Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 91-Training to Failure, High Frequency Training, + POKEMON FAVOR

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

In this episode, Danny talks about his new pokemon + football card collection. He also goes into detail and fields questions from the following topics/areas:- His 3 Biggest Sales Tips- Working on strength and endurance concurrently.- Just how close do you have to train to failure to make gains?- The effectiveness of training legs two or more times per week.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:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, Danny Matrenga, 10 year tenured professional. You like that? 10 years as a tenured professional in the health and fitness space. I have a degree, a bunch of certifications, but more importantly, I've worked with a ton of people just like you. I've helped a ton of coaches develop their businesses and feel actualized by working hands-on or online with lots of clients.

And I really appreciate every single one of you being here today, whether you're a hobbyist, an enthusiast, a coach, a fitness fanatic, whatever you fall into, categorically speaking. Thank you for tuning in to my podcast and thank you for subscribing. If you haven't already, be sure to hit that subscribe button. Every subscriber makes a difference. And I am pretty dedicated to bringing you weekly, if not twice weekly episodes, touching on a variety of different topics and answering your questions. So this is a Q&A episode. We're going to do a little bit of housekeeping before we get into that. If you don't want to hear the housekeeping section, feel free to skip ahead to around the five minute mark.

That's where we will start the Q&A. I took last week to lay a little low on the podcast because I was really struggling with some seasonal allergies. I live in California, which is beautiful. It's wonderful. You'll never hear me complain about the weather, but you will hear me complain about the allergies. Man, oh man. I live in a county that is notoriously bad for pollen growth. Beautiful. It's green. There's so many gorgeous trees, apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, acacia, live oak, you name it. All beautiful, but they're all in bloom. So last week, my allergies were bad

and my sinus congestion was bad. And I just wasn't comfortable getting on the podcast and sounding like I was so, so sick because I was like, hey, this is an audio platform. And I pity the fool who has to listen to me sound like I have mashed potatoes shoved up my nose. I could barely, barely talk. So I'm back, loaded up with Flonase and a little bit of Allegra. I feel exponentially better, and I'm excited to bring you this week's episode. I did, however, last week kind of fall down the rabbit hole of, I guess you could call it hype chasing or hype beasting in the Pokemon card collection world. So I'm 25, and I'm very much on social media. And one of the things that's just absolutely

blowing up on Twitter or even Instagram and YouTube are alternative stores of value, like relative to the US dollar, relative to conventional securities like stocks. Alternative stores of value are super popular for our generation. And I think a lot of that is multifactorial. One being, of course, we aren't going to, at this stage of the game, be able to enter into the housing market that people got into 30, 40, 50 years ago, where they got massive returns on real estate. In California, at least, if you're not making at least $100,000, you're probably not a homeowner, period, end of story. Real estate prices here are insane. My friend is a realtor. We just

played nine holes of golf. And he told me that he had a client put in an offer, $96,000 above asking on a three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house with half an acre. And this offer was for $900,000. And they still got outbid. That's 100 grand over asking. So crazy competitive. People aren't going to make nearly the amount of money in real estate that maybe their parents or their grandparents did. Student loan debt's crazy. We're living in this weird, potentially bubble economy right now. Things are crazy. And I think you see a lot of young people looking into alternative stores of value like cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. I definitely have some of that stuff. I'm much more brick and mortar old school.

I'm an ETF guy. I'm an index fund guy. That's what I'm into. But Pokemon is something that I loved growing up as a kid. It's something that I got super duper into. And so my friend and I, my friend Matt and I went out last weekend, or actually last week during the week after we played a little golf. And we said, hey, you think we can find some Pokemon cards? Everybody's all over it. It'd be hella fun to open some packs after watching some people open up on YouTube. And so we did. We went out.

We got some packs. We got some Pokemon cards. We got some football cards. And we just had a blast. It was a ton of fun. They're not worth much. I think the most valuable card I pulled was like worth currently like 60 bucks, which, you know, you can spit on that these days, but it was a really fun process. We had an absolute blast. It was, it was totally cool. It was totally fun. It's definitely something

that I'll probably keep doing. I just had to do a little housekeeping here to let you guys know what exactly it is that I've been up to. And that's of course, on top of training my clients in person, working with my online clients who are doing fantastic. This group of online clients, I have to say, everybody's different. Every roster I've had looks different. I've worked with people for quite some time. So, you know, people hang around, other people drop off. But this group is unbelievable. I swear, I have never worked with a group of people that has gotten results this quickly, that has been this communicative. I'm just jacked. I think about it all the time. Online coaching is quite difficult for coaches in general. If you haven't

