Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 60 - Q + A: The Triangle of Gains, Full Body Training, Soreness, and 1-on-1 Personal Training

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

In this episode, Danny answers some of your questions! How do we gain muscle while maintaining being lean, especially without the gym? Is it still worth it to hire a trainer even if you’re not a “newbie”? Tune in for much, MUCH MORE!---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING:I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!-----TIMESTAMPS:“Still no gym, what are some tips to gain muscle and stay lean?” The triangle of intensity, volume and frequency! 0:50“Volume recommendations when training full body, 4 times a week?” 9:35“Do you approach nutrition differently if DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) are massive?” 14:55 “I am not new to the gym, is it still worth hiring a one-on-one personal trainer?” 23:41Support the Show.

Welcome back, you guys, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I am your host, Danny Matranga. And as always, this is a place to learn, grow, and develop every avenue of your health and physical well-being to optimize your performance and longevity. So welcome in. Today's episode is a Q&A. We're going to be talking about all kinds of stuff from lifestyle to training volume recommendations to how we might approach nutrition to optimize recovery or mitigate soreness, as well as a question regarding personal training and a few more. So let's dive in to the first question and it's from Instagram from at Jeeksy Mar and at Jeeksy Mar wants to know, still no gym, lifestyle tips to gain muscle and stay lean. it's worth talking about and zooming out a little bit because I think the lifestyle recommendations I would have for somebody whose goal was to optimize the amount of lean tissue on their body while staying lean wouldn't be all that much different whether or not this person had access to the gym. So this wouldn't change a whole hell of a lot if you're in a state where gyms are, say, still closed or if you're in a state where you're going to the gym every single day and your routine hasn't really been disrupted

much at all. What goes on behind the scenes, the lifestyle parameters, the nutritional parameters, all of that stuff is going to be about the same. And so let's first start with what we can do nutritionally to optimize muscle and optimize leanness. So in general, increased protein intakes are highly correlated with increased fat-free mass and generally lower body fat mass or lower adiposity, meaning the more protein people tend to eat, they generally tend to be more muscular and they generally tend to be a little bit leaner. This is for a myriad of reasons, the first of which being that protein is highly satiating. So when you eat ariad of reasons, the first of which being that protein's highly satiating, so when you eat a lot of it, it's going to keep you full. So it minimizes just

how many additional calories you eat from carbohydrate and fat. Not that either of those two things contributes more to fat gain than anything else, but it is interesting that protein of the three macronutrients, when over-consumed, tends to have the least spillover into body fat gain. And that has to do with the chemical construction of protein itself, being that it's higher in nitrogen than carbohydrate and fat, which are much more similar to one another and are much easier to be converted into adipose tissue. So a high protein intake will encourage fullness. It will also encourage muscle growth via elevation of muscle protein synthesis. A meal of about 20 to 40 grams of protein is

usually sufficient to spike muscle protein synthesis, if not optimize it. Space a couple of those 20 to 40 gram feedings across your day, and you should be good to go. So like I said, your day and you should be good to go. So like I said, whether or not you have the gym, you can still space out three to four, 20 to 40 gram protein feedings across your day and optimize your chance of gaining lean muscle and staying lean whilst training, whatever that training may look like. The second thing we want to look at is sleep. Sleep has been correlated, or I should say, greater sleep quality and quantities have been correlated with a leaner body with less overall adiposity, greater fat-free mass. When we sleep, that's where we do the bulk of our recovery. And something a lot of people make the mistake of doing is forfeiting that oh-so-precious sleep

in the name of staying up late and watching Netflix, and even something that might be more well-intentioned like waking up early to hammer a workout. In almost all instances, getting between seven to nine hours of sleep is going to be exponentially better for your gains than getting, say, four to six. So much so that when you look at professional athletes, one of the biggest things they tend to focus on is how they can distance themselves from their competition by fine-tuning sleep. Interestingly enough, players like LeBron James and Roger Federer, both of whom are very, very

good at an age at which most people in their sport tend to drop off, both of those players are notorious for getting high amounts of sleep. Roger Federer actually sleeps, I believe, 11 to 12 hours a day, and he sleeps in between his training sessions. So he gets a full night's sleep and a couple naps in there, but that's why he's able to play tennis at the absolute highest level so late in his career. It's not the only reason why. I'm sure there's other variables, but that is one of the reasons to which he attributes so much success. So no gym doesn't matter, right? You can optimize and look to fine-tune your sleep whether or not you have access to the gym. And some of the best ways to do that are to take a supplement like magnesium. Magnesium tends to be a rate-limiting factor for a variety of processes

that help us sleep. Melatonin can help you fall asleep, or you can use something like a blue blocker glasses. A pair of blue blocker glasses can limit how much light penetrates the retina. And when light penetrates the retina, it sends a signal to a small part of the brain called the SCN, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which effectively tells our body, is it daytime or is it nighttime? And the more light that hits that retina, the greater the signal to the SCN. And when the SCN is getting a lot of stimulation, it tends to think it's daytime. And unfortunately, a lot of the electronics that we stay up late watching stimulate that SCN. That light penetrates the retina and it gets all the way to the SCN.

