Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 382: 10 Axioms + Mental Models for Easier Health and Fitness

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, I'm going to be sharing 10 axioms or mental models, ways of looking at things that I think are profound and very helpful for improving your fitness, improving your body composition, building muscle, increasing your longevity, increasing your productivity. We'll go all across the spectrum here into the interpersonal, the psychological, et cetera.

But a really good way to kind of have a deep discussion and deep dive on various different motivators and things that will cross paths or will cross our paths on our various fitness, health, and kind of life journeys. Ten of my favorite axioms things I've shared and just unpacking them here in a more thoughtful way. I think you guys will enjoy this episode. This podcast has some awesome partners and one of of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics.

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and you'll also be supporting the show. Okay folks, so before we get into it, let's just go over a quick little definition of terms here. An axiom is essentially a statement or proposition that's acceptable or evidently true. These are things that I have said, things that I believe to be true. A mental model might be a good way of looking at things.

And what I think I'm gonna share with you today are my takes on the very complex scene that is navigating your body in the world we live in with social media, all the various different inputs we might have as to how we should look, how we should eat, how we should supplement, how we should train. After doing this for a decade and having had the glorious opportunity to get very close to some very smart people, get tons of reps with real people, wonderful clients who truly come in and work hard, whether that be in person, virtually, in any capacity, I've identified some stuff that I think really

just works for everyone. As close to universal as I could say without being over general. Okay, so axiom number one is Essentially built on the yaja It's built on the concept that fat loss tends to be An extremely principal goal when people work with me or work with most personal trainers online coaches anybody in the fitness space, aesthetics, losing body fat is pretty key.

And I have really come to believe it boils down to three highly mechanical things. And the axiom is this. Fat loss is about three things. Calorie intake, number one. Protein intake, number two. Consistency, number three. Not in any particular order. However, if your calories and consistency

aren't where they need to be, your protein intake doesn't mean shit. But if your protein intake isn't where it needs to be consistently, you'll probably have a hard time with your calorie intake. But if you consistently eat less calories and you consistently eat enough protein to feel full and hold on to muscle, you should lose body fat. The importance of tracking carbohydrates and fats, I would argue, is more of a performance or feel thing for most people. It does help. But if aesthetics, particularly body fat loss and muscle retention are what you are after, which

is what I believe most people tend to be after when they come to work with a personal trainer or even start a drug like ozempic or start a diet in general. They want to look a certain way. That really does boil down to getting into a calorie deficit, eating adequate protein to retain your muscle tissue, and doing those things consistently. That is so much more important than training. It's so much more important than hormones. It's more important even than sleep.

Now, if you sleep and train and eat in a deficit that is reasonable, you'll probably have a favorable hormone profile anyway. All these supplemental things, all these secondary things that people fuss about, they do ultimately matter, but substantially less than the amount of calories you eat, the amount of protein you eat, and how consistently you have those two things

aligned with your goal. If those two things are aligned with your goal, you will ultimately get there. If your sleep is shit and your training is shit, you'll get there way slow, if at all. But if your sleep and training are dialed, you'll definitely get there. But it really does boil down to those three things. The next axiom I have for you guys is about dealing with the many people who will, and this is especially relevant for trainers, fitness enthusiasts, people who are kind of the fitness person in their relationships, in their group, and maybe in their family. There's going to be detractors, people who ding you for it, people who kind of cast judgment on you

or maybe ridicule the relationship and commitment you've made to your fitness. And that can be really frustrating. And it doesn't necessarily cause a rift. I tend to think that the fitter people who are often the butt of jokes like, oh, is there any protein in that? Or, oh, what are you going to get a chest day in today, bro? Or, oh, yeah, definitely can't miss a

day at the gym when you're on vacation. There is definitely a time and place for taking a break. But there certainly seems to me to be an awful lot of judgment heaped on people who choose to maintain their fitness routine around maybe friends, family, coworkers who do not. It could be that you pack a lunch to work and choose to eat a healthy home cooked lunch not only to save some money but also to nourish your body and you get dinged by your coworkers for not going out and grabbing a beer. There's all kinds of ways this shows up. But the axiom for dealing with these detractors is people who do not like when you talk about how exercise benefits you usually haven't felt the benefits of exercise. People who don't like when you talk about how eating

