Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 68 - Gym Closures, Vitamin D, Sprints VS Plyos

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

In this episode, Danny is talking all the way from Sea Ranch, California! We talk about Vitamin D and how important it is to helping us, more than just simply sunlight! Then we touch base on plyometrics and HIIT and how we can implement these into our training?---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING:Check out my programs and E-Books! Click HERE!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:Gym Closures! When will they open back up? 2:33Science and Random Clinical Trials with Vitamin D! Vitamin D helps ALL AROUND! 9:41Plyos and HIIT/Sprints! 14:02How to Integrate Plyos into Training! 16:52Sprints and HIIT! 20:16Support the Show.

Back in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host Danny Matringa and today I'm recording from my living room. But not my living room. I'm actually in Sea Ranch, California, which is a beautiful 1960s planned community on the California coast about an hour north of Bodega Bay and about two hours northwest of where I live in the Santa Rosa area. Now this is what's crazy about this before we get into the episode I just had to tell you. So this entire community was effectively built to mirror and blend in with the landscape. So houses can only really be made from redwood and redwood when it's exposed to the salty sea air like you get when you have a community on a sea cliff um turns gray so all the houses out here are very geometric they are either blue or like a tannish uh redwood color or

a gray kind of salt stained redwood color it's pretty cool the nature is gorgeous i played my best 18 holes of golf and it's just been incredible to get away and enjoy the beautiful sea air it's about 110 degrees all across california i've seen friends in west hollywood that's saying it's 110 my where i'm from in Sonora is 105. No, 115. Sacramento's 115. It's hot. And so it is about 77 up here on the coast. And I am enjoying it. This is absolutely stunning, beautiful and wonderful. So when you guys hear this episode on Tuesday, hopefully it's cooled down a little bit for you. But again, I am enjoying the coast very much, and I will be coming back here many, many times in the future for sure. So, that being said, today's episode is going to primarily revolve around gym closures,

because that's been something I've been getting a ton of emails and DMs about, so I do want to touch on that, as well as a recent examination of some of the vitamin D literature as it pertains to COVID-19. I'm not going to try to sway you one way or another with regards to any of that. Simply staking, I should say staking the claim that there is definitely valid reason now more so than ever to use supplemental vitamin D if you are not somebody who can get adequate sun exposure. We're also going to chat a little bit about plyometric training and HIIT training, to use supplemental vitamin D if you are not somebody who can get adequate sun exposure. We're also going to chat a little bit about plyometric training and HIIT training. But let's start first with this gym closure stuff.

So gym closures have been one of, if not the most common business-related question I've gotten from whether it's personal trainers, gym owners, whoever, asking me questions as to when do I think gyms are going to reopen. And my guess is as good as yours. I think a lot of that is going to depend on the political lean of your state. So no matter where you're at with this virus, from a scientific standpoint, we can't deny that there has certainly been a politicization of the virus, meaning the political divide in this country has taken the reins of the virus and tried to steer it one way or the other. And the same, both parties are guilty of this. Now, in your traditionally red or Republican states, which is going to be most of the southern portion of the country,

middle America, all of that stuff tends to be a little bit more conservative, right-leaning, and Republican. And politically speaking, we know that these states generally had a less aggressive response to the virus. Many of the gyms shut down, but very briefly, most of them tend to be open in those areas with some stipulations. But if you get a little bit more coastal to some of the more democratic or left-leaning states like Washington, Oregon, California, New York, etc., what you'll find is that these gyms are closed permanently, indefinitely. They are going to remain closed until further notice. They're open but only for outdoor stuff. A lot more rules and regulations.

And again, I only bring this up not to make this political, but to give you some of my insight, because again, people are asking me, and I don't know a lot about the gyms, because I don't know about the individual gym owners. I don't know too much about what these corporations are planning on doing. I'd imagine they'd all like to be open. However, the political lean of the state that you live in might have the greatest overall likelihood of impacting whether or not your gyms are going to be opening anytime soon.