So our body actually doesn't secrete melatonin as effectively because melatonin, which is of course secreted by the pineal gland, that process is initiated by a decrease in photons penetrating the retina. So as it gets darker, melatonin tends to come out. So the good news is there's a lot of things you can do to optimize your sleep. Like I said, there's supplemental magnesium and melatonin if you're into that. Blue blockers to minimize that. If better yet, just turn the screens off altogether, do some reading, maybe even a meditation, and try to limit caffeine intake to prior to, I'd say, about 11 or 12 in the afternoon. Those are your best bets with regards to eating and lifestyle stuff like sleep. But we also have to look at things like training frequency.

So this is where we might draw the line between, hey, if you're at the gym and you're training with all your typical resistance implements, dumbbells, barbells, cables, free weights, all of the stuff that you'd have access to, the literature leans pretty heavily in favor of two times per week being optimal for muscle growth. And that's a two-time-a-week training frequency per muscle group.

And that has to do with, again, like I said, using traditional resistance training implements. That's where that data comes from, studies that were designed and utilized traditional resistance training implements where we can perhaps accumulate quite a bit of mechanical tension because we're using maybe machines or barbells or free weights, or we can really hammer in on eccentrics, all the different things that machines and the typical resistance training modalities found at gyms allow us to do. But when we're training from home, that might be a little tougher. So this is where I might actually look to increase frequency because I can't tap into that same intensity. I consider intensity, volume, and frequency to kind of exist in this beautiful triangle.

And ideally, right, intensity is the top of the triangle. Let's say volume is the bottom left. And let's say frequency is the bottom right. So they all represent one point on a triangle. And ideally, each person will find where they belong in that triangle. Maybe they're shifted a little bit up towards the upper left, where intensity and volume really help them grow. Or maybe they're more towards the bottom, where it's volume and intensity that give them the them grow. Or maybe they're more towards the bottom where it's volume and intensity that give them the most help. Or maybe they're more towards the right

where it's intensity and frequency. That's probably not gonna be the case. But again, if you move towards intensity and frequency, you'd move away from volume, which may well work. And so my focus would be primarily to increase the frequency of training bouts. If we're using things like bands, limited dumbbells, and bodyweight training in the name of stimulating muscle protein synthesis as optimal as possible. We can use things like eccentrics. We can use things like isometrics.

We can use intensity and density techniques in an effort to enhance the stimulus we get from that bodyweight training. But at the end of the day, I think going to a maybe three time a week training frequency per muscle group would be ideal. So those are the things that I would focus on. If again, your goals are to gain muscle or at the very least stay lean during this quarantine. The last thing is just a kind of blanket note regarding calorie intake. We talked a little bit about macronutrients with regards to protein, but I would say to keep calorie intake at maintenance level with maybe a mild surplus if you have quite a bit of equipment and you're going to be training pretty hard or you're going to be training with the frequency

that we talked about. You might do a little bit better with a mild surplus if your goal is to gain muscle. But if you really want to just maximize your leanness, your neat, and your activity has been impacted by quarantining, just eat at maintenance and do all the things that I recommended. So the next question comes from Mr. Underscore Awesome. And he says, volume recommendations for four times a week full body. Now, a four time a week full body split is a little bit less common than the traditional full body splits that have been popularized most recently, which are usually about three times a week. You can do a super high frequency protocol, like a five time a week full body, but the

volume, of course, would be really low there. But Mr. Awesome 3 wants to know about four times per week full body. So let's paint the picture here. Let's say we're doing a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and we are resting on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. So how I would split that volume up, I might look initially at my volume landmarks and say, okay, 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is generally going to be the sweet spot for most natural lifters. Can you go to 30? Sure. Do you actually get measurably increased gains from going that high? In most cases, from what I've found in my own training and with clients. You don't always. Some people do. Some people just enjoy higher training volumes. I think it's more rare to find somebody who gets better results from 30 to 40 sets than it is to find somebody who actually

