Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 98 - Are BCAA's, Fat Burners, and BFR a SCAM + Q&A

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

In this episode, we talk about some hot topics in the supplement world of the fitness industry. Is it worth purchasing fat burners or BCAA supplementation? Is blood flow restriction training effective? Then we dive into some of your questions in this IN DEPTH podcast! Enjoy!---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:BCAA’s Discussion! Is BCAA supplementation good or bad?  5:06Fat Burners, yay or nay? Maybe a ‘natural’ fat burner?  14:01Blood Flow Resistance Training!  20:19“Talk about sneaker collection? I get a vibe you are a collector!”  28:36“If I experience no effects from caffeine, will a pre-workout do anything for me?”  31:58“Flat (back) bench press or arched bench press?”  32:49“How old are you and how old is Coop?”  34:05“How often should I change my program?”  34:52“I am a 58 year old female doing strength 5 times a week, but I love spin. Will this affect my gains if I do it twice a week?”  36:03“Will you see a massive difference working out 4 times a week versus 6 times a week?”  37:05“Opinion on the ‘vacuum’ ab exercise?”  37:58Support the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast, your one-stop shop for all your fitness, nutrition, and performance questions. Today we're going to dive into a few topics that I've really railed against publicly, and that is BCAA consumption, the utilization of fat burner supplements as a means to reduce body fat, and blood flow restriction or occlusion training. And I just want to make sure that I give you guys the most nuanced perspective possible off of social media. These are topics I get a lot of questions about. I think that they're all things worthy of discussing in deeper, more meaningful

ways. And I'm also going to get to a Q&A towards the end of the episode. So this will be a fairly long episode, certainly longer than we've been having. But I hope you guys enjoy and I would love some feedback when you finish listening. Before we dive into our discussion about fat burners, blood flow restriction, BCAAs, and some of the other stuff, there is a little housekeeping that I would like to do. First, I want to remind you guys that the personal trainer mentorship program that I am putting together is still very much underway. I'm doing the best that I can to make sure that this is affordable, it is accessible, and it is something that you can implement whether you coach people in person, coach people online, or you do something similar to what I do where you work in a more hybrid

model. I think recently, the COVID-19 pandemic really shook our industry in a way that none of us were particularly prepared for. And one of the elements I really built into this course is just having discussion with coaches about, you know, how to kind of build yourself a moat, if you will, how to protect your business by implementing other forms of revenue than just one-on-one personal training. And I resonate a lot with people who like to coach in person because I still like to coach quite a bit in person. Not everybody wants to exclusively be an online coach. If you want to coach in person, this has something for you. If you exclusively want to coach online, this has something for you.

If you want to do something more similar to a hybrid model, like what I do, this has something for you. And I'm working my way through the course PowerPoint so that you guys will have a legitimate course to coincide with the mentorship. So do be patient. That is on its way. I'm thinking a summer or late summer release. Speaking of which, summer really is right around the corner. I just noticed today, today's April 13th at the time of recording this, that we're like not even 18 days now. We're getting towards the end of April or the middle of April. And I just noticed my birthday is less than a month away and my birthday's in May and it's always kind of right on the cusp of what looks a lot like summer out here in California. So I have ramped up my training.

I'm currently running my power build program with a few modifications made so I can train out of my gym. But just a reminder, guys, if you want to support me, if you want to support the podcast, if you like the work that I do, whether it's the tweets that I put out, the infographics on my Instagram, the questions I answer, one of the best ways you can support me and what I'm doing is by buying a program. And that might also help you get in shape for summer. So you can head over to my website, www.coachdannymatranga.com and grab yourself a program there. We've got female physique, which is designed to be a hypertrophy and aesthetics based program for women, particularly developing muscles that when I've

coached girls, when I talk to them, they're all about developing glutes, hamstrings, upper back, shoulders, symmetry, um, and, and making training enjoyable. And that's the way that program was designed. Power Build is much more unisex in that it kind of features hypertrophy work that's a little bit more global and less what I would call focused on some of those areas that tend to be a little bit more popular with women. And Foundations, again, also a great program for summer, very much an athletic-based program. You're going to get great aesthetics work. There's a block designed specifically for aesthetics that you can actually pick the muscle groups you want to develop, but that's a little