If you're in California or New York, two of the most progressive states, I would say don't plan on it probably for the rest of the year. I really don't see a world where these gyms just fly open. I think what you'll see is you'll probably see a little bit more of the kind of truncated slow reopenings where we get maybe a little bit here, a little bit there. We start outside and then we start going back through what they had before, which was you had to schedule appointments you got one hour per person etc etc what is interesting and i don't bring this up to stir the pot um if there was a liberal hot bed in a more liberal state than san francisco i'd be shocked but california probably the most progressive state san francisco is probably the most progressive city, maybe in the world, definitely in California. SFPD has had all of their gyms open, which is very interesting, and it made the news because there's a lot of people who are very frustrated about this.

people who are very frustrated about this um and it it's somewhat ironic given the fact that there's also all of the politicization of the frustration with police but one of my friends who is a firefighter and i were actually talking about just this and he actually made a really good point which was i don't think you want fat police officers and firefighters do you and i said no that's very much fair but of course there is great irony and frustration in the fact that we will only allow the gyms in california that are for our first responders to be open but not the gyms for the rest of the general public to be open because of course that would be too likely to cause a spread of the virus that seems to be the rationale there so take all of these various things into account when you go

about formulating your guesstimate for when your gyms are going to reopen but if you are in california or new york city i would say you're probably going to be waiting until 2021 before we see large scale reopenings or normalization of what gym reopenings are going to look like. Maybe we get reopenings in like late October, early November, but I don't think things are going to look normal until probably closer to 2021. And again, I only bring this up because this is something that I just keep getting asked about. It seems to be something that people are really chomping at the bit. And again, if you go back and listen to my podcast from March and April, I was really hammering

getting your hands on some home equipment. I have been checking the websites regularly for going on six months now, and things are a lot easier to get now than they were before so if you are still in the market for home equipment you haven't pulled the trigger yet because you're like man you know i think the gyms are going to reopen this week this is the week i'm not going to buy a barbell and plates because this is the week they're going to reopen i think that you're setting yourself up for a little bit of frustration and we also have to look at the precedent right um i don't think we're out of the woods forever with regards to pandemics or just general bugs but the precedent has been set now right we have an understanding that we have uh very quickly have the ability to implement shelter in place orders uh social distancing

practices mask wearing policies, all kinds of things. So let's just say there's a COVID-20 or a COVID-21, I guess it would be, right, that comes through next year. We're going to end up in a situation where maybe we have a smaller but still significant closure to gyms. You'll be glad you have that equipment. It'll be great on holidays when you don't have gym access because maybe the gyms have different hours where they're just all out closed days where you can't make it to the gym on your lunch break or when you normally go because things change days where you want to work out from home because you have a friend visiting who doesn't have access to your gym blah blah blah there's a million reasons why you might want to

continue to consider getting home equipment but But at this point, I'll be honest, we're six months in. If you're really serious about it and you still haven't got equipment, I hope it's because you can't afford it. If it's because you keep thinking that this is the week that gyms are going to reopen, I think being a little bit delusional about how this is playing out. And again, I just refer you to the earlier part of this podcast. Look at the politics of it. It shouldn't be a political issue, but it is a political issue. So if you are in a state like myself in California, don't bank on it. If you're in middle America, the southern portions of this country, you'll probably be fine for a while. But again, we all live in different places. So the next point, again, we're sticking

with COVID, which is somewhat unfortunate, but I actually found this to be quite interesting. I'll just give you a brief overview of the science and the things that you should probably understand before we dive into this without like going unnecessarily overboard. But one of the things we look for in science when we want to really, really say there's a lot of validity to this. There's a lot of reason to believe this. There's a lot of reasons to listen to this. One of the gold standard ways we can really hone in on something as being pretty legit is if we can look at something called a RCT or a randomized clinical trial. That is one of the gold standard forms of scientific study. And it's really, really important that as we review literature,

as we look to science to state claims and make assertions about what is or isn't safe, we want to have the highest level of the scientific method and process in place. We want to have really made sure we've checked all of our boxes. And RCTs allow us to do that. More so than just, say, one single trial or one single study that we looked at. So an RCT is a study in which people are allocated randomly, by chance, to receive one of several interventions. So we're really looking at multiple things here as opposed to just an A group and a B group. And so they're always going to have a placebo control as well. And so that's really important to look at. And there was a recent RCT with regards to vitamin D,