coached people in person, it's not easy. I've definitely gotten better with it because I'm going into my fifth year of doing it. I'm quite experienced with it. I have some great systems, but I have to give every client credit for getting these results. I'm, I'm kind of the, uh, I aim the gun, they load it, they pull the trigger. Um, and all of them are doing absolutely fantastic. So if you are somebody who's looking to improve your health and fitness, maybe your strength, maybe your performance, maybe your aesthetics, consider applying for the coaching program. I only have a few spots left, but this is a team you want to be on. I couldn't be any happier with how everybody's doing. It makes my job so easy,

so awesome. Getting back into the podcast and going to dive here into the Q&A section. So first question comes from Abigail Nadner, and she says, what are some sales tips for somebody working in a commercial gym? So I feel particularly, I guess you could say, qualified to answer this question. I actually started my career in a commercial gym at a 24-hour fitness. I was a trainer for two years, then I moved into the management department where I hired trainers and taught them the ins and outs of pretty much everything you need to know about training in that environment, especially sales. And this is something we're going to talk about a ton in the upcoming mentorship program. So if you are a new trainer, if you're somebody who

wants to build your business, develop your business, expand your reach, move into the online space, maybe you're working at a corporate gym, maybe you're working at a studio. This mentorship incorporates all that stuff because I've done it all. And I find that the sales stuff seems to be fairly universal. The first thing you have to do is be comfortable selling, period. End of fucking story. That's that. Pardon my French.

But if you don't believe in what you're selling, and this goes for anything because everything you do in life is one, in my opinion, one way, in one way, shape or form, some form of selling. But if you cannot sell people on improving their health, if you're not confident communicating to people why this stuff is important and why it's worthy of their financial investment, their time investment, their commitment, you're probably not going to be a great trainer. And again, I always ask trainers this question, first and foremost, how can you possibly be uncomfortable pointing somebody in a direction that will improve their health, will improve their quality of life, will improve their longevity, probably improve their self-image, their relationships, everything. Fitness permeates everything that you do.

have kids, you might be improving the health of their kids for generations to come. One parent getting in shape can literally change the trajectory of an entire family who's maybe struggled with this. And so you're not selling any shitty lemon car. You're not selling fake Pokemon cards. You're not scamming people. If you are selling people an honest product and you can deliver and you're a good coach and you know that, right? This shouldn't be a barrier. You should not be afraid to sell. That's step one. Step two, or I guess that's tip number one. Learn how to be confident with what it is you're selling. Tip two, try to keep like two, maybe three tips here. Try to keep it short, sweet. Tip two, practice this shit. Sales is a skill. Communicating to people from different walks of life who respond to different styles of communication is important.

Good salespeople are able to mirror the people that they're selling. They're able to meet them where they're at and they're able to communicate with them in a way that makes them, one, feel comfortable, allows them to feel like they're in control of the situation, and allows them to feel like they've organically arrived at the solution that, hey, enrolling or signing up with this coach really is the best thing for me to do. And practice will allow you to end up at that destination with different people who have different goals in different situations. So step or tip one, don't be afraid of selling. Tip two, practice that shit and be okay with hearing no. And I think my last tip with regards to sales,

and this is something that I think it might be a little bit more esoteric or are difficult to understand, and that's get comfortable connecting with people on non-fitness stuff when you do consultations. People don't necessarily buy stuff because they think that person knows everything and they think that that person knows what they need to get in shape. That's certainly a piece of it, but people really like to buy from who they like and who they

trust. So if you can connect with people in a variety of different ways, non-fitness specific, still making it about them, right? That's going to really help your chances of helping connect them with what you're interested in, fitness. For example, you get a guy in there, he's got back pain, maybe he's a mechanic, and he says, oh man, my back's just trashed from working on all these cars, and I know I need to lose weight. And maybe you know quite a bit about cars, or maybe you enjoy cars. That's a great opportunity for you and that person to connect about something non-fitness and show them, hey, I'm a non-threatening human being. I'm not some super intimidating personal trainer who's going to make you cut carbs and fucking do burpees until you puke because that is what a lot of people think of personal training. Think about this.

Think about how personal trainers are portrayed in media. They're like drill sergeants who either scream at you until you puke or they're having sex with your wife when you're not paying attention. We don't have a good rap. So humanize yourself, connect with people. Those are some tips that I think will go a really long way. Now, if you want some more advanced strategies and you really want to get into the weeds, click the link in the show notes and join the mentorship mailing list. I'm putting this together here. It's been about three months since I started, starting filming very shortly. I'm very excited about this project. I think it's going to be a wonderful course.