bit more well-rounded. And lastly, guys, again, another way you can support the podcast is heading over to legion.com and trying out some of their fantastic sports nutrition supplements. I'm not a huge supplement guy myself. We're going to talk a lot about some of the supplements that I don't like. And full disclosure, Legion actually does sell a fat burning product, although I think it's quite a bit different, quote unquote, fat burning product than what you'll see conventionally on the market. So when you hear me talk about that today, I'm not going to make reference to Legion's product because I don't think it's particularly bad relative to the rest of the industry. But the Legion products I do take and I take quite regularly are the Legion Genesis, which are the greens, Legion's Whey Plus, which I love as a

protein. And I love the pre-workout Pulse and the Pulse Stem Free, which I take on the days I have coffee. So if you want to support the show, you can head over to legion.com, buy some sports nutrition supplements and use the code Danny at checkout to save 20% off your first order and get double points after that. And again, I don't get paid in cash for saying this. I just get my supplements taken care of. I really do think that this is a fantastic company and I love the educational content that they put out as well. So you'd be supporting me and you'd also be supporting Legion. But hey, let's go ahead and get into this. And we're going to open up with a discussion about BCAAs or branched chained amino acids. And you have seen me on my Instagram, probably on YouTube,

on podcasts that I've been featured on or on this podcast here, rail against BCAA. So let's first break down what BCAAs are. And BCAA is an acronym for branch-chained amino acid. And branch-chained simply refers to the unique molecular structure of these particular amino acids. And the BCAAs are leucine, or L-leucine, isoleucine, and valine. All three of those play a particularly impactful role on the development of skeletal muscle. The most important of the trio is L-leucine, which seems to, at least in the literature, be the most impactful of any amino acid as it pertains to muscle growth. So if muscle growth was your only goal, could you theoretically supplement with just leucine? Well, not quite, because isoleucine and valine do play a role in how we actually metabolize and optimize our usage of

the entire BCAA, or all three of the BCAAs, I should say. Now, do I think that the branch-chained amino acids are bad? No, I actually think they're great. Like I said, you need them to build muscle. No, I actually think they're great. Like I said, you need them to build muscle. But BCAA supplements, on the other hand, I think are a waste of money 99 out of 100 times. And here's why. In the research where we see studies that show BCAAs to have an impactful, meaningful, really what we would call statistically significant impact on muscle growth, those populations are not eating adequate dietary protein. And remember, when you eat protein, you get amino acids. Do

you necessarily get a lot of BCAAs? That more so depends on the type of protein you eat. We often talk on this podcast about the difference between plant and animal protein. And if you only ate plant protein, you would probably get much less of the BCAAs than if you only ate animal protein, because animal proteins tend to be higher in BCAAs, specifically leucine. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we talk down the road here in a minute about populations that might actually benefit from BCAA supplementation. But I think when we look at the literature, we can say, these work when people don't eat enough protein. How well do they work when people do eat enough protein? And I think that's very easy to overlook, right? It's very easy to go, well, you know, hey, these work, but think about the population that's going to be supplementing

with this stuff. I think it's going to be supplementing with this stuff. I think it's going to be mostly physique-oriented individuals, probably people who already have a decent idea of what their diet looks like. And in all likelihood, they're probably individuals who have all the macronutrients, protein, carbs, fats, alcohol, of all of them, the one that they're almost assuredly going to get enough of is protein. And maybe they get that through dietary protein supplementation in the form of, like, you know, whey protein. Either way, it's very difficult to say that the average resistance training adult who eats enough protein has any reason to take BCAAs besides the fact that they like to drink

them. Some people will argue that supplementing with BCAAs on top of eating adequate dietary protein can actually lead to some neurological problems with the way in which we take tryptophan in in the brain, because there's some competition that happens there, if I remember correctly. I could be wrong. But I do think that they're relatively innocuous. And what innocuous means is that they're probably not likely to cause you any problems, but they will cost you money. And I talk about finances a lot. This is opportunity cost. If you spend $30 on 30 servings of BCAAs and take a scoop a day, it's not just that you're wasting $30 on BCAAs or not wasting it. Maybe you like drinking them, but that's $30 that you could

