Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - Cannabis and Your Fitness

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

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order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Welcome into another episode of the podcast, guys. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's discussion, we're going to take a look at cannabis, cannabis consumption, and the interplay that might have with your health, fitness, body composition, etc. We've had multiple episodes of late that examined alcohol at a surface level, what we could expect alcohol to contribute to in the short, intermediate and long term at various intake intake levels with regards to health outcomes. What are you going to get? If you have these inputs with alcohol, what are you going to get on the outputs? And this is difficult to do with cannabis because

there's not as much research, but we're going to take a look at it from a surface level here in this episode. This is a re-airing from an episode that's over a year old now, and I'll discuss some of my biases, some of my opinions, and how I think you may or may not be able to interact with cannabis if it's legal in your area. And if it's not, don't assume I'm making any recommendations as to whether you should or shouldn't consume these things. I'm certainly not. So here we go. Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I am your host, Danny Matringa, and we're getting into the early part of November.

At the time of recording, it's November 9th. It's a nice crispy Tuesday in California. We're having some rain and some storms, and I'm looking forward to increasing my podcast frequency in the next couple of weeks. I'm hoping to get you at least two, hopefully three episodes weekly between now and the end of the year. And I just want to make sure that that's a frequency that I can keep up and that you guys enjoy. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for more episodes.

I'm excited to bring you that. Today's episode will be interesting in that I think I'm going to be able to provide you with some perspective that perhaps you have not gotten on a topic that is interesting to many, but certainly more relevant now than ever before. And that is cannabis, THC, CBD, and fitness slash performance slash body composition. And the interconnectedness of these things now that cannabis consumption is more common than perhaps it was previously, or at least more legal than it was previously. Before we touch on kind of the ins and outs of the ways in which I think the fitness industry and the cannabis industry might intertwine in coming years, and maybe your relationship to cannabis if you choose to use and how that might

affect your fitness outcomes, I do want to go through kind of a non-procedural list of things. First off, I'm not a doctor. Second off, I'm certainly not a lawyer, but the lawyer wants me to let you know that use of any substances, banned or otherwise, is at your own discretion. That of course includes cannabis. And I just want to do a little bit of a kind of bias check so that you guys know where I'm coming from before we talk about this. The first thing you should know is that I live in a state where cannabis is legal to consume and to cultivate. In California, it's legal to grow cannabis and it's legal to consume cannabis. In many states, that's not the case. In some states, you might be able to consume, whereas in other states, you might not. And cannabis is different

than CBD. And we'll talk quite a bit about CBD in our first section here when we go over some of the emerging literature around CBD and CBD's ability to impact performance. I thought that you guys might find that very interesting since CBD is all over the place. I am an advocate though for legalization. I do think that that is a bias. I do want to share that up front. I think you guys should know that before you listen to anything I have to say about the topic that I am an advocate for the legalization of cannabis. I've been exposed to cannabis for many years. I indulge in cannabis. It is my drug of choice in that I don't use any other drugs. I do not drink. Rarely, if ever, occasionally with my girlfriend, I will have a drink, usually at her request.

Otherwise, I'm basically what many people would refer to as green and sober. I don't even really use caffeine much anymore. So, you know, cannabis is a drug that I'm very familiar with. However, CBD, as it's typically marketed, is something that I'm still skeptical. I think the claims are very broad. I think they've spread very fast. I think it's recreational drugs. I know plenty of fitness enthusiasts who use it. I know plenty of bodybuilders who use it. I know plenty of athletes who use it. In fact, I think you guys would be surprised to know at just how many athletes at the professional level are using cannabis. In fact, it's cannabis use that is effectively ubiquitous in the NBA. From Tom Haberstroh and Monty Poole of NBC Sports, there's a quote here that says six different NBA players who did not want to be identified estimated that the percentage of active players using marijuana in some form, buds, edibles, concentrates, CBD oils, lotions, patches, etc. was at least 50 to

as high as 85% of NBA athletes. So we're talking about one of the most demanding sports in the year, or one of the most demanding sports we watch that goes pretty much most of the year, one of the longest seasons, one of the hardest with the traveling that these guys have to do across so many different time zones. And cannabis use has become extremely normal. Now, whether or not that negatively or positively impacts performance is hard to say because there's a lot of different elements of the actual cannabis plant

that might be influencing your performance. Could it be some of the relieving effects of things like THC, some of the inhibition lowering effects of something like THC, maybe it enhances your appetite and you can eat and recover better using the THC side of the plant, but then we have CBD or cannabidiol, which are the non-psychoactive elements of the plant that are often touted for their ability to reduce anxiety or to maybe have an impact on pain reduction, which they might be using it, whether they're using a more psychoactive form like an edible or perhaps cannabis bud, or they're using a non-psychoactive form like a CBD tincture

or a CBD patch is hard to say, but cannabis use is quite, quite prevalent in one of the most popular sports globally with some of the athletes who I think have the most demands asked of them. So clearly it's not the like worst thing in the world for your performance if used properly, but kind of working our way slowly into the first portion of this discussion, I want to talk about CBD specifically. And I think before we talk about CBD, you guys should know that CBD is not the same thing as THC. CBD is in fact non-psychoactive. So when you guys think about cannabis, when you think about marijuana, you probably think about smoking weed and getting high, right? And that high that you get from marijuana comes from THC or tetrahydrocannabidiol. CBD is just cannabidiol. Okay. So CBD, cannabidiol, THC,

tetrahydrocannabidiol, right? And so you're getting psychoactive things in THC when you eat it or when it's heated that can influence the brain to have psychoactive, euphoric, really intense responses. That is the high. Now, cannabidiol is very different. It's usually harvested from hemp, right, or part of the hemp plant, whereas much of your conventional THC-rich cannabis is harvested from strains of the cannabis plant that are indica or sativa that are the THC-producing rich strains. Hemp isn't technically the same thing as marijuana. Industrial hemp, right, refers to the strain of the cannabis plant that's basically just grown for agricultural purposes. And marijuana, which is in the same family, