Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 96 - Q&A Quad Dominance, Lat Training + More!

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

In this episode,  coach Danny answers your questions about quad dominance, training the lats and triceps, training splits for hard gainers, and 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: 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 there, everybody. Welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Coach Danny Matrenga, and today we're going to go through some of your questions. I got these questions from Instagram the other day, and I'm excited to break them down with you here. Today will be a quicker episode than Monday's episode, but I hope you enjoy it all the same. So getting right into it. First question comes from Simone McCaffrey, and she asks, how important is it to hit your daily carbs if your protein and calories are relatively on point? And I think the answer to this question is very simple. What is it that you want to accomplish

with your nutrition? Are you trying to get on stage and compete in a bikini or bodybuilding competition? Or are you just trying to lose five pounds, right? And you want to just get started and get the ball rolling on your weight loss journey. And I would say that it's most important with regards to body compositional change that you focus primarily on calories in both instances. And so then the next thing we want to focus on in any diet is protein. And that's why I made the delineation originally or initially that I think we need to be pretty clear about what population we're addressing. Because if you're trying to get on stage from the jump, you need to be very aware of your protein, carbs, and fat intake for multiple reasons. One of them, you are going to diet to an extremely low body fat, male or female,

and you need to know exactly how much fat you need so that you stay, one, calorically where you need to be to lose body fat, fat but to getting enough dietary fat to actually function physiologically because we use dietary fat for quite a number of things and so if you were just looking to lose weight i might say yeah you know hey hit those calories um focus on the protein and not give you too many things to focus on because if you can do those two things with the way most people eat i can almost assuredly assume they're getting enough carbs and enough fat. And, you know, we're really just trying to get the ball rolling and give them something they can stick with because tracking all of your macros meticulously isn't the easiest thing to do in the world.

But if you have a serious body compositional goal or you're going to be competing, the other two macros, carbs and fats, become really, really important to pay attention to. As you get leaner, like I said earlier, essential fat intake is critical because we want to maintain hormone health, skin health, hair health, the health of your heart, the health of your fucking brain, for God's sake. Like, people go crazy into preps. And so you really need to make sure that you are keeping fats within a range that at least keeps you safe and healthy. But then, you know, you also have to monitor carbs because you need those to perform, to recover, to deal with stress, not just the stress of training, but your stress in life. But let's be honest, if you're dieting down to a show, you are going to,

at some point, probably need to be fairly low on your carbohydrates, at least lower than where you're at during your off season. Like I said, unless you zero out fat, and if you zero out fat, you're in a lot of trouble because that is an essential nutrient. So for people who are quite serious, we really want to track all three, if I'm being honest. If you're really just getting started, you can lose quite a bit of weight tracking calories and protein. A lot of times I start clients there if they're just general population because I think that's a great way for them to get a handle on, hey, calories play a role. And my coach says protein is really important, which is fucking true. You just started lifting weights and you just started getting into your fitness journey. Okay. So next question comes from Jacob A. Roth, and he says, squatting and feeling my lower back,

thoughts and ideas. So when we think about the squat, right, we think about it as a lower body movement. It is not just a lower body movement. It is a total body movement, right? When we have the bar on our back and we're stabilizing it with our core or squatting up and down through that range of motion, a lot of different muscles, a lot of different things are coming into play. And so first thing is the upper body. A good squat, you should pull the bar down kind of into your shoulders a little bit, whether you squat high bar or low bar, create stability. Make sure your shoulders are in a safe position. Make sure that your ribs aren't flared so high up that you have no bracing through your core. And then when we get to that midsection, the core, again, creating stability and rigidity is important because that is probably going to be the weak link or I should say the

body part that's most likely to end up in a potentially dangerous position if you reach fatigue or you break form, right? You want to protect your spine when you have a bunch of weight balancing on top of it, duh. And then of course we have our ankle mobility, knee, hip mobility, and our ability to squat through a full range of motion while maintaining balance and maintaining our center of gravity. So it's a total body exercise. But when we feel like, okay, I really feel my back a lot, there's a few things that I like to look at initially. And one of them, of course, is technique. A lot of times you're just having bad technique or you're squatting with poor technique. A lot of people just can't plain squat well. Maybe they're squatting and they're coming way up onto their toes or they're falling way, way, way forward and using too much hip extension because that can definitely be a cause. Or maybe