spend elsewhere. Maybe that's $30 you could, like I said earlier in the episode, spend on a program that would get you better gains. Maybe that's $30 that you could spend on a supplement that might be more impactful for your situation. But in all likelihood, if you're eating adequate dietary protein, there's really no need to supplement with BCAAs. Now, there are some populations that might do well. One of them are just people who generally do not get enough protein and don't like eating protein. Supplemental branch-chained amino acids, as the literature has shown, would be beneficial for those population, more so than those who do get enough adequate dietary protein. However, they would be like tertiary on the list of supplements that I would recommend,

because if you didn't get adequate dietary protein, the first supplement I would recommend isn't a branched-chained amino acid supplement that only yields three of the 20 amino acids. I would recommend an entire protein powder that has protein in its most complete form because remember, proteins are made from amino acids. All of our quote-unquote macronutrients are made up of smaller subcomponents, right? So protein is made of amino acids. Carbohydrate, glycogen, for example, in the human body, is made up of fat or dietary carbohydrate, you wouldn't only want to fuel up with the subcomponents. You would want to fill up with the most nutritious form. So whole foods first and then probably a protein shake next. is essential amino acids, which are amino acid supplements that give you a much more complete spectrum of amino acids. They give you all of the essential amino acids. Essential amino acids, of course, are those that we cannot synthesize ourselves. Not all of the amino acids that we take in in our diet are essential. Some of them are non-essential. We do make some ourselves, but that does not mean that we make enough. So a full spectrum protein is probably the best bet. The other population that I think is particularly

probably going to get the best results from branched-chain amino acid supplementation independently is vegans or vegetarians because plant-based protein options can be a little low in leucine, isoleucine, and valine. But even then, I would recommend first essential amino acids or a plant-based protein powder. Now, one note on plant-based protein powders. It is most likely in your best interest to get a blend of proteins for reasons that I mentioned earlier. Plant proteins in general tend to be relatively lower on some of these important amino acids compared to animal proteins. And if you only get your plant proteins from one source, you will get a very consistent amino acid profile.

And there may be a chance that you aren't getting adequate intakes of all of the amino acids. So blending something like hemp, brown rice, pea, pumpkin, all of these different types of proteins, even potato, they make potato protein now, would probably be better than just taking one form of a plant-based protein in. So really, in truth, no matter how hard I look, or no matter how much I work to try to find a way in which I can say, yeah, BCAAs do have some utility, I usually end up boiling it down to the most utility is for populations that don't eat adequate protein or eat a plant-based or vegetarian diet. They will likely not hurt you. If you take a supplement, I'll name drop here, like amino energy from optimum nutrition as a low stimulant pre-workout

with some beta alanine in it again, and that's an essential amino acid anyway, I think that that's probably fine. I don't think that's going to hurt you. But we want to be very clear. And I want to make sure that you guys hear me give you my reasons for actively shitting on these things on the internet, because a lot of people make a lot of claims without a lot of evidence. And I used to take supplemental branched chain amino acids when I first started training. If you went on bodybuilding.com, one of the top three supplements on there, it was always optimum nutrition, gold standard way. And then right behind it was Syvation's Extend. And Extend was like the original branched chain amino acid supplement. It came in a billion flavors. And it was always up towards the top because you wanted

to constantly be feeding your muscles leucine, isoleucine, and valine to keep your mTOR and muscle protein synthesis maxed out so you could get as big as possible. And BCAAs are cheap to produce, so the supplement industry and its infinite douchebaggery, assholery, shysteriness, duped a bunch of people, including myself, into spending a lot of money on BCAAs only for the literature to become robust enough one day that we would go, oh, yeah, kind of fuck that one up. And so I want you guys to learn from my mistakes. I don't want you guys to waste money on supplements that I've wasted money on. And I'm certainly not going to harp on anybody who's fallen prey to the supplement industry because I've done it quite a bit myself. Now, talking a little bit more in depth about another

supplement here, and that's going to be fat burners. And I think that one of the things we should talk about before we do that is the nomenclature, the actual words we use when we label products. And so some of the marketing that goes into supplementation. Fat burning supplements, in most cases, are stimulants and appetite suppressants. I think a more proper terminology for these would be calorie deficit enablers would be like a better word or verbiage because one of the things you'll find in most fat burners are stimulants, which can increase basal metabolic rate and reduce exercise-induced fatigue. So if you take a quote-unquote fat-burning supplement with