starts to go backwards from doing 30 to 40 sets. I think there's a lot of people who do so much volume that the quality of that volume is largely trash, and the stimulus and the intensity to which they're actually kind of challenging the tissue is quite low. Because again, if you go into a session knowing, oh, I've got eight exercises to do, and I'm doing four sets of 12 on each of these exercises, the impetus to kind of half-ass all of that is quite high. the impetus to kind of half-ass all of that is quite high whereas if you go hey i only have one chest exercise today i'm gonna bust my butt so that that would kind of give me the initial direction for how i would handle this so i would look to do about 10 to 20 sets but what i might do is say hey i stagger it so i do my my heaviest pushing movements and my, maybe the upper body pushing movements and my heavy lower body pulling movements. I front load volume on those for the first day. I do a little bit of lower body pushing and a little bit upper body pulling on the back

end. And then you just flip flop that across the week until you get to about 10 to 20 sets. Now, that's kind of how I designed my foundations program. And that's on the website. It's four times a week, full body. It's an upper lower split though. So each day is kind of prioritizing one hemisphere of the body, either the upper half or the lower half. It's not truly full body per se, where you're hitting toes to nose every single time you step in the gym. That's not my favorite way to train. But let's say that's what you want to do. I would say do about 15 to 20 sets per workout and then shift that volume across four primary movement types being upper body

pushing, upper body pulling, lower body pushing, aka squat lunge, lower body pulling, aka hinge thrust. And then sprinkle those across and maybe you make an exact even volume and you toss in some accessory stuff at the end. Maybe you prioritize each of those four a little bit more each day, but have volume, a little bit of accessory volume for the other three across the back half. There's so many ways to do this that I think that creativity might be your friend here, but you still would want to live in that space of, hey, I have some volume landmarks. I have a frequency of four times per week. Each muscle group is going to be hit four times per week. And so if 10 to 20 sets per week

is optimal, the most I'll probably do, let's not say optimal, let's say 10 to 20 sets per week is manageable and recoverable at a level for most people with where they're at with their fitness. most people with where they're at with their fitness. The most you should do on any one day, in my opinion, for any one muscle group is probably like eight sets, right? Because say you did eight sets on your Monday session for your upper body push. You want to do 20 sets of upper body pushing across the week. That's of course pattern-based. Let's say it's chest. You do eight sets of chest on Monday. You do like four on Wednesday, right? That'd bring you to 12, four on Tuesday, four on Thursday and Friday, and you'd get to 20. And so you could do it that way where you prioritize them, or you could just evenly split it and go, hey, I do five sets per muscle group across my week. That'd probably be what I would

do. So that's how I would handle and recommend volume be stretched across a four-time-a-week full-body split. screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. The next question comes from at shizzles. Nat shizzles wants to know, do you approach nutrition differently if DOMS are massive? So let's first outline what exactly it is or what we're referencing when we hear the term DOMS. So DOMS is an acronym and it stands for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. And it's something that almost all lifters, particularly newer lifters, are going to be familiar with. And the best way to describe it would be as, say you head into the gym and you just, we'll stick with chest because we just talked about it, you hit a gnarly session, a gnarly push session, and you really, really hammered your chest. Let's say it's Monday.

Well, maybe Tuesday your chest feels a little bit tight, and you know, about 12, maybe 24 hours after your session. But on Wednesday, your chest is sore. It has that deep, all the way to the bone soreness. But it's two days after now. Not one, two days. Why is it worse after two days? Well, that's DOMS. And that's where the D comes from, delayed, pause. And so what you end up focusing on when you talk about DOMS is like, man, this is where it comes up as being kind of a frustration. And this is why people would want to be able to expedite it or do something nutritionally to manage it. Say you're in a situation where you can only train three times a week. Well, if you train Monday, say you do squats,

and the next time you're going in to train is Wednesday, if you're a DOM sufferer, you're somebody who's predisposed to really have quite a bit of DOMs, you're going to go in Wednesday, and that's when you're going to be the most sore, but that's when you have to train again. So that could be really problematic in the context of, especially right now, where people might be able to get to the gym, but it's by appointment, so maybe they can only go a few times a week, right now where people might be able to get to the gym, but it's by appointment. So maybe they can only go a few times a week or they're working out from home and they have limited equipment access or they're using somebody's garage and they only can go so many times a week. These are all very real situations. So there's a few things that I do always look at if I have a client who's

recurrently dealing with DOMS. The first is the obvious one, and that's protein. Are we getting between 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of body weight? That's what we need to optimize muscle protein synthesis. That's a level of protein intake that I'm comfortable with with regards to recovery. But the macro that I actually look at the most stringently isn't protein. It's actually carbohydrates. So a lot of people don't know this, but carbohydrate has a muscle sparing impact. And the reason for that has to do with the insulin pathway. Insulin seems to be muscle sparing. regarded as this anabolic hormone that was like the ultimate and all the bodybuilders were taking insulin, especially in the early 2000s. And when you took a lot of insulin, that's when we saw this huge boom. And people were wondering, well, is the growth hormone or is it the insulin? What are these guys taking that's letting them go from, you know, 250 stage weights up to that like 280.

