Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 72 - Q&A: How I Define Fitness, Injury Recovery, and Cardio

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

In this episode, Danny jumps straight into your questions! We cover topics ranging from cardio to what even is fitness? Submit your questions whenever Danny posts on his Instagram story or HERE!---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:Housekeeping! Hello to those who are NEW! 0:45“Thoughts on working out in the morning fasted?” Will it kill my gains? 3:48“Ideally how much cardio should I do?” 9:08“How does DANNY define fitness?” 11:54“What are some of the strategies you use for a fat loss program?” 17:35“When recovering from injury, should I be at maintenance, deficit, or surplus?” 19:20Support the Show.

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I am your host, Danny Matrenga, and today we are going to dive into some Q&A questions. I have a ton of them here. I'm a big fan of a lot of these. I think they leave room for creative discussion, as well as give you guys kind of the opportunity to implement some of the strategies I'm going to go over when I respond to these questions. Now, before we do that, I do want to do a little bit of housekeeping because I know many of you might be new here. The reason I'm making that assumption is because a few days ago, I made an Instagram post regarding how it is that we go about introducing exercise to women in the traditional Western world here in America, here in Europe. In a lot of the world, the introduction that women

get to exercise is closely correlated with, hey, this is a means to help you get thin, to help you look the way you feel that you're supposed to look. Perhaps that's from societal pressures. Perhaps that's from men. Perhaps that's from other women. That's not really relevant. And that food is maybe perhaps the enemy or it's a means to gaining weight and getting fat and that you have to be very careful with it. And the post I shared simply posed the question of imagine a world where we introduced exercise to women as a means to building strength, becoming more athletic, and food as a means to nourish the body and set you up for long-term health and success. And that post very quickly spread.

It was my fastest-liked post. It's at 15,000 likes and 15,000 shares. So this post has been shared 15,000 times, which is awesome. I think that's really cool. I'm not a huge person in terms of likes and comments. It's not really what drives me on social media. I don't really have a lot of followers in the first place. But what I do imagine is that it's probably brought a few new people here to the podcast. So if you are one of those people, I just wanted to say thank you so much for tuning in. I look forward to hopefully earning your subscribership. If you enjoy today's episode, like I say at the end of every episode, please feel free to screenshot it, share it to your Instagram story, tweet about it, put it out there on whatever social you use so you can share some of the stuff we'll talk about with people who probably need a little bit of help too. talk about with people who probably need a little bit of help too. Today has been a lighter day for in-person sessions for me. So the majority of my one-on-one clients have been finished up. Most of

my online programming is done. So I cut away a little bit to record a podcast. And these are the days that I love to do Q&As because you guys always bring the best questions. And I'm trying to fit this in here on Tuesday between my last client and the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden so I do plan on watching that I'm fairly politically inclined that probably makes a lot of you like just sick to your stomach but that's where we're at here today in California I do live in Sonoma County so this smoke in the air from these wild fires is kind of making it a just stay inside type of week, unfortunately. So you might get a couple more podcasts as we go along here. So the first

question and these are fielded again from Instagram. If you have a question specifically for the podcast, you can go to the link in my Instagram bio and actually click on the icon. There's a little icon that says ask a question for the podcast. You can do it right there. It sends me an email. I flag it so I can come back to it later and answer it on an upcoming mailbag episode. These rapid fire Q&As where I don't get into so much detail, those are fielded from the question box on my Instagram that I throw up on my story from time to time. So for new listeners who want to interact with the podcast, this is a great way that you can go about doing it. All right. So first question comes from at Elva Des with four S's. And she says, what are your thoughts on working out in the morning without eating? Is that good or bad? So whenever you're training without having had food in a considerable

amount of time, specifically overnight, we are generally going to refer to that as training fasted. Now, training fasted is not inherently better or inherently worse than training fed. A lot of how you train and how you will learn to train and get into the routine of training across your training career is going to be based on personal preference. If you're somebody who likes to train in the afternoon, one to two hours after you've eaten lunch, training fasted early in the morning might rock you like you cannot imagine. You might have no gas, you might feel lethargic, you might be half asleep. Having trained so many people over the the years and i used to start my days training clients at 5 a.m um i i just know that people have different archetypes there's actually a word for it and it's called a chronotype and it just kind of is whether you're a morning person or an evening

person and for some people morning workouts fast are amazing for other people afternoon and evening workouts are the way to go one thing i would would say is when you work out is largely personal preference. How you work out with regards to your food state is largely personal preference. Although there might be some additional benefits to training fasted if you train early in the morning, but maybe not for the reasons you might think. Fasted training generally gets most of its hype from, hey, you're going to be burning nothing but stored body fat because you have absolutely no fuel available to you because you're fasted. So your body is going to harvest energy from your fat cells. That's like the big sell in the fitness industry, right?