they can't keep their balance and there's a lot of hip shifting left to right and their core is having a hard time stabilizing. You know, technique errors are big, especially with things like squats, deadlift, and pressing when it comes to experiencing pain. Oh, Coop just did one of his little shakeouts here in the studio. make a big difference? Bracing is huge. And that's using our breath, using our respiratory muscles, our abdominal muscles to create pressure in the abdomen by holding a breath in while we squat down. And when our back is the most exposed, we pressurize the abdomen. We've created a lot of tension and rigidity there to protect the back. A lot of people wear belts to actually enhance their ability to pressurize and create what we call intra-abdominal pressure or IAP. So look at your technique and look at your bracing if you're having pain at any point in your squat. Those are two really, really easy

things that you can do to go, okay, I'm going to take a video from the side of my squat in the back and I'm going to look for some really key checkpoints. Are my heels coming up off the ground? Am I falling too far forward? Am I rounding at the back? Is my chest or are my ribs flared? Am I hyperextending at the top of my squat by squeezing my glutes really hard and throwing my hips forward, right? That can be a problem. That can mean like, hey, every rep I do, I hyperextend my back with weight on my spine. Okay, if your back's getting tight after squatting, that might be something that you can pull from your technique, right? And then of course, bracing, like I said, are you creating tension in your abdomen? Are you bracing and holding it through the entire range of motion? Or are you getting to the bottom of

your squat and just giving this huge exhale and emptying the can and losing all of your tension and then just, boom, all of this weight just comes down, crunching on your back. And this isn't as scary from squatting. Squatting is quite safe. I realize now that I'm using some language that's a little bit, it seems like fear mongering, but like, yo, you can't get to the bottom of your squat and depressurize with a ton of your weight, a ton of weight on your back, like every single rep and get out of there without back pain. And those are the two things that I'm qualified to probably tell you to check on. It could be a legitimate back problem, but you know, for most people, I think that they know how their pain works and it's probably a technique or a bracing issue. Okay. Next question comes from at RX men. He says,

what's your weekly split looking like? I'm currently running power build a little modified power build. Power Build is the program, one of the programs on my website. And so this is a power building program and it focuses on really progressing the key lifts or the key movement patterns like your squat, bench, and dead with some supplemental hypertrophy work. And the way I've modified it is I'm just doing the full program, but I've swapped deads out for hex bar deads. I've, I've swapped the squats out for a split squat. So that's the exercise I'm primarily progressing. And I have swapped the bench press out for dips, weighted

dips. I just got a new squat rack in the garage. And so I wanted to do a little bit more weighted dips. Um, cause it got a really, really nice dip attachment for it. And that's the Rogue Monster Light something. And it has a badass, badass hip thruster pad. Anyway, I'm doing power build. If you guys enjoy the podcast and you're like, hey, I want to do a program and you don't know how to support the podcast and maybe you don't know where to find a program, this is a great way to do just that. There's foundations, there's female physique, and then there's of course power build all on the website, www.coachedannymatranga.com. Transitioning over guys to the next question, best glute workouts for quad dominant people. And this comes from extras desire. Okay. So quad dominance, we're not going to address what that is, what that's all

about. Uh, if that's all about, if that's even real. Suffice to say, some people have a little bit too much development through their quads or they have a lot of sensation in their quads when they train, which could be technique related, could be neurological, could be a lot of different stuff. Some people don't think quad dominance is real. Some people say, oh my God, it's the biggest thing in the world. I'm here to tell you that regardless of the development or the sensation in your quads, we can make some really easy training adjustments to bias the posterior chain or help you better develop the glutes and the hamstrings. And the first thing we have to

consider is, okay, hip extension uses very little quad, like just as a general rule of thumb. Think about the Romanian deadlift, think about 45 degree hip extension, think about hip thrust, hip thrust might actually get a little bit more quad than the other two. But still, we are not going to use a lot of anterior chain legs to go through those movements and perform them with any degree of progression. Like so you talk about 45 degree hip extension, literally pushing into the pad with the glutes and quite a bit of hamstrings.

