doing the best I can with the admittedly limited equipment. And folks, that's really all you can do when you're traveling. You have to keep it in perspective. You only get so many of these trips and a little bit of stimulation and a good amount of protein and the right amount of sleep will totally help you hold the line. You're not going to backslide if you do those things, I promise. So please hear what I'm saying. Don't stress. Don't worry. Realize that a break from training can enhance gains. If you focus on sleep

and protein, you'll be doing a lot of what you need to do to be successful. Try this microdosing strategy I've done successfully with myself and my clients, Pedro and Wendy. Leverage the power of frequency and do small things often and intensity. Maybe do those small things to failure. Bust your butt leading up to the trip so you're not stressed about not having trained hard going into it. Maybe consider packing some things that can help like protein, creatine, vitamins, and some small, easy to pack equipment like bands and TRX, and then call around and do a little planning. But if it's not easy and it does distract you from enjoying your vacation and being fully immersed in the culture, don't worry. I promise you, 7, 10, 21 days, 30 days even

of sub-par training will lead to only the smallest, if any, regressions in your physique. It's really not something to worry about. And it's a great opportunity to kind of push back against some of the neurotic, obsessive, compulsive tendencies we have to train that hold so many of us back because we're not recovering. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, be sure to leave me a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share it to your story, tag me, hit that subscribe button, and just help me grow the podcast so I can help more people achieve a fit and healthy and happy life. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next one.