a lot of stimulants in it, and we'll talk more about why we might want to be careful about that, you're likely to improve your exercise performance compared to a placebo because you've got caffeine. Now, if there are herbs, if there are natural compounds in there that also have an appetite suppressing effect. That might not necessarily be a bad thing as well, because it might help you adhere to a calorie deficit. Some fat burners include actually beneficial ingredients or things that might be a little bit more robust, but most combine a lot of stimulants with a lot of appetite suppressing agents and many stimulants to suppress your appetite anyway. Nicotine being one that comes to mind. So that being said, if we look at these more of as a supplement that has the ability to enhance our exercise performance

mildly and help us maintain our appetite mildly, we might not call them fat burners because the implication there is if I take this pill, it is going to independently and directly help me lose fat when in fact it's doing such things very much indirectly through a lot of different pathways like making exercise easier and making not eating a little bit easier. So that's one of my biggest gripes is just in the way in which these are marketed. They can help, but they don't often help in a measurable way. And they can also be really expensive. So how you go about implementing these into your supplement protocol is going to be dependent on a lot of those things.

But I think for most people, they're almost entirely unnecessary because appetite suppression can be gamed through things like eating more protein, which is always a good idea when you're on a diet, and eating more vegetables, which is always a good idea when you're on a diet. Because when you reduce your intake of calories, you'll likely reduce your intake of nutrition. And that if you eat less carbs, you will probably get less of the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients that we get from carbohydrate-rich foods. If you reduce fat, if you reduce protein, you get the point. So additional vegetable intake is a great way to bolster your micronutrient intake throughout the day. And it also is highly

appetite-suppressing with almost no caloric impact. So fat burners and branched-chain amino acids, I think, are very cheap to produce. At face value, if you don't know a lot about physiology and you don't know a lot about, you know, hey, opportunity costs, what supplements am I not taking to take these supplements, for example, I think that we're missing the ball. So let me give you some alternatives, right, that I think if you are somebody who's taking these or you're somebody who's already investing in their supplement protocol, let me give you some alternatives. We'll start with alternatives for fat burners. So we've already discussed that in most cases, these are going to work indirectly to enhance fat loss

through exercise output and through appetite reduction. So are there other indirect pathways that can enhance fat loss? There are, and there's one that always comes to mind, and you probably know what it is if you've heard me talk about this at all, and that's sleep. Sleep is one of the best ways that we can regulate appetite, regulate our blood sugar, build muscle, also lose fat, and enhance our quality of life, well-being, and mental health. A lot of people are criminally underslept, and they use stimulants as a way to kind of sweep that under the rug, and that doesn't pay dividends in the long run. You want to get good sleep. And there are some supplements that can help, not for everybody.

And again, I'm not a doctor, so don't take anything I've said up until this point or anything I will say seriously whatsoever. But there are a few supplements that I have found anecdotally help me improve my sleep. One of them is magnesium. And magnesium is something that I have found anecdotally help me improve my sleep. One of them is magnesium. And magnesium is something that people have a tendency to be deficient in anyway, and it helps with a lot of different things, not just sleep. But I like to take 200 milligrams of magnesium with 5 to 10 milligrams of melatonin about 90 to 120 minutes prior to my ideal bedtime. And I don't take melatonin every day, but I will take something like melatonin right around the time. I take it around one to two hours before my ideal

bedtime. And I find that that helps set my circadian clock. If I stayed up way too late one night or, you know, I was traveling, I will often take melatonin about two hours before my desired new bedtime. And it helps me quite a bit with that. I like to have that on hand, but magnesium is the big one that I tend to recommend. It's valuable for your performance as well. And that might be something that if I was saying, hey, I want to enhance my fat loss through indirect measures and sleep is something that I really want to work on. Melatonin has been proven to help with sleep as has magnesium. So I think those might be better investments if you're still going to spend that money on supplements. As for the branched chained amino acids, I might take the