We talk about RDL, big time hip extension, not a lot of quad. Things that a lot of people do for glutes that have obvious bias towards the anterior chain, squats, Bulgarian split squats, another one. So those two are going to have, they'll have a lot of glute, but they'll have a lot of quad too. So if you're like, hey, I don't want to develop my quads anymore, you should reduce the volume of squatting and split squatting that you do,

and perhaps increase the volume and the bias of your training towards the stuff that's a little bit more selective for the posterior chain. So if you're doing like 10 sets of squats and BSS or Bulgarian split squats a week, and you're doing like eight sets of hip extension work, you might want to do 12 sets of the hip extension stuff. So maybe I do four sets of RDLs, four sets of hip thrusts, four sets of hamstring curls, or 45 degree hip extension, something like that. And then I only do like, you know, six sets of split squats and squats, three of each, something like that. And that could be across a training week. That could be like one session. I don't know how much volume people can handle. Um,

if I'm not working with them directly or making assumptions, right. But that's kind of something that you could do immediately to circumvent the problem of being quote unquote quad dominant. And again, I don't think that that's really something that you should be too worried about. You should just say, hey, those are the things that you want to accomplish developmentally, like the posterior chain matters to you. You can make some very simple adjustments with your training. 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 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. guidelines for a deload week. So in theory, we deload to allow for recovery and resensitization, R&R, recovery from heavy load, that be it at the neurological level, right? The psychological level. So the neurological level being like, oh my God, I want to give my nervous system a chance to recover from having a huge bar on my spine all the time. CNS fatigue might not be a huge issue, but it definitely could take its toll. You can get tired from pounding back fucking pre-workout all the time and just being totally just slammed on caffeine and training super heavy and intense so you can recover neurologically. Psychologically, deloads give you the ability to step away from training and kind of get a little bit hungry for it again if you had a huge high volume training block um i believe it's less

enticing that to continue to just progressively add more and more and more and more volume and never take a break from that you have to step away a little bit to you know almost re-spark or you know relight the spark if if you will, with training. So that's really beneficial. And then we have the physiological, right? Deloads, we generally are trying to, and this is where I'll make my recommendation, with a deload, we're generally trying to reduce training volume, or we're trying to reduce training intensity. And the reason that we're doing both of these things is to promote future gains. So yes, in that deload week, we might not lift as heavy. For powerlifters, a popular thing to focus on is technique work, coming in and just doing

a few sets and really focusing on technique, mobility, core strength, accessory work with a lot less multi-joint compound movements, focusing a little bit maybe more on isolation work and giving your body a break there. And for bodybuilders, it might just be a low volume phase. So something I'll do with my clients when I transition them from one phase to the next is the first phase of the new phase is a low volume technique focused phase. So it's almost a two for one, we dip into that deload by really reducing the volume. But I still give them a chance to kind of acclimate what the exercises go over form and technique stuff with me if they have questions as to what's been prescribed. And then we really ramp things up. And that's where we talked about

two things, recovery and resensitization. And so resensitization is literally giving your body a break so that it becomes a little bit more susceptible or I should say a little bit more responsive to a stimulus because it's not just constantly being told hypertrophy, hypertrophy, hypertrophy, hypertrophy. And that's a concept that I borrowed from Renaissance Periodization and Dr. Mike Isvertale over there when I did their training templates many years ago. Okay, next question is from underscore Lococo. Ideal split for someone trying to gain serious size.

So I would say four or five days a week of hard training, upper and lower, is probably going to be just fine. Again, when you're trying to gain a lot of mass, you definitely can do a ton of volume. But the big things we need to focus on are lifestyle, getting enough food, recovering like a pro, sleeping like a boss, and making sure that the reps and the work that you are doing is of high progressive quality. And that tends to be doable for most people in four days. If you need a little bit more volume, you can add a fifth day. If you're a hard gainer,

I typically recommend staying between four to five days because a lot of times hard gainers actually end up training a little more than they need to and recovering a little less than they need to. So again, these are just recommendations, but I find that four to five days a week is perfect. And I would focus on, again, training a small variety of movements through some, you know, different rep ranges, maybe some in the lower rep range, some at a moderate rep range, some at a higher rep range, but keeping your sessions between 45 to 90 minutes max and training really hard, making a point to have effort, intensity, and proximity to failure present. And that should do the trick. I really think that

it's that simple because the mistakes probably aren't what you're doing in the gym. It probably comes down to lifestyle, maybe moving quite a bit and not replacing adequate calories for whatever your total daily energy expenditure is. Because if you're trying to gain, quote unquote, serious size, you want to make sure that you're getting not just a, you know, calorie surplus here and there, but a consistent, you know, measured calorie surplus every single day. And that's the way that you make it happen. Okay. What does a typical day of meals look like for you? Do you track at all? Yeah. I track protein every day. I track macros a couple of days a week, just eyeballing it. I don't currently have any huge physique or performance goals. Might start ramping that up as we get into summer,