We are going to touch on a ton of different stuff, from sales to business acumen to the legality stuff to the finance stuff, all the way through program design, functional anatomy. It's going to be really, really cool. I think you guys will get a ton of value about it. It's going to be very competitively priced, non-mastermind vibey, non-salesy. to be very competitively priced, non-mastermind vibey, non-salesy. It won't be some entry-level thing that's then followed by some massive investment. It's going to be extremely straightforward, extremely valuable design for trainers in their first zero to 24 months in the profession to help kind of combat that really aggressive turnover rate. We know that between 80 and 90 trainers don't even

make it through their first year. And I think it's because they're not making it through these really, really foundational pieces. They're not grasping that stuff. And this mentorship is built to drill that shit into your head so that you become a master of the basics and the fundamentals, whether it's of communication, writing, content creation, selling, or business acumen, this is going to have it all. This is going to give you the best foundation I think possible. And I've done this with fucking hundreds of trainers. Some of my best friends, some of my favorite people in my life are people that I've met

in my work who I've helped become successful trainers. And now we just sit back, enjoy life, golf, train when we feel like it. become successful trainers. And now we just sit back, enjoy life, golf, train when we feel like it. It's amazing. And it's all a very, very simple, organic, natural growth process of understanding how to do this job like a professional with some guidance, with some skills and do. And then once you have that, you can really unlock whatever you want. If you want to be an online coach, you can do that. If you want to be the best athletic trainer or I should say sports performance coach in your area, this will help you do that. If you are at a big box gym and you just want to do the most sessions out of all the other trainers and you're really new, that's great too. This is very universal stuff. I think it's going to be

very helpful. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply 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. Next question from Dylan Lang PT. He says, how to program running into a two to three day a week powerlifting program. So this feels like an alley-oop, kind of an easy question,

but hey, let's break it down. If you're lifting three to four days a week, heavy, okay, well, he says two to three, heavy because it's a powerlifting program, high central nervous system fatigue, a lot of spinal loading. That's going to probably mean we want to separate these sessions by at least a day. Because one, if you're going to do three times a week, you don't want to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or I'm sorry, you don't want to do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, take three days off. You might instead do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and take Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday on. Those would be the days that I would run. I would incorporate your endurance work or your aerobic work into the days that you're not doing heavy lifting and keep it low enough threshold that it doesn't pound you. Right. But that might actually be a nice way to promote recovery, increase caloric expenditure, enhance well-being, improve aerobic health whilst not inhibiting your ability to develop power. If you go do a bunch of fucking aerobic training early in the morning and then you have heavy squats later in the day, that might be problematic. So I would say

keep your endurance training on the days that you don't do your high performance work in the gym. That's what I recommend for a lot of different types of cardiovascular training, whether it's upper end like VO2 max work, like sprint work on an assault bike, or it's sprinting on a track, which I wouldn't call aerobic work. That's more strength, speed, power development stuff, or low intensity, steady state cardio even like going on a walk or a jog. If we can try to move these things as far away from our training sessions as possible so that we can allow optimal time for recovery from our anaerobic work whilst not allowing our aerobic or conditioning or speed work to get in the way, that is awesome because all this

stuff has a impact on your recovery. Now, the more advanced or I should say the faster the cardio you're doing, if you are doing sprints, that is going to torch you. You can't do a sprint training day in between every single powerlifting day on a two to three time a week program. Meaning if you're deadlifting Monday, and that's the big focus, you're squatting Wednesday, and that's the big focus. You cannot be sprinting Tuesday and Thursday. You're going to be trashed. Sprinting is maximal effort, but you could go on a walk. You could go on a light jog. You could ride the assault bike at a low intensity. All that stuff is definitely on the table. And that's

actually how I crafted my foundations program. It's a hybrid program. I call it non-shitty CrossFit. It's basically the incorporation of low to moderate aerobic development work, some strength work, and a lot of stability stuff. I think it's kind of filling the gaps in a lot of non-traditional athletic programming, like powerlifting, bodybuilding. If you've been doing that stuff for a really long time and you're noticing like, oh man, you know, my body just kind of moves like shit. I feel like shit. I know I should be in better shape. I get out of shape going up the stairs. I look great, but I could feel a little bit better. This is kind of how I tailored that