money that you would have spent on those and spend them on creatine, a better form or better quality protein powder, or an essential amino acid if you really want to do supplemental amino acids. So those are I think, I'm not just going to bag on them, I want to give you guys something actionable that you can implement and say, okay, I'm not going to take those anymore, or this is what I'm going to recommend to my clients instead. 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 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. And so the last thing I want to talk about before we dive into the Q&A is blood flow restriction training. And blood flow restriction training isn't new. It's actually been around for a really long time. But it's made a resurgence on social media for the reason a lot of things have made a resurgence on social media and the fitness space. And that is their marketability. So they're incredibly, let's first just actually talk about, let's talk a lot about what blood flow restriction is, and then we'll talk about the marketability of it. Okay. And so blood flow restriction training was originally coined Katsu training many, many years ago in Japan as a way of occluding blood in and out of tissues in populations who had had surgery or were immobilized. And the findings were that, hey, occluding blood flow, restricting blood flow, letting blood in and out actually has a metabolic stimulus that could help with

maintaining skeletal muscle. And that's a really big finding, right? Particularly for geriatric populations, post-operative populations, people who can't necessarily move their best. And Katsu training became very popular and it evolved over here in the States into what we now know as blood flow restriction. To my knowledge, they are not the same thing. They're in fact mildly different. But blood flow restriction is not new. It and analogs of it have been around for quite some time. And what blood flow restriction is not new. It and analogs of it have been around for quite some time. And what blood flow restriction allows you to do is to occlude blood flow in and out of working tissue or reduce the amount of exchange of blood flow

in and out of working tissue. So you build up more metabolites like hydrogen, you have a lot of oxygen deprivation, and you can train at really high intensities with almost what I would describe as very insignificant or penalty-free load. And so one of the fundamental tenets of blood flow restriction training is you don't need much weight at all to get a very high training effect at the occluded or restricted tissue. So we'll use arms as an example, because right now the marketability

of blood flow restriction training is all about the glutes because glutes are really popular. People want to work on them. They're working on them from home. And technically you could do blood flow restriction training of the glutes. But my experience with blood flow restriction training as a professional pertains to upper extremities and lower extremities, not glutes specifically. So what I've done is what I would describe as the traditional bro PFR using bands or occlusion wraps. I have not done this using Katsu. I have a client who's got some pretty debilitated knee related issues. And we do use the Katsu to perform lower body training. We basically use this machine to perform blood flow restriction training, but it is worth noting, it is a lot more advanced than, and she does this at home with me virtually.

This is a client that I work with on zoom, but it's important to know that she is a population or she would fall into a population that I would describe as pre or post operative because she will need to get her knees replaced from having an extremely physically demanding job. But this allows her to train her legs, particularly her quads, her glutes and her hamstrings with extremely light load and getting incredible sensation and almost zero fatigue the next day, like totally ready to come back in and crush it. So my experience, that's my client's experience is using the bro version of BFR bands that you wrap around your arms, um, as a means to just get a pump and Lane Norton popularized this, if I'm not mistaken, many, many years ago,

that's the first person who I ever heard talk about blood flow restriction. And it was pretty simple at the time. I mean, things have become much more robust than they are now. And if you want a good podcast to listen in detail after you finish this one, check out the Iron Culture podcast. They did an amazing episode on blood flow restriction. And that's with my good friend, Eric Helms, who's been a guest on the show. But I wrapped around my arms about seven out of 10 tightness. That's what was recommended. You do 30 reps of curls, 30 reps of extensions, and then you go into three sets of 15 without taking a break. Your arms get very, very full of pretty much everything. They get pumped and it hurts like an absolute motherfucker. And then it's done

and you get a nasty pump. And what I found, actually, as somebody who suffered quite a lot from lateral and medial elbow pain, is that BFR allowed me to get a really high training effect with my biceps and triceps that I couldn't get. And I did BFR fairly regularly for about eight to 10 weeks. And after doing it twice a week for about eight to 10 weeks, I noticed that I was actually able to lift heavier weights more pain free. It had an almost recuperative effect on some of my agitated soft tissues, I definitely made some small gains in my arms, which is saying something because arms are not a particularly easy muscle group for me to develop. It's only something that recently I've been able

to develop because I didn't get to train arms much at all because of this elbow pain that I'd constantly been dealing with. My upper body training was almost exclusively compound lift related. And what I did isolation wise was for upper back delts because any isolated work for a long time in my training career really caused a lot of pain. And so BFR was a fantastic rehabilitative tool for me. But the way it's being marketed now is as this end all be all glute growth hack. Blood flow restriction training is extremely popular with quote unquote biohackers or people who want to get fantastic results in the easiest way possible, or they want to get, you know, they want to try unique, new and exciting things. And I don't think that BFR is the end all be all for great glutes. I think that it could be a small part of your training and the way that perhaps you