And even Ronnie was, I think he said he was close to 300 on stage. And of course, this is that like two, 3% body fat. So insulin got this rap for being this super anabolic. But at the end of the day, when the research fleshed out, it appears as though it's more anti-catabolic than it is anabolic. And what I mean by that is if you go bust your ass in the gym and you don't have any nutrition post-workout, that protein breakdown that occurs when we break down our muscles in the gym, it keeps happening, unfortunately, after we leave. But protein can help manage that, and carbohydrate can actually help manage that even more. And the other cool thing about

carbohydrate is, or I should say insulin, because carbohydrates are what's going to elevate that insulin. Some protein can, whey protein can actually spike insulin quite a bit. It's going to facilitate GLUT4, that pathway in the cell that allows for glucose to transport, and it can bring some other cool things in too. So carbohydrates can enhance nutrient partitioning if they're timed properly, and your insulin pathways are primo, which for healthy, lean people, they tend to be. And it also helps manage muscle protein breakdown. And one of the things that could be causing DOMS is muscle protein breakdown. There's actually some really interesting new research that might be related to the actual motor unit or the nerve innervation inside each muscle cell or muscle spindle or group of muscles. They cause large

bundles of muscle. One motor unit can cause many muscle bundles to contract. But it's interesting that there might be acute damage to these nerve endings in the tissue that cause DOM. So nobody's 100% sure exactly what it is. Some people say it's accumulated metabolites like lactate and hydrogen that don't get flushed out. One way or the other, having the right amount of carbohydrates can be really, really beneficial. And if we look at all the myriad of things that could contribute, whether it's muscle damage, in which case we might want protein, if it's potentially upset, frustrated nerves, we might want a little bit more healthy fat intake. If we're not adequately

putting the brakes on that muscle protein breakdown, we might want more carbohydrate. But the big one, let's say it's metabolite buildup and we're not getting enough exchange at the level of the tissue, well, then we have to look at hydration. And carbohydrate really helps with hydration because carbohydrate and water love each other. When you have a lot of glycogen, you're going to hold a lot of water. When people do a low-carb diet, a lot of the weight they lose initially is from water because when you start burning through that glycogen and you're not repleting it, you lose a lot of the associative water that's held in tissue. So the other thing we can look at, of course, would be hydration and making sure that you're getting adequate water intake across the day. And the thing I really key into with water intake is are we

getting in that ballpark of about half your body weight in ounces of water per day? And if you really want to optimize hydration, you can crack a little pink salt or add a little bit of electrolytes into the mix. All that's going to do is enhance the uptake of that fluid. So that's one that I definitely like to look at. So with regards to minimizing DOMS from a nutritional standpoint, we have to look at carbs, protein, and water. Now, from a training standpoint, if you are somebody who really keys in on tempos and you do prolonged eccentrics, that's going to fuck you up. Overdoing eccentrics, and I mean this lovingly because I think eccentrics are perhaps the most overlooked part of individualized range of motion-based training.

Everybody's going so violent through the concentric, they just pass that right onto the eccentric. But when those sarcomeres cross, when those muscle fibers cross, think about your bicep. If you're in the car listening, grab your bicep. If you're at home, grab your bicep. When you flex, when you make that muscle, the actual muscle cells, the units inside that, right? The sarcomeres, the small little effectively lines, they run across each other like Velcro. And when you're flexing, that Velcro is tight. Now, as the weight is being lowered, so you're lowering a bicep curl. So pretend to extend your arm like you're almost going to flex your tricep. Those muscle fibers, that Velcro, they start to come apart. But if you resist it, they kind of

tear apart. And that Velcro, when it tears apart, that scratch, right? That's what's happening at the muscle fiber. It creates micro tears. That's the impetus for things growing back larger in many cases. So neglecting the eccentric altogether is missing out on one of, if not the singular most impactful piece of a muscle contraction with regards to muscle growth. However, overdoing it, meaning you're like going insanely slow and really just punishing yourself with eccentrics, is a surefire way to have a lot of muscle damage and then by proxy, quite a bit of Dons in most instances. So if you can, key in on your tempos and make sure you're not overdoing the eccentrics. And then the last one, and it might seem a bit obvious because I hammer it all the time on the