That faster training equates to greater fat loss. I haven't necessarily found that to be the case. The scientific body of literature doesn't necessarily support that. The scientific body of literature doesn't necessarily support that. But one thing I have found for me and for a lot of the clients who have trained over the years early in the morning is that waking up and getting a big meal in prior to training, particularly if you're like training before work and you're in a bit of a hurry, maybe you start at 8 a.m. and you get up at 5 a.m. to get to the gym at 5.30 and work out till 6.30 and then you take a shower and you're on your way to work.

For a lot of people, that early morning huge meal is quite daunting. And it actually makes them feel more lethargic because they don't have adequate time to digest the food they're eating. Many times they end up eating it on their way to the gym and they're training whilst digesting. And digestion is a biological process that takes calories. It takes energy. So you are diverting some of your body's energy to digestion, which doesn't necessarily equate to massive drops in your resistance training KPIs. KPI means key performance indicators. It's maybe not going to massively reduce your strength, your power, your pump, right?

But for a lot of people, that digestive process going on can lead to lethargy. It can lead to you feeling tired, more tired than you might already be. So that kind of summarizes my thoughts and my theories around training in the morning fasted. As to the question of whether it's good or bad, it might not necessarily be ideal for gaining the absolute most amount of muscle possible. But again, this is splitting hairs because training fasted might impact your ability to preserve protein. We call this protein sparing, right? You might have excessive muscle protein breakdown if you don't get a meal in closer to after training. So again, diving into the conventional resistance training wisdom rabbit hole, you've got your bros out there that are like, yeah, dog, you got to get a protein

shake and a rice cake with jelly on it in after your workout every time where you're pissing away your gains. That's the bro voice, right? So bro comes out and he's like, yo, anabolic window, 30 minutes post workout, gotta have it or you're losing everything. Then conventional scientific evidence models come out. We take a look at those post-workout windows. We give some groups the food. We give other groups no food, but we give them the same amount of macros across the day,

and bam, not a huge difference. However, for those who do train fasted, that anabolic window bro theory it might be worth adhering to a little bit more because having a meal with some carbohydrates and proteins more close to that actual wrapping up of your workout so getting it in closer to finishing your workout versus maybe putting it off all the way to lunch might mitigate excessive muscle protein breakdown so all of that to say this my thoughts on working out in the morning, is it good or bad, is it's entirely up to your personal preference.

How you like to train and how you like to feel when you train is really important. If you're somebody like me who gets anxious if you don't have your workout done by 2 or 3 p.m., maybe you go ahead and knock it out early. If you're somebody who likes reward-based behavior and you want to go through your whole workday and then hit the gym at the end of the day as maybe a way to say cheers to me for making it through, that's awesome too.

It's neither good nor bad. It is primarily based on personal preference. And you just might want to experiment a little bit with nutrient timing, prioritizing getting some food in after your workout. That's really, really important. All right, we'll toss this one in here. At Gina Marie Green asks, ideally, how much cardio should I be doing? I really find myself winded, but after only about 10 minutes. So cardiovascular training, running, jogging, going on the row machine, the stairmaster, playing basketball, all of that stuff is really good for

your body. But it's not necessarily going to help you build any muscle. Because when we're doing this stuff, we're primarily training the aerobic pathway, which is a pathway in which we effectively fuel our body using stored body fat and carbohydrate. We rely heavily on the mitochondria to produce ATP. And we're using our lungs and our heart a little bit more strenuously than we might be using our skeletal muscle tissue. So the primary adaptations are on the tissues I just mentioned, like the heart, the lungs, and the mitochondria. Those are the typical adaptations to aerobic exercise. A lot of people look at cardio as a means to lose fat, but again,

that's only happening via caloric intake and caloric output. Doing more cardio increases the number of calories you expend or ups the ante on that caloric output, which might help you at the end of the day be in a more favorable caloric environment for a lean body. Less calories generally, if you're eating below your maintenance, is going to equate to enhanced fat loss. So when people look to lose weight, they often add cardio because, again, it's great for caloric output, and they can see great results from adding in some cardio. However, you do not have to do cardio to lose fat, and you probably should do some cardio

in the name of aerobic fitness. But to answer your question, how much? I tend to recommend between 60 and 90 minutes per week, and how I program that for clients is really simple. I want everybody to get a 10 to 15 minute cardiovascular warmup. Just find a spin bike, go for a walk, go ahead and hop on the treadmill or the Stairmaster, whatever your workout situation looks like, and take 10 to 15 minutes prior to training to increase your core body temperature, increase the temperature of your working tissues,

enhance the ability for your tissues to facilitate blood flow by getting your heart rate up. All of this awesome stuff happens when you do an aerobic warm-up, and it's going to enhance your training, whether you're training aerobically or anaerobically, like weightlifting. Cardio is a really, really powerful tool for getting to a physiological state of readiness aligned with really performing well in the gym. However, we don't want to go like balls to the wall and run like as fast as we can as long as we can prior to our workout. A simple walk, spin, light row machine, outdoor walk will do the trick.