program to fill in those gaps. It's 12 weeks. You can run it one time, improve your aerobic threshold. You'll definitely improve your stability. There's a ton of core work in there as well. It's kind of designed as a fill in the gaps. If you're just, if you've gotten to a point where you're like kind of sick with conventional bodybuilding and powerlifting stuff, run this for 12 weeks. I think you'll like it quite a bit, but that's kind of how I designed this. And that's only four days a week. So it gives you plenty of opportunity to recover there. Next question is from at Kawai Katrina. And she asks, to grow muscle, does every set have to be to failure? So if you want to build muscle, and you train every set to

failure, you will be well on your way to doing that because the proximity to failure seems to be the one consistent thing we can identify across all rep ranges and training styles as being a potentiator of hypertrophy, if you will. So when I took my NASM certification like a decade ago, they used to have this handy dandy little table. One to five reps builds strength. Six to 12 reps builds hypertrophy. 12 to 20 reps is for endurance. Anything above 30 is garbage. And that was like the paradigm for like 90% of the fitness industry. You want to build muscle, you got to do six to 12 reps. That has been debunked by a variety of different studies, checking on a variety of different training protocols from blood flow restriction training to high rep training to low rep training. We know there's different mechanisms

that drive muscle hypertrophy, whether it's metabolic stress, mechanical tension, muscle damage. And what these different things have in common is if you take all of the different rep ranges and you do a set of 30 bicep curls close to failure, like 30 is killing you. You do a set of bicep curls, 12 reps close to failure, 12 is killing you, five reps, five is killing you. You will probably be potentiating hypertrophy. And this is the case for all exercises across all rep ranges. So what I like to do is I like to tell my clients this, if our goal is hypertrophy, we want to train close to failure. And we want to train at a variety of rep ranges because we have a variety of muscle

fiber types. But also, some exercises lend themselves better to higher rep ranges. I mentioned curls. Think about rope extensions for triceps or lateral raises. Do you really want to do sets of five lateral raises? Do you really want to do sets of five bicep curls or sets of five rope extensions? I'm not saying that stuff doesn't work, but when we talk about the joints we're using, we talk about the tissues, do you want to have to use a dumbbell or a cable heavy enough to have a set of five laterals be hard? Or do you think that that opens the door for potential issues around the shoulder girdle, right? Because that joint is highly mobile, but it's also quite sensitive if you train like a fucking idiot. So that might be

a place where we go, hey, we're still going to train close to failure, but we're going to train at a higher rep range so we can use lighter weights and have a better execution of the exercise. But maybe squatting and deadlifting, you keep at a lower rep range because it's something that you can do with quite a bit of weight. You feel quite stable. You're using big, strong musculature. You've got a lot of ability to recruit your core to stabilize. So again, it's more about proximity to failure, I would say, than it is going to failure and finding a way to be close to failure across different rep ranges and then selecting exercises that lend themselves well to training in those rep ranges. It's not rocket science. All right, next question from AFSU

underscore Kushmax. Not sure this is a weed account, but underscore Kush Max is like the best fucking backend handle I've ever seen. And he asks, is it, or they ask non-discriminate profile picture. Is it okay to train legs three times a week? Absolutely. My female physique program on my website kind of revolves around a three time per week frequency for developing the lower body musculature. That's something women really like to do. There's two days that focus on the posterior chain, the glutes and hams,

and then right in the middle is a day that focuses on the quads. And I find that if you equate for volume and you don't just go complete berserk maniac with how you train and you optimize for recovery, you can absolutely train the lower body three times per week. Think about Olympic weightlifters. They do squats, cleans, all that shit almost every day. And they do it pretty heavy. Now, they're tremendously capable of recovering from that because they do it all the time. Their recovery pathways are hyper attuned to that type of shit. I get it. But look, if you want to develop musculature, frequency is one of the things that we can really lean into. And I like the frequency for lower body training. We have a lot of different movement patterns. We have our squats. We have our hinges. We have our

lunges. We have hip extension movements like RDLs. We have hip extension movements like hip thrusts that are more glute dominant. We have single leg work. We have, I think I said that already when I said unilateral, but we have banded work for glutes, which is more of a metabolic stress type of thing, but you might get something from that. We have a lot of different things we can pull on and play with. I wouldn't have you do like squats and deadlifts Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but maybe Monday you do heavier work, squatting and deadlifting. Maybe Tuesday you focus more on unilateral work and that's when you incorporate lunges and split squats and single leg hip thrusts. And then again, this is assuming you're a woman and that it's not assuming you're a woman, I should say. It's assuming that you want to develop the entirety of your lower body.