healthy makes you feel usually have it connected with how healthy eating makes them feel in quite some time. People who don't like that you talk much about not drinking usually drink more than they should. And so I think this also really dovetails nicely with an axiom I quite like that I've heard many times from one of my oldest clients, not only oldest in tenure, but quite literally oldest in age. Her name is Karen. Many of you know her from my Instagram, but Karen has many times said to me in conversation about various things that come up when you train someone one-on-one, you have to think we've probably spent a number of hours together.

And she says something quite frequently that has really resonated me, uh, with me and it's consider the source and consider the source really just reflect to me means like, Hey, when you hear something from someone, maybe it's judgment, maybe it's condemnation, maybe it's people who are doubting you. Uh, you're trying to get in shape. They're making fun of you. Maybe it's, own self-doubt, right? On your way to building your better body, you're facing some self-doubt on your way to the gym. You need to consider the source.

Is it your own insecurity that's talking? Is it other people's insecurity that's talking? Are people judging you because perhaps they wish they had these habits going themselves and they wanna try to bring you down a little bit? I do think if you can keep that in frame, it can make dealing with the negativity totally doable because you're also going to get a lot of people that probably are vocal about how they admire your consistency and your dedication and your fitness and all that.

There's certainly a lot of more people who I think are gonna build you up than bring you down, but it doesn't make the negativity any less frustrating. So a mental model for dealing with it, an axiom for dealing with it is essentially just people generally do not like when your good behavior shines a light on maybe a lackluster element of their own behavior. And their judgment might just be a reflection of them

Wishing that they were as disciplined or committed as you and it could be about things much more than fitness Okay, this is an interesting one on type 2 diabetes And this this is from a tweet that I did an X post that I did about a year ago, and it's still true But I have never this is number three I have never met a single person overweight or otherwise who has regularly resistance trained and Developed type 2 diabetes what I'm not saying here is I've never met a

person who isn't who lifts weights who doesn't have type 2 diabetes. It's not what I'm saying. But almost everyone I've ever met, literally everyone I've ever met, even if they were a little heavier than you might expect, if they had been resistance training for quite some time and were not already type 2 diabetic, I've never seen it develop. The back half of this is I've also met and worked with dozens of people who have eliminated both pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes just by adding weightlifting to their life a few times a week. I wish resistance training were prescribed more to the general population. Now, I am not one of those like, haters, I'm not like a doctor hater,

like, oh, if you have a doctor and they prescribe you drug before they prescribe exercise, you don't have a doctor, you have a drug dealer. I'm like, okay, I get it. I totally get it. These doctors have to see way too many people. Our health care system is, I I think, has its inefficiencies

and its shortcomings, and so does our insurance system, and so does our education system that buries these doctors in debt. I think agnostic to all of those things, which are worth talking about for sure, is the fact that sometimes truthfully medication is very warranted and it is often delivered in adjunct with lifestyle therapy. So it's not like everybody who has type 2 diabetes is not being told to exercise. They're just being

given a prescription. I just marvel at how effective resistance training is at increasing the baseline insulin sensitivity of the average person because it makes your muscles much more hungry for glucose because resistance training is what we would call glycolytic exercise and that it demands carbohydrate to fuel the contraction. Not necessarily that that is still driven by ATP, but the generation of ATP in the actual scenario that is weightlifting is best done with carbohydrate. And long story short, if you have type 2 diabetes, you don't clear carbohydrate out of your blood very well because you are not very sensitive to carbohydrate coming into the body.