And if you work out four times a week, a 10 to 15 minute warm-up will get you somewhere between 40 to 60 minutes. So on the days you don't train, if you go for a nice little walk, you should be well within that 60 to 90 minute range I tend to recommend for clients. So next question comes from at Lee Pinkham, and it is, how do I define fitness? So I think this is a really great question. So from a evolutionarily, I should say evolutionary biology standpoint, fitness is effectively our ability to survive and reproduce. That's what Darwin meant when Darwin said survival of the fittest, fittest, meaning those who can survive and reproduce. Well, fast forward to 2020, our, you know, contingency of reproduction isn't our overall ability to survive. Survival isn't so much an issue. However, our fitness might be and fitness has taken on a new term,

or I should say it's a term now that we use to describe our body leanness, our overall level of strength, perhaps it's the way we feel, right? It's a term that we don't necessarily have a concrete definition. Like what does healthy mean and look like? What does fit mean and look like? Well, I have a little bit of an opinion here, and it's probably biased, so take it with a grain of salt. But I believe that somebody who is fit is living a mostly pain-free life. Their body is not super impacted by pain all the time because pain can be a massive detriment to quality of life and i think that being pain-free is one of the number one hallmarks of people who

have strong able bodies i think that making an effort to be well nourished by selecting a variety of foods from mostly whole food sources that provide you with tons of micronutrients and the macronutrients you need to perform right you're not eating foods that lead to excessive body fatness and you're not depriving yourself so much that you have a very low level of body mass that would be considered to be detrimental on that end too. So you're making good food choices that are aligned with longevity and living a healthy life.

So I think that is a component of fitness as well, right? So relatively pain-free and having a quality approach to your nutrition. Another thing that I think has to go into fitness is your stress, your anxiety, your mood, your overall mental health, right? That's got to be a part of it. You could be the number one bodybuilder in the world, absolutely shredded. You could be the top running back in the NFL, absolutely a beast, the number one crossfitter, top bikini competitor, you name it. But if every night you go home, you're super anxious and depressed and you want to take your own life, I don't know how fit and healthy that is. So keeping an eye on your mental health is incredibly, incredibly important. And going out of your way to, quote unquote, exercise that by maybe going to therapy, communicating with your friends at a deeper level,

making the effort to, you know, unpack elements of your subconscious, things that bother you, challenging your own bias, getting outside of your comfort zone. That stuff can be really powerful. And I think it's a part of living a good life. And then, of course, the most obvious one is you've got to do some type of challenging arduous exercise. What that looks like, I can't say for sure. For some people, like maybe going out and playing basketball several times a week is enough to be lean and happy and be in your mind

fit. And again, if you're pain free, and you're, you know, not having any adverse health issues related to metabolic health or excessive body fatness, in my in my mind, I'd categorize you as fit. But if you're somebody who wants to take your fitness to a really high level, I think that doing a lot of resistance training and building strength and quality metabolic boosting muscle is going to have a ton of benefits. So in my mind, when I look at somebody and I was like, man, that person's really fit. They are healthy, robust. They're pain free. They're strong. They can lift. They can run. They've got a good head on their shoulders and food doesn't dominate their life. It adds to it through nutrition and helping them connect with other people. That right there is my definition of fitness. I hope that

answers your question. The best multi-purposed gym shoe for women. This is from crossjaw96. So the best multi-purpose gym shoe if you're not going to be running is probably something like a Converse Chuck Taylor or a Vans. Something that's really flat, low profile, provides minimal cushioning, right? Because we don't want to be lifting weights on top of pillows. As somebody who used to collect a lot of shoes, like I have dozens of collector Air Jordan sneakers that are worth between $300 and $1,500 that I've worn literally once or twice in my life. And I look back at myself when I was younger now, and I'm like, what the hell were you doing buying those shoes? I thought they were cool.

I thought they looked awesome. I thought that they gave me the drip, yo, swag. But the problem for me is they weren't really great to wear around when I was training clients, and they were even worse when I was training myself because they're so cushioned. And so things like Adidas Ultra Boosts, Nike Air Maxes, all that stuff is incredibly popular. They're great sneakers from an aesthetic standpoint, right? We can all

admit they look cool, but they're not necessarily ideal to lift weights in. And they're probably not that great to run in either. So I think overall, you should get a shoe that's semi-functional. So understanding that you've got the opportunity to lift you want to have a stable you know relatively low cushion profile shoe so like i said vans or converse are my go-to and if you're going to be running i would strongly recommend packing some running shoes in your bag um so that you can switch into those because those like i said chuck Chuck Taylor's and Vance fat and flat and low cushion not ideal for the average person's foot or somebody who's just taking up running okay so G21 Lori asks what are some of the strategies that you use to program