which for those of you who don't know, is actually called calcifediol. And the title of the study is effective calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for covid19 a pilot randomized clinical study so for those of you who don't know the name of the game in the research space is give your study the most long, hard to follow title possible that literally describes exactly what's going into it. It's almost comical. It's like a 40 word title. But basically what it is, is looking at the effects of vitamin D and the other ICU treatments available and seeing like, hey, how does this really play out? And so the highlights of the study are vitamin D and endocrine system may have a variety of

actions on cells and tissues involved in the progression of COVID-19, administration of calcifedrol, hydroxyvitamin D to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced their need for ICU admission, and calcifediol does seem to reduce the severity of the disease. That should come as very little surprise to anybody who knows a bit about what it is that vitamin D does with regards to the body. So when we talk about vitamins, we usually talk about them from the nutritional standpoint, which is like I say vitamin C, you think immunity. I say vitamin B, people tend to think energy. When you say beta carotene, people think eyesight. But when you talk about vitamin D, because it's synthesized in the skin, right? And it's secreted throughout the

body because of the way in which it's created, it's technically a hormone. And it does a hell of a lot more than your average vitamin. It also plays a vital role in the health of your skin, your hair, your hair, energy production, muscle strength. It does a ton, but it does play a really intriguing role in immunity. And it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, right? Anybody who's healthy, in my opinion, that people who have administered vitamin D in a supplemental form and have enough vitamin D adequate amounts would have a more robust immune response to any illness, not just COVID-19. But it is always interesting when we see this stuff show up in literature. And it's one thing to just talk about it, to postulate, to come up with ideas, but to see it in an RCT is really encouraging. So this is from Science Direct.

I believe the entire paper is open access. I think it is open access. I shared it on my Instagram today. But when you're listening to this, I will have shared it on it yesterday. It was made available on the 29th of August 2020. The title is Effect of Calcifidol Treatment and Best Available Therapy versus Available Therapy on Intensive Care Unit Administered and Mortality Admission and Mortality Among Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19, a pilot RCT. So look into that if you're interested. Long story short, you probably won't. Vitamin D is a good thing. You should do it. Another one I wanted to touch on today, because this comes up a lot, is how to integrate plyometric activity into your training protocol and how to implement HIIT or sprints. We're going to lump those together into your training protocol. And so first and foremost, I think we need to start with one at a time. And we'll start with plyometric stuff with regards to improving your fitness, with regards to integrating it into your program and wondering how it is that we go about doing that.

So first and foremost, we need to define what it is the general adaptation response for most people is going to be to properly perform plyometrics. A lot of people think of plyos as relatively quick, sequential forms of bodyweight jumping exercises. And colloquially speaking, when we talk about it in the fitness space, quote unquote, plyos are generally just really fast, short, not full range of motion, jumpy exercises that you see people on Instagram doing to get your heart rate up. When we talk about the actual nuts and bolts strength and conditioning definition of plyometric activity, it's effectively a tendinous way to produce greater force using the body's stretch shortening cycle. It has nothing to do with cardio cardio it actually has to do with force transmission and explosive output so these two things which would be the actual benefit and definition of plyometric training versus the actual bastardized benefit of this pseudo faux

fake phony plyometric training they don't even live in the same world properly performed plyometric activity is explosive in nature not aerobic in nature it is effectively anti-aerobic you might get your heart rate up you might be breathing hard it might be tough but we're not using the aerobic system we are doing these repetitions we are when we do plyometric training we do things like depth jumps tuck jumps hide-ins all this different stuff we are talking about building explosive rapid strength the type of strength you see on display when you watch sports like football when you watch sports like basketball that quick change of direction explosive how did that guy get from point A to point B so quickly, that's plyos. Not hopping around a medicine ball, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot for a minute

straight while you get slightly fatigued aerobically. How do you work this type of stuff into your program? Well, for most people, you don't because it's quite difficult. Most people don't really necessarily need explosive uh adaptation to be successful as say maybe a power lifter or a bodybuilder but if you want to a great way to start is with ground contacts meaning most plyometrics are going to be done for the lower body so when i say ground contacts we're talking feet but if you wanted to do things like plyo push-ups or even trunk related plyometrics you consider one rep a ground contact.