You don't have the right insulin response. You will, I think, cultivate fortification against that with lifting because you have bigger muscles, they want more glucose, they dispose of it more quickly, and if you don't, when you produce the hormone insulin, it binds to a receptor, or essentially it signals a receptor called Glut4 to come to the surface of tissues and absorb carbohydrate. Exercise also stimulates that same thing. Glut4 will come and proliferate when exercise is present. So it's a great tool for diabetics of all types if you know how to use it. And I do

think that doctors oftentimes recommend that, but we do have like an epidemic of over prescription of certain things for sure in place of lifestyle. I get that. I'm like super empathetic to that, but I'm also like, we just had a dog injury and it was like, dude, we need meds for the dog because the dog is like incapable of understanding and discerning his pain. And so he had had what appeared to be a bulging disc prior to an x-ray, which in fact revealed, we were choosing not to do the x-ray, but it would it would probably reveal whatever's going on at the spine. But the dog, my big dog, the Doberman was jumping up and down and he landed on his hind legs. And my wife had picked him up from daycare and he was yelping. This was what they told her anyway. She was obviously very upset that he was like playing.

Maybe it happened when he was playing. He kind of jumps up and down sometimes. I was like, okay, I get it. Sometimes I guess even a person could have like a slight bulging disc, but it looked like he had some pain from his lower back, lumbar spine area, which was what they told us when we took him to the vet for the testing. We didn't take him for the x-ray, but they're like, yeah, it looks like something's going on in his lower back. So all this to say that dog is incapable of discerning where spinal pain is coming from because, you know, spinal pain is really weird. You can have a bulging disc and it can refer pain into your legs. And it was clear that he was having weird pain that he never experienced before and

it made him like almost scared. And so the, the, I think humane thing to do was to give him the medication that was relevant as well as follow the prescription for him, which just so happened to be less activity. And so, you know, I think there's always context where medication is indicated in animal medicine and obviously in human medicine, which is, I think, quite a bit more complex. So I'm not anti-medication, but I do think exercise can be almost like medicine in a lot of different ways. Okay another axion this one is to really like connect with how low the

floor is in the context of like your fitness relative to the average person and this is to motivate and inspire those of us who are not super enthusiastic about training to train So this is for your loved ones your friends your clients who might not have the same motivation as many of you who are super enthusiastic And it's just like the floor is so low right like the average person is overweight Almost obese like 40 plus percent of Americans are obese. Right? So the average is like 70 average person is overweight, 70 percent are overweight, 40 percent are obese. So you're almost two above average obesity, meaning for like 50, 51 or any 50 point zero one percent would be like, oh, more than half of the people

are obese. So if you're obese, you, more than half of the people are obese. So if you're obese, you're technically in the average, which is crazy, right? But the average person is overweight. The average person does not meet exercise guidelines. And it's a very convincing argument, I think, to make to tell someone just by engaging in a couple hours a week of exercise, let's say three or let's say four 30-minute workouts, two hours a week of exercise. Like let's say three, or let's say four 30 minute workouts,

two hours a week, and like cleaning up your diet a little bit, just a little bit, so that you can have a little more muscle mass, skeletal muscle mass, and a little less fat mass, especially visceral fat mass. That would probably put you very quickly in an above average category when it comes to fitness and metabolic health. And so the axiom is you can completely rewrite the story of your health with just a few workouts a week.

Getting in a few more steps, a few more, sorry. You can completely rewrite the story of your health with just a few workouts a week. Getting some more steps, drinking more water, and aiming to eat more nutrient-dense food. You do not need to adopt a seven-day a week routine or an intense diet. You do not need to upend your life. Small tweaks can lead to huge change. The floor is extremely low.

It takes very little effort to be exceedingly fit compared to the average, okay? So no one's saying you have to be a bodybuilder. And I think that when fit people approach less fit people, it can often feel like we are trying to elevate them to a level that there might not be enough interest on their end to get to. Like we are prophetic about it. We're obsessed with it. They might just want to be in a little better shape. And so I think reminding people like, hey, a little bit can go a fucking super long way is

insanely powerful and very helpful. What's going on, guys? 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 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. Axiom number five here is to that you really in health have to remember things are so Nuanced and oftentimes so interconnected that in few very few cases with the exception of things like alcohol above average alcohol intake excessive smoking of things like cigarettes, especially on a completely sedentary lifestyle Most individual behaviors are not going to kill you. Some things probably are really bad, like laying on top of a uranium refinery, like sunbathing on top of a uranium