implement it a few times a week. Um, I think you could do it in place of band metabolic work. I think that that might actually be more effective. But I don't think it's going to replace heavy squatting, heavy lunging, heavy hinging, heavy hip extension work, like you've still got to work through all of the pathways by which we know we can build muscle. And BFR particularly highlights that metabolic stress pathway. And it's really good for that. So I give BFR two thumbs up knowing that there's almost 900 articles that I saw in the database or online written within the last like 10 to 15 years. So there's a lot of literature on it. You do have to be aware, right? Like if you struggle or you have like arterial issues,

you have diabetes, you have hypertension, you have sickle cell, right? If you have clotting related issues, varicose veins, these are all things where you're on an antihypertensive drug you need to be aware of before doing BFR. You shouldn't just do it because you can do a lot of damage because if you've ever really done it, you know how fucking hard it is. That being said, if you're not in a population with a lot of contraindications, I found that it's actually a really, really safe way to build and develop a little bit of muscle and train with some really, really low loads. I think that's important. So check it out. We're going to dive into the Q&A. But before we do, I just want to remind you guys again that there are a few spots left in my online coaching program heading into the summer. If you want to get started on getting the best body you've ever had, it probably makes sense to work with a coach. Now, I understand that coaching is a luxury expense, and for a lot of people, it's not in their budget.

But if you want somebody whose job it is to really help you set the course, navigate effectively towards having your best summer body ever, I'm here to help you do that with nutrition and proper training and a lot of really in-depth work on some of those indirect things that I talked about earlier that could help you, like optimizing your sleep, your hydration, or managing your stress. And again, head on over to www.coachdannymatranga.com, select the coaching portal and apply for online coaching. So our first question today comes from at JXVN05. And he says, yo, talk about your sneaker collection. I get a vibe that you are a collector. So in the most like basic sense of the term, I really do like to collect things. And I've collected a variety of things in my life. Sneakers, of course, are one of them. I've collected everything from Pokemon

cards to Star Wars memorabilia to even fish. And I had a bit of a collector's mindset when I was putting together my home gym. There wasn't like, if I didn't have it, I was interested in having it, even if I didn't know if I'd use it with myself or with my clients. So collecting things is something that I'm not neurotic about, but certainly familiar with. And sneakers is one of them. Some of my favorite cops that I was ever able to get, um, were the Kobe six Grinches, the Katie, I believe it was the Katie for all-star NASA's the Jordan cactus jacks. I got Jordan 11th, both of those. I actually, the space jam 11th, both of those, I actually got on sneakers, which was a fucking crazy experience. Um, and I've topped out at about 120 pairs of shoes.

One of the things though, that's happened lately. Um, and this've topped out at about 120 pairs of shoes. One of the things though, that's happened lately, um, and this was with the pandemic and not going out much and not, you know, not a lot of people seeing me. Uh, and I've never really cared too much about what people think, but my desire to spend a lot of time, money, and energy on clothing or material wealth, money and energy on clothing or material wealth, such as jewelry, shoes, vehicles, things that we use to project wealth and status, right? It really changed. COVID made me exponentially less interested in having nice clothes and driving a nice car and projecting wealth in that way. And that's what got me into collecting sneakers in the first place was when I was in high school, I couldn't afford the sneakers that I wanted because my parents didn't have the money. And so when I became an adult and I started working and making good money,

there wasn't going to be any sneaker that I couldn't get. And you, you know, you spend tens of thousands of dollars on shoes. Eventually you get to a point where once you actually have them, once you've got them on the app, once you've copped them, it's not the same. And they sit there and I don't wear them because I don't want to get them dirty. So I've really pivoted away from that actually, but it was something that I did a lot in probably my early 20s. I'm 25 now. So this was something that I did from probably 20 to 23, pretty religiously was, you know was buy a lot of sneakers. And I've gotten into the habit now of giving them away because I actually did sell a pair recently, but many of them I just give away because I find that it helps me detach further from the materialism. I'm that much more inclined to focus on money when I'm trying to find somebody to buy these shoes. And I feel a lot better when I just