probably here in April, maybe first week of April. So like a week from now, start tracking things pretty seriously so I can look the way I would like to look for the summer. But I start off every day with a shot of espresso and a protein shake and some of the legion greens. That's my breakfast. Um, I don't have a huge appetite in the morning and I usually go right out and train two clients. And then I come back into the house cause you know, that's the best life in the world. And I fire up like two pieces of sprouted grain toast. I'm sorry, four pieces of sprouted grain toast and two, um, eggs. And I do the pastured eggs because they tend to have a little bit more nutrition and I'm super, you know, Sonoma County douche woke nutrition guy, right? For like

a snack in the mid morning, I will have a little bit of beef jerky with something like beet juice and a ginger shot. Cause I love beets and I love the taste of ginger. And then jerky obviously has a little bit of sugar and protein in it. And I start, I tend to have that about one hour before I train in the afternoon. I'll also sometimes with that have some more carbohydrate. But usually I just have my stimulant free pre-workout and that's Legion Pulse. If you want to, you can head over to legion.com, get yourself some Legion Stim-Free Pulse, maybe some whey protein, maybe some multivitamins, and use the code DANNY to save 20% off your first order and

get double points every order after that. That's one of the many ways that, again, just like buying a program, you can support this show and have me keep coming back and answering all your guys' awesome questions. And so usually post-training, I'll have some simple carbohydrates, something easy to get down. Salmon and rice is one that I've been enjoying lately. I'll fire up the Traeger in the evening, and I'll throw some salmon on there, and I'll smoke some salmon. So even though that's a little more fat than I'd like post-workout, I like to keep my post-workout meal pretty low-fat. I've been really vibing the salmon, so I'm making the sacrifice there and having salmon and white rice with a scoop of the Legion Recharge Creatine and L-Carnitine. So that's a big one for me too that I take right there. And then for

dinner, I tend to have usually whatever I want in full transparency. Last night, I spent so much time cleaning out the backyard and the side yard after I got my squat rack delivered, I had a ton of boxes. So I had to load up the truck to go to the dump. Um, and at the, I, I didn't finish with that until like almost eight 15. And so I just ordered DoorDash and I had somebody bring me like a double cheeseburger with garlic fries because I was like, I am so behind on calories today. Um, and I very rarely reward myself. So I wanted to give myself a chance there to get something enjoyable into the system.

All right. And the last question comes from at kimberly.fitness. Workouts that target your lats slash tries more. I retrain more. I retain more water in those areas. So first things first, you are not going to be able to manipulate the way in which your body retains water by training certain tissues. So throw that idea out. If you want to develop your lats and triceps more, they actually function quite well

together. Interestingly enough, Dorian Yates, seven time Mr. Olympia, if I'm not mistaken, one of the best physiques ever, quite possibly my all-time favorite Mr. Olympia, if I'm not mistaken, one of the best physiques ever, quite possibly my all-time favorite Mr. Olympia, actually trained back and triceps together. And he kind of made that famous, but the triceps act to extend the shoulder. It's one of their secondary functions beyond extending the elbow. And so do the lats. So movements like straight arm pull downs, where we actually end up pulling the arm into that extended position. And then we actually, in many cases, go back. If you're using like a rope, uh, beyond the trunk, you go quite, uh, you go into quite a bit of shoulder extension. Uh, you get a lot of lat and tricep doing both of those. So if you're not doing straight arm pull downs, that might be a movement that I would

include. Of course, I like the lat row from N1 education or Kassem Hansen, the Kassem row, whatever you want to call it. It's like a chest-supported lat pulldown, but it looks almost horizontal. It's definitely more aligned with the lats, and you get a really good contraction out of the lats doing that. I've shared that on my Instagram before. Rope extensions are wonderful for triceps. Overhead rope extensions I quite like. To fully develop the tricep, we need

to have a lot of elbow flexion exercises, pressing, and you probably need those elbow flexion exercises to occur with the shoulder in different positions so as to better hit the three different heads of the tricep. But that's how I would do it. Thanks so much to everybody who tuned in. Again, I got you two episodes this week. I want to get you more. The way for me to do that is for the podcast to grow. I stay quite busy in a lot of my other projects, but I love bringing this to you guys. Next week, I'll be sitting down with my good friend Austin talking about his new book. So I'm very much looking forward to that. So you'll probably get another two episodes next week, one featuring a guest again. So that'll be quite nice. I appreciate every single one of you for

listening. Again, if you're listening on iTunes, please leave me a five-star rating and review. Share it to your Instagram story. Share it with a friend. Any sharing helps. Have a great day. Stay fit, stay healthy, stay active.