refinery, probably not good for your long-term health. But most things are nuanced and interconnected and multifactorialorial meaning driven by many things and so the mental model here is to quiet the fucking noise around a singular villain. We are the sum of the choices and reactions we make in the choices we make regarding our health and our body very rarely are singular choices highly influential, especially in singular or low doses, with the exception of ripping tons of cigarettes or drinking tons of alcohol, having a binge episode, getting a tremendous sunburn is pretty bad for your dermatological health.

Okay, so that's the mental model. Quiet is the singular villain narrative. It is not helpful. And an axion that goes with it is, it's not seed oils, it's not carbs, it's not GMOs, it's not red meat. It's also likely that your hormones and genetics aren't even the problem. What's most likely is that you suffer

from a confluence of not moving enough, not challenging your muscles, sleeping poorly, drinking far too much alcohol, mainlining social media, and avoiding vegetables like a toddler. Pairing this with a chronically low protein, ultra-processed food diet, and it's no surprise you're looking for a reason your health's fucked up. There's just one thing. It's not one reason.

So keep that in mind. Our health is often the sum of many large choices. It's not like any singular dietary component or environmental component in many cases. And over vilifying certain things is kind of exhausting and very frankly I think distracting to people who I would prefer be guided by more nuanced, it just more nuanced and inclusive advice that's actually helpful than like just don't ever eat this, don't ever eat that, don't ever eat this, don't ever eat that, don't ever do this, don't ever do that,

be terrified of this, be terrified of that. That to me is exhausting. Okay, the six mental model is just the kind of general idea of delaying starting your health, investing, muscle building, fitness building journeys, right, like enjoyment of life journeys, like you should not delay things until tomorrow that are worth doing today.

I think the best quote on this is do not put off until tomorrow what's worth doing today. A reframing of that is anything worth doing next week is worth doing right now, or anything worth doing is worth doing right now. My spin on it is hundreds of millions of people live a life promising themselves that they will eventually get in shape get healthy and take care of themselves but it's always

a next week thing. The problem is a lifetime of I'll start next week tends to dissolve into a one-way ticket to a shorter life time full of sickness and stress I might add. So, you know, delaying investing is often displayed on various charts like this is what would happen if you invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 at 20 years old and retired at 65 versus at 30 years old and retired at 65 due to the compound effect that takes place in the stock market, in real estate, in assets where we tend to like to see values go up. We see a positive compounding effect. And I think this is very true of your health. The earlier you start and the more aggressively you invest, the more it will pay off for you.

Now there's obviously a case to be made for balance. I'm a huge balance guy. Let's not overdo it. Let's not become compulsive or develop eating disorders or over train our bodies. Let's find balance early in the process, hopefully, but the earlier you connect and commit to a fitness goal, better. And delaying it until tomorrow is truly silly because you lose the ability to benefit from the power of compounding which takes place in the future. Strange as that might seem. Okay, this one has to do with balancing aerobic and anaerobic fitness and it's to remember lift weights and do cardio but lift more weights minute per minute you get the highest ROI from lifting weights.

Cardiovascular exercise is invaluable for your health and longevity, but you have limited time and lifting keeps you strong, mobile and metabolically healthy. Balance these two accordingly. I pair this with a model of like the rule of sixty, thirty or sixty, forty, sixty. I really like sixty, six, thirty three, like two thirds, one third. I realize I said like sixty, thirty off the top, which is adds up to ninety. That's kind of silly, but like a two thirds, one third approach for general population adults for how to balance anaerobic fitness with aerobic fitness, meaning hey, I work out six days a week, so I run four

of them and lift all right, lift four of them and run two of them right. That's a two thirds, one third. Hey, I exercise three days a week. Okay, I lift on two of them and run two of them, right? That's a two-thirds, one-third. Hey, I exercise three days a week. Okay, I lift on two of them and do aerobics on one of them. Or my favorite by far is, hey, I do this for the general population. If I could do an hour of exercise, I would make sure 20 minutes of that were aerobic in nature and 40 minutes of that were anaerobic in nature.