give them to somebody who I know will truly enjoy them. But I'm not a complete moron. If I have a pair of shoes that's valued at several hundred dollars, I will generally sell those to somebody who, again, I think is a collector and who I know will enjoy them. Like the pair I sold just very recently, I sold to somebody who I know personally, who I like, and who I know is going to actually wear them. And so that was really big for me. But I did collect sneakers. I would no longer call myself a sneakerhead. I think the best way to describe it would be that I've outgrown it. So next question from Cassandra Mulhall. She asks, if I experienced no effect from caffeine, will a pre workout do anything for me? And the answer is yes. So pre-workouts, well-formulated ones like Legion Pulse and Legion Stim-Free Pulse contain ingredients that help performance beyond stimulants. So many pre-workouts,

unless they're stimulant-free, contain stimulants like caffeine, yohimbine. There are several, but caffeine is probably the main one. But they also include things like beta-alanine, which can help with fatigue management, or citrulline, which can help with basodilation. So there are a lot of performance-enhancing supplements included in pre-workouts that are not stimulants. So to answer the question as succinctly as possible, yes, you can make a solid impact on your training with a pre-workout that contains no caffeine. Okay. This question is from at E Smith, 43 81 flat bench press or arched bench press have seen instructions for both, which is better. So what she's asking here is should I bench with my back flat or my back arched? Assuming we're talking about a flat barbell

bench, right? Like I know she said flat bench press or arched bench press. I think she means flat back or arched back because an arched back is extremely popular, particularly in the power lifting communities. Why? Because it elevates the chest and reduces the actual range of motion of the exercise, which if your goal is to move the weight as much weight as possible, that really helps. So I wouldn't recommend a huge arch in your back unless you are a really competitive powerlifter. I don't think a small arch is bad. I don't think a flat back is bad. I actually think that the primary thing we should be asking is why are we selecting bench press as an exercise? Is our goal muscular development? If so, is bench pressing with a barbell any better than machine pressing or dumbbell pressing? I tend to think not. So I don't actually have a ton of my

clients bench with the bar unless they really like it. Uh, or we're using it as a strength exercise, in which case I tend to recommend a small arch in the back. So hopefully that answers, um, in the back. So hopefully that answers that question. This question comes from Ian Kormis, and he says, how old are you and how old is Coop? So I already said earlier, I'm 25. I will be turning 26 on the 8th of May. And Coop is about eight months old and his birthday is coming up. is about eight months old and his birthday is coming up. Uh, no coop. When is your birthday, buddy? I don't know. I remember that I got Cooper when he was eight weeks old on October 5th. So his birthday is two months previously to the 5th of October, which January, March, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. So Cooper's birthday is August 5th. March, April, May, June, July, August, September. So Cooper's birthday is August 5th. Um, and so he will turn one to one year old on August 5th. Wow. That took a long time. It was quite a bit

of math. Okay. So intuitive eating one, two, three wants to know how often I should change my program. Listen, the answer to this is highly specific. It depends on your goals, your ability to recover, how the current program is treating you. This is why I make programs, guys, because I get about 50% of the questions in here are questions just like this. And spending, you know, 40, 50 bucks on a program or a bundle of programs kind of answers this question for you. It's intelligently put together. put together. I like to have clients alternate exercises every four to five weeks so that things stay relatively fresh, but not so frequently that they don't get a chance to actually get better at the fucking exercises. You need to make progress. You need to actually make fundamental quality progress. You need to get stronger. You need to become better at the movement. You need to become better at controlling the movement. You need to make progress somewhere. And if you're flipping exercises all the time, you're not going to allow for that. And that's really, really important.

Okay. So if you don't already know what periodization is, go to my website, www.coachedaniamattraining.com. I've got free guides that will pretty much teach you how to put your own program together. And if you don't want to do that, just buy one of the programs. I promise you, you'll really like it. Okay. At Audrey Hines for real asks, I'm 58 female doing strength five times a week, but I love spin. Will it affect my gains if I do it twice a week? I really don't think so. I think that the industry went a little bit too hog wild. We rallied against cardio for a while because everybody who came to us to work out was like, I want to lose weight. What should I do? I'm doing cardio and I'm not losing weight. And we were like, well, you need to do some

resistance training because you need to send your muscles a stimulus or a signal that you want to preserve them. That will help your metabolic rate stay high. And it probably, you know, calorie for calorie will be better exercise than cardio for fat loss. So we were like, ah, all cardio is bad. It's a gains killer. I don't think that's the case. I think that doing too much cardio is gonna kill your gains for sure. But I don't think two spin classes a week falls into the category of too much cardio.