podcast, is sleep. If you're not getting the right amount of sleep, you're overstressed, you're not going to recover optimally from something as arduous and taxing as heavy resistance training. So those are the things you can really key in on to manage your DOMS. Ask yourself, hey, am I getting enough carbohydrate to minimize muscle protein breakdown? Am I getting enough protein to optimize muscle protein synthesis and recovery? Am I getting enough fluid to have adequately hydrated tissue and encourage the exchange of metabolites at the actual level of my muscle? Am I getting enough sleep to promote recovery and enhance my readiness to train? And of course, am I being a complete bumbling dumbass and doing 15-second eccentrics, which is probably rare as fuck, but let's just throw it out there and say it's possible.

Let's just throw it out there and say it's possible. Okay, so last question comes from Lady Maria 4KA. And Lady Maria 4KA wants to know, not new to the gym, is it still worth hiring a one-on-one personal trainer? So in my opinion, the answer is always yes. It's kind of like hiring a therapist. If you've got something in your way emotionally that's holding you back from accomplishing what you want to accomplish,

talking to a professional about that can be really, really powerful and it can give you some guidance. But addressing that on your own is something we often don't make time for. So here we are, let's flip the script now and talk about resistance training or fitness specific goals. If you have habits, behaviors, or things that you neglect with your training, with your nutrition, with your mobility that you know are important and you know are a what I would call shortcoming in your game, hiring somebody to either bring you up to speed, encourage you to do them, hold you accountable to doing them can be massively important. hold you accountable to doing them can be massively important. Additionally, the myth that training for a while makes it so that you know what you're doing is bullshit. Okay, I cannot tell

you how many people, when I worked at a commercial gym, went there seven days a week. I saw these motherfuckers every day for like five, six years. And for every single workout, I just looked and said, what the fuck are you doing? Where did you learn this? What are you doing? Where did this come from? This is insane, right? So it stands to reason that you'd think over the course of five to six years, they'd fine tune their programming. They'd learn a little bit more. You'd look at them and go, wow, look at that. That guy's doing, you know, beautiful form. You know, it looks like he's doing some type of programming. No, no, no. Five, six years in, half these people have no fucking idea what they're doing. They just, the only thing they

really have going for them to no fault of their own is that they have a good habit in place. They go to the gym, but that's it. And so, you know, I do hesitate when I see not new to the gym. Not being new to the gym does not mean you know what you're doing. The bulk of the clientele I work with online and in person in some capacity know what they're doing. Most of the clients who I train online are actually trainers or coaches themselves. They know exactly what to do, but they also understand the importance of accountability. And that's what hiring a coach allows you to do. It allows you to outsource perhaps the biggest piece of your programming or the biggest thing holding you back to somebody who's going to hold you accountable to doing it and executing it. So I'm pretty big on it. And I think one-to-one

in-person personal training could be amazing. Like even let's say you do 12 weeks worth of sessions and you go twice a week. Normally, let's say you do a four time a week program. You do upper body on your own and you train legs with your trainer twice a week. But your goal is to grow your glutes and you tell your trainer, hey, when I come here, I want you to push me. I want you to make sure my technique is perfect. I want to maximize the stimulus I'm sending to this muscle I want to grow for 12 weeks versus somebody who just goes to the gym four times a week and does all those sessions by themselves. I would go so far as to say that the upper body differences between those two people might be marginal, but the person who's getting help with what they need specific help with from the coach is going to get much better

results. So I would say that the person who goes to the trainer would have a much more developed lower body because they've probably told that person and that trainer is probably pushing them. They're probably taking reps closer to failure. They're probably training with greater technique, focus, intent, and execution. All kinds of amazing things start to happen. And so that's just one of the upsides. If you are new, it's definitely the move. It's definitely the move. You can cut so many corners and save yourself so much time hiring a coach. And I think that it's overlooked because the price is high relative to some of the other stuff that we tend to spend our money on. But I think that that money is very well spent and almost always tends to be very much worth it.

So that'll do it for today, guys. As always, thank you so, so much for tuning in. It would mean the world to me if you found value in this episode, if you shared it. Please do tag me or give me some feedback. I'd love to just chat about it and continue to help reach more people by putting this out there on various platforms. Share it to your Instagram story and tag me. Share it on your Facebook and tag me. Send it to a friend via a text message and let them know that, hey, this episode has

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it would make a massive difference. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll chat soon, guys.