But you just want to start with as little amount of ground contact as possible. So maybe you're starting with 50 total contacts per session. And what contact is, it's a way of quantifying exactly how much stimulus we are sending to the body. And the bigger the person, maybe the lower on the edge of the spectrum you want to start as far as contact. NSCA will tell you you should be able to squat 1.5 times your body weight for a single on a back squat before you even do plyos.

I don't know if I agree with that. But again, plyometrics are primarily designed to facilitate tendon stiffness and explosive strength. So it's not something you want to do improperly, and it's not something you want to do too much of. A little bit goes a long way, but you have to go about quantifying that in an intuitive and intelligent manner. So let's just say it's 50 ground contacts for your first session.

You might do 10 sets of 5 max effort jumps, where you just jump as high as you can five times take a nice long rest period that's really important we'll talk more about that when we get to the sprinting portion of the episode today but longer rest periods are going to be more idyllic for generating any type of adaptation on that force velocity curve whether it's maximal strength speed strength maximal explosiveness, the longer you can rest, the better your training adaptations are going to be. When we talk about things like hypertrophy, where there's more of an inclination to lean towards metabolic pathways, hydrogen

accumulation, creatine buildup, lactate buildup, that stuff tends to really help hypertrophy. That's where playing a little bit more with shorter rest periods is ideal. None of that stuff really comes to play with regards to building maximal strength, power, or explosiveness. So if you were going to do 50 ground contact, say you do 5 sets of 10 max effort, or 10 sets of 5 max effort jumps, you might rest for 2-3 minutes in between each set. So that might mean that, you know, your active

set is 5 seconds. You jump 5 times as high as you can. You're landing relatively quickly. It's five seconds, but then you rest for three minutes, right? That's what? 36 to one from a work to rest ratio. If my math is right there, that's a lot of time, but that's really what it takes. So the problem to just circle the wagons here with a doing high rep, what I like to call pussy plyos, you're basically driving an aerobic adaptation with getting almost no plyometric adaptation, and you're doing most of the time really high impact cardio, meaning you're still getting those ground contacts that you would get if you were doing, let's say, box jumps.

contacts, right, that you would get if you were doing like, let's say, box jumps. That's a terrible plyometric exercise that a lot of people use for aerobic output. So you're jumping, you're landing hard on the box, and you're landing hard on the ground. And that's fine for a tough, resilient physique. You can jump, you can land, we're all tough. But I don't think that's the best way to drive your aerobic adaptation. If you want to just get quality aerobic work, hop on the rower, hop on the bike, go for a jog. All of that impact tends to be a lot less than jumping up and down off a really high box, which I think will lend itself better to your overall recovery. So shifting gears literally here to talking about sprints and high intensity interval training. The reason I've lumped these together is because when people tell me, hey, I want to go run sprints, they don't really want to go run sprints. They want to run kind of fast on the treadmill and then walk for a little bit and then run kind of fast on the treadmill and then walk for a little bit.

Real sprint training sucks. It's hard. It will wreck you, your glutes, hamstrings, lats, triceps, obliques, anything involved in hip or shoulder extension or any type of rotation around the midline is going to be sore as hell. Why? Because one, you probably never do it. And two, it's max effort every time. One of the things that's interesting about weightlifting is if I put what you believe to be your max on the bench, there's a very good chance, let's say it's barbell bench, I put what you think your max is on there, there's a very good chance you're either full of shit and it's not your max and it's going to bury you

or you're a conservative guesstimator and it's a little bit less than your max and you're going to get it and maybe could do more. That's what happens with weights. If I put a gun to your head and said run as fast as you can, you are always going to hit that high threshold. You're not going to be getting buried. You're not going to run so fast you fall over or quote-unquote fail, and you're certainly not going to half-ass it and guesstimate, oh, well, actually, I think I had a little bit more in the tank.