for fat loss in addition to nutrition so obviously with training, I think I actually answered a very similar question to this on the last podcast, but lifestyle wise, right? Cause I do program some lifestyle stuff in. I like all of my clients to take a 10 minute walk after each meal. And this is something that I stole from Stan Efferding and Mark Bell. And I love it because going for that walk helps with digestion. It helps with normalizing insulin after a meal, right? Blood sugar response. It acts to burn calories. For most people, you're going to get some sun exposure and that's going to help with vitamin D. You're going to increase your NEAT by taking more steps. So many amazing things happen. It also gets you into a little bit of a routine where you can work on some mindfulness. Going for a walk and maybe leaving your phone behind

is something that I think all of us should probably do a little bit more of. And so as far as things that I ask my clients to do, that is definitely one of them. And then I actually referenced one of the things I had my clients do in their programming to enhance fat loss earlier, which is incorporating that element of an aerobic warmup. If you can bump that up to 15 to 20 minutes, you can sneak some cardio in that's going to increase your total caloric output quite measurably across the week. And I'm a big fan of doing stuff that doesn't make it seem like you're doing stuff. I think that's really important when you're talking about changing someone's behavior. You want these changes to be noticeable, right? You want them to be tangible enough that people actually want to do them,

but not so noticeable that people feel like they're dominating their life. So little stuff like this can go a really, really long way. And I'm a big fan of simple little wins. All right, next question is from at Ellen Grace Fit. And she says, when recovering from injury, less calories, maintenance, more. What do I do? Less NEAT? And so this is a great question. And I've actually been working really closely with one of my clients who had a total knee replacement or a TKR 150 days ago. And so basically from the moment he got done with his TKR, we implemented a pseudo physical therapy protocol. This is a client who

I've worked with through one joint replacement before. And he trusts me quite a bit. And I work very closely with my friend who is a physical therapist to implement some of these protocols in the comfort of my client's home during COVID-19. We'd had exposure to each other. So this was something he was more comfortable with. And the first thing I had him do was make sure that he was getting adequate protein. So whenever you have an injury, and I know that I'm referencing a surgery, but when you have a surgery and you cut out someone's knee and you cut a massive hole in their leg and then you sew it back up, that's an injury. Cutting someone open qualifies as being injured. So if you have any tissue damage at all, in any capacity, whether it's a sprain,

a strain, a tear, a cut, that requires protein to heal, right? And so for people like us who are resistance training all the time, maybe we are already in need of quite a bit of protein. It's really important to remember that when you're recovering from an injury, right, you still need all of that protein, even if you're not training, maybe not all of it, but quite a bit of it, to help facilitate repair of the tissue that's damaged. Another thing that's really important to remember is recovering from injury requires energy, right? Your body uses energy to do a lot of things, not just exercise. So don't go into this massive deficit when you're injured.

A lot of people think that, you know, oh, I'm going into a deficit because it's inherently anti-inflammatory and that's going to help me heal. That might be true, but I don't think the minimal outcomes or inflammation-related outcomes of a calorie deficit are going to be better for your recovery than eating the amount of food you need. I would recommend focusing on mostly whole, minimally processed foods. I recommend that all the time so it doesn't really change here. But that's something I would really focus on. I wouldn't reduce your NEAT because any type of exercise that promotes blood flow, fluid exchange, that's probably going to help your healing more than it hurts it for most people. So that's something that I would also strongly recommend focusing on not getting rid of. So you know, the question starts less calories remove neat, I would actually

recommend the opposite, I would say eat what you need and try to move as much as you can in ways that don't bother your injury. That's a really powerful tool you have to enhance your performance and promote a more quick, I should say, a more a quicker, more robust return to training. And that's perhaps the most important thing that you can do is get back to doing the stuff you want to do. That's the thing that's the most frustrating about injuries is it knocks us off track. So I definitely wouldn't recommend just straight up abandoning all that stuff. Stick with it and definitely don't drop your calories super duper low.

All right, you guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and you are new, do me a favor, hit subscribe here on iTunes and leave me a five star rating and review. It helps other people find the podcast and it helps me rank higher on the health and fitness charts. If you're following along on Spotify, do the same. And if you're one of my Stitcher or Google Play fans,

again, any subscription helps quite a bit. Do stay tuned. More episodes hopefully coming your way given that I will be inside. But remember, I still run a one-on-one coaching business. I work with a lot of clients online. And this podcast is a small piece of what I do. I want to make sure that when I do bring it to you, it's of the highest quality and I'm

making the best connection with you guys possible. So until next time, keep the questions coming. Stay fit. It's always a good day to be a good person, I like to say. So take that with you and have a good one.