And then maybe Friday you focus more on hyper stable machine work where you can get a high output like leg extension, leg press, machine hip thrust, lying hamstring curl. Almost all this shit is on the table. There's such a variety and a kind of expansive volume of lower body training that I think training your lower half three times per week, so long as you have adequate exercise variety, so you don't have too much competition with recovery, you space it out appropriately, and you fine tune your lifestyle to promote recovering from training three times a week, you can be fine. And I built a whole program around this because I've done it with clients. I think it can be done. It's typically what I do for my online clients who want to develop their lower body. A lot of times we'll go upper, lower, upper, lower total, where we'll do kind of a more CNS dominant light

day where we go a little bit heavier. That would be the first lower body day, an upper body day. The second lower body day would be a little bit more volume based than another upper body day. And then that total body day is just identifying, okay, did you want to really prioritize the glutes? If so, that will be the lower body component of the total body day. Did you want to prioritize the quads? If so, that will be the lower body component of the total body day, and then borrowing whatever they wanted to focus on. So I call that fifth day a specialization day. And that's one of the benefits of having a coach put things together, is they can really fine tune for that. You can do that yourself too, if you like. All right, guys, last question from at smitry91. And that is how to add more thickness and width to the back. So talking about development of the back muscles. So when we

talk about that, we're really talking about several different muscles. We're talking about the lats. Those are the big muscles that contribute most of the width. We're talking about the trapezius, the upper, mid, and lower fibers of the traps, the posterior deltoids, the rhomboids, to a lesser extent, some of the musculature of the rotator cuff and the teres, which you can't see that well on most people, if at all. You have to be stupid lean and stupid jacked. So we'll talk mostly about the rhomboids, rear delts, traps, and lats. If you want to develop your back's width, that V taper, that noticeable, holy crap, you look like an upside down Dorito, you're so wide. That's going to be a lot of development of the lats. And we can train those with movements like lat pulldowns. If you follow me on Instagram,

you'll see that I do some lat training that I got from Kassem Hansen or Kassem Hansen over at N1 Education. They got the best shit for lats. And I know I plug them on this all the time, but I'm trying to be better about plugging people because earlier in the week, if you follow me on Instagram again, you saw that somebody's just blatantly ripping off my posts. This shit's been happening a lot. It bothers me. And I want to give credit where it's due because I haven't been the best at that either. And those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Now, I'm not stealing anybody's shit like this one fool, but Tassim Hansen, N1 Education, amazing, amazing stuff for lat training. If you want to hammer your lats and hit them and go, oh my God, I felt like I've never trained lats before.

That's a great way to do it. They have awesome material for that. That's how you build that quote unquote width. So when we talk about depth or density or thickness of the back, we have the opportunity to develop those lats still, right? But we want to hit those upper traps, lower traps, rear delts, rhomboids, that upper back. And you can do that so many different ways. A lot of the great bodybuilders often say to build a great back, you have to pull from multiple different angles. And I think that's still quite true. But when we talk about the upper traps, we usually talk about upward rotation, shrugging movements, Y raises, things like that

can work. The upper traps, the lower traps, we talk often about things like extension, thoracic extension, okay? But you can also do things like cable rows where we have to stabilize and keep a neutral spine. So we talk about rhomboids, we're talking mostly about scapular retraction, and you get a lot of that on face pulls. You also get a lot of external rotation, which is a secondary function of the rear delt. So if you want to build thickness and width in your back, like to distill this down in the simplest way possible, pull from a lot of different angles, pull from a lot of different rep ranges, pull close to failure, face pulls, band pull aparts, rear delt work, straight arm pull downs, lap pull downs, cable rows, one arm rows, metals, meadows, rows, all the N1 stuff. Variety tends to work quite well with back. Find what

works for you. Train it close to failure. Train from a variety of angles. That is it. All right, guys. Hey, thank you so much for tuning in. It's Monday at 8.07 here on the 1st of March. I'm about to jump into a series of sessions here. Cooper, my pup, is getting a haircut. Life is good. I do appreciate you guys being patient is good. I do appreciate you guys being patient with me. I wanted to get you an episode last week so bad, but nobody on this earth deserved to sit through listening to me give a podcast while I sounded like I was congested. The US government is probably going to hit me up about recording a podcast when I have allergies just so they can use it to fucking torture people and get information out of them

because I don't like the way my voice sounds anyway, but when I'm congested, oh my God, it's not worth it. So I hope you guys have an amazing week. I'm going to record again tomorrow. I'm going to touch a little bit more on some stuff that I'm working on, answer some more questions. But again, thank you guys so, so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed it, please share this to your Instagram story, hit that subscribe button, leave me a five-star rating and review on itunes every little bit helps i never cease to be amazed by the amount of nice things you all say about the podcast so more to come stay strong keep lifting share the love have a great week you