Sprinting is sprinting. It's as fast as you can go. That's effectively what the title of sprinting is. Sprint training, you can do at different percentages of RPE, just like any other training. But just throwing the term sprint around like, hey, I'm going to go run some sprints. No, you're probably not. And high- high intensity interval training is not the same thing as genuine sprint training. High intensity interval training effectively is just any harder interval paired with a lower or recuperative interval at which point you are recovering and getting ready for your next higher intensity interval. It's not always a sprint. High density interval training is a great cardio modality for people who want to burn more calories in less time and might want to condense some of what they do into a more challenging bout of exercise. That's dope.

Sprinting though is not for that. Sprinting is amazing for building strength, power, performance. Actually, if you look at your legs after you run some sprints, your legs will probably be pretty torched. So it's probably an effective way at at least maintaining skeletal muscle in the lower extremities for people who don't have access to weights. And if you go back to earlier in COVID, you'll actually hear on the episodes I was really touting getting out and running some true sprints

if you don't have access to a lot of lower body weight training equipment. But again, with sprinting, sprints should be very difficult with extremely long rest periods. So if you run a 10 second 100, which you don't, let's say you run a 13 second 100, because that's probably more likely. If you run a 10 second 100, good for you. I would probably have you rest three to four minutes before I had you run another 100. That's 10 seconds of work to what? Three to four minutes before I had you run another hundred. That's 10 seconds of work to what? Three to four minutes, 180 to 240 seconds of rest. That's a lot of rest. That's like 24 to one. Hit training is like one minute on, one minute off. That's one to one. That's why we don't talk

about sprint training and hit training as being the same thing. They get thrown together all the time, but they are not. The other thing about sprints is with those expanded recovery times, you're not going to get a huge volume of training into a short amount of time. So you don't say, oh, I ran sprints for 20 minutes. No, if you actually went out and did sprint training, it probably took you at least an hour. And that's fine, right? If you want to do some sprints at the end of your workout and just run, that's great. But you're probably not going to get as fast as you would if you were doing genuine sprint training with adequate recovery periods. It should challenge you quite a bit with regards to reaching that peak speed without proper technique. Sprinting and running are, again, just like weightlifting,

all about mechanics, all about technique. You can really improve someone's speed simply by improving their technique, their rate of stride, or their stride length and their stride frequency. That stuff's really big. So if you want to become a better sprinter, you're probably going to want to work on your technique. If you want to do HIIT cardio, it doesn't really matter. You can do that on an elliptical.

You can do that on a Stairmaster. You can do that on a spin bike. You can do that on a row machine. You can do that on a basketball court, running side to side. That's not sprinting. And again, like I said, when you do your sprints right, you're going to know. You're going to feel like you got hit by a truck, but you're going to notice a large leap in bound forward progression in your explosiveness and your power output. You want to be more powerful? you want to be more athletic, that's when we talk about things like true plyometrics and true sprints. If you want to have a little bit of fun, move around, play, and burn some calories,

that's where we talk about pussy plyos and HIIT. Very, very different things. The fact that these things get lumped together all the time is mostly the, I guess you could blame it almost entirely on Instagram influencers who really don't know what they're talking about and just use these terms interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. So guys, hopefully you enjoyed today's episode. I know I enjoyed making it for you. When you hear this, it will be Tuesday, September the 8th. The sale for my programs will have ended, but if you guys want to still check it out, go to www.coachedaniematrinka.com and check out all of the stuff on the website under the product tab. You'll see all my programs from Power Build, Female Physique to Foundations. Also, Legion is back in stock.

By the way, Legion is a proud partner of the podcast. Legion has its new gut health supplement balance in stock, as well as one of my favorites, which is Genesis. I took both of those this morning, and I'm quite excited to see how they work together. So do check that out. And if you want to save on your first order, go ahead and use the promo code DANNY at checkout to save 20% and get double points on all of your subsequent orders. Again, guys, thanks so much for tuning in and listening to the podcast.

Be sure to subscribe if you have not and leave me a review. It makes a big, big difference. Hopefully, you guys have a great rest of your week and you can avoid what's left of this heat wave. Have a good one.