Meaning 20 minutes were focused on specifically the development of a strong robust cardiovascular system and 40 minutes were on strong muscles, bones, and just generally being more fit. I think that that combination, that spread, that balancing effect, that that exact ratio works so good for the general population and I would just strongly strongly recommend that approach for most people not all people but most people okay this is on managing the scale and weighing yourself which seems to be something that many people struggle with. I've always noticed this. It's very psychological. I understand human

psychology more now than I did when I was a younger trainer, but it's still really hard for a lot of people. And it's still hard for me even sometimes. But some days the scale goes up, some days the scale goes down, some days the scale goes down, some days the scale stays the same. But the pursuit of good health, feeling better, cultivating strength and muscle, and of course fighting disease are always worth it, no matter what you weigh or what the scale says. And so I think it's important to remember that after you get off that scale, whatever feeling is connected with the weight displayed back to you on the monitor,

you need to ditch that as quickly as possible and hopefully get to work expeditiously on taking care of your body, your health, your well-being. Some people are so defeated by what they see on the scale, they kind of unplug from training and unplug from working out. And it's kind of dangerous. They often unplug from how they're eating and just say, fuck it, I'm gonna just give up. And my argument would be, hey, that's all right. There's so many more reasons to take care of your body than just to see that number go down.

Meet a frustrated scale with empathy and a like zoom out to the bigger picture. Okay, this one's on balance. And I think it's important for those of us who are super fit to remember how important balance is. The axiom goes, I love the way healthy eating makes me feel. I also love the way eating not so healthy delicious food with people I care about makes me feel. Balancing the two can be hard. Much time is spent focused on how we should eat to nourish our bodies.

But we mustn't forget how well eating with others can nourish our soul. I think this just speaks to the importance and the kind of humanness of eating with other people. It's cultural, it's social, it's very energizing. It's the kind of being, you know, considered of calories and protein intake and nutrient density, et cetera. But there's no denying some meals, for example, pizza, just bring people together.

And I would say that opting out of that to follow a very rigid diet is too puritanical. And a great example of balance is approaching those meals with like, hey, this is maybe not the healthiest thing I'm going to eat this week, but it is very pro-social and I'm going to benefit from that. So there's an offsetting effect. Remember the positive offsetting effects of indulging every once in a while and practicing balance. The final axiom of the day is just on expanding our view of exercise in general. This tweet is extremely popular. It has like a million shares on Instagram and it is when you look at exercise and these are all my quotes my

original quotes or tweets whatever you want to call them these axioms when you look at exercise is nothing more than a weight loss tool it's easy to skip workouts and become disengaged but if you look at exercise as frontline care for your mental health and mood, an opportunity to cultivate discipline and routine, and the best tool for living longer, looking better and moving well, and feeling healthy, it's all of a sudden way harder to skip

and much harder to disengage. And so, honestly, when I look at that, it does not seem to me to be one of the kinds of axioms I've posted that would go as viral as it has. But fuck it. I get it. I think it really resonates with people who have quit or have come back to exercise after quitting.

But I don't know. I don't know. I just I think you have to make it about more than just looking a certain way or weighing a certain amount if you want to stick with fitness. And I think it's really important for those of us who are like stewards of fitness, um, whether that be as trainers, as strength coaches, as influencers, as the fit people in our circles, that we give people that permission structure. I don't care what you weigh, dude. I don't care what you look like. No excuse not to take care of yourself. Let's work out. Let's take care of ourselves. See you healthy here

and there, right? Or let's do a little better than we were just the day before. Keep it simple. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, be sure to leave me a five star rating on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can subscribe on one or both, I don't care. I'd love to have you share this to your Instagram story and tag me so I can share the podcast more organically with other people and I'll take your feedback over there too. Keep your eyes peeled on my YouTube channel for new things, long form videos that I think you'll really enjoy if you like the podcast and I'll catch you on the next one.