You might wanna pay attention to your individual response, but I think that for the most part, it's gonna be okay. The next question comes from at Danielle Rabatiello, Danielle Rabatiello. I'm wondering if that's Italian. Sounds Italian. Sounds great. Love the name, Danielle. Okay. Will you see a massive difference in results working out four times a week versus six times a week? Um, it depends. And so here's the difference, right? If you have the ability to recover from more than four times a week training, and you're only training four times a week, bumping it up to five or six might really make a difference. If you can barely recover from four, and you move up to six, and you're not actually recovering from that additional volume, it's probably going to be no better. And it might even have potential to be worse. And that comes down to intelligent program design, understanding your body, and really just paying good attention to where you're at and how you're responding to the training overall. Okay, wow, another question from another Danielle. This is from Danielle Lee with Three

Wise. And she asks opinion on the vacuum ab exercise. Is it effective? So a vacuum is a bodybuilding pose that's become incredibly popular again. It was really popular during the golden age of bodybuilding and it was kind of largely replaced by the, you know, abdominals and thighs, most muscular poses that really show off the abdominals. But back in the golden era of bodybuilding, as many people like to call it, the late 60s, 70s, early 80s, the vacuum pose was very, very common. And with the rebirth of classic physique in the NPC and IFBB, you see a lot more people hitting vacuums on stage. Many people will call this an exercise independently, because really what it is, is it's nice, it's a contraction of the transverse abdominus that pulls the abdomen in.

And you get this hollowed out shell look where your six pack or rectus abdominus would be. That's a great way to strengthen your transverse abdominus. So think with me really quickly about the exercise, the cat camel or the cat cow, as many people call it, where you're in the quadruped position, you're down on all fours, you're pulling your belly button in towards your spine by contracting those intrinsic abdominal muscles. That can be great at strengthening, like I said, your intrinsic abdominal muscles. It's very gentle on the back. It's a means of training your core that requires very, very little spinal flexion, like a crunch. You do get a lot of bending particularly, but it tends to be more

in the thoracic spine, which if you have back pain, usually isn't in your thoracic spine. It's not weird to have thoracic spine pain, but people who tend to have a hard time training core, it's because of lumbar spinal pain. So in a lot of ways, being able to train the transverse abdominus without a ton of flexion or without a ton of load can be really valuable. So the cat camel is a really popular exercise. A lot of people say that doing vacuums will literally make your waist smaller. I don't think there's any validity to that, but I don't think they'll make your waist particularly any bigger. And I think if you were a bodybuilder or you took a lot of photos and you wanted to have control over the way your core looked in those photos, it's not necessarily a bad idea to

have just better overall coordination of your midsection. And this will probably help you do just that. But again, I don't think it's a substitute for a robust list of abdominal training because remember, the abdominals do a lot. They do rotation. They do anti-rotation. They do flexion. They do lateral flexion. They resist lateral flexion. They create rigidity. I think I said rotation, but they do a lot and we want to allow them to do what they do because that's how you maintain strength and function. You train those muscles in a variety of ways. This is something that I would consider more core stability and rudimentary, but it's never a bad idea to throw it into the mix. So guys, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed the episode today.

I'll be sure to get more out to you. I'm planning on recording again in two days. Your guys' response to the podcast is always awesome. If you could continue to do me a favor, just share this episode if you enjoy it, send it to somebody posted to your Instagram story, be sure to tag me so I can say thanks. And if you're listening on iTunes, or you just have an iPhone, and maybe you listen on Spotify, go to iTunes and leave me a five star rating and review that helps people find the show that helps more people get value out of that and hopefully have a little bit more direction on their health and fitness journey. As always, guys, this is your host, Danny. Thanks so much for tuning in and we will be chatting very shortly as you can expect another episode from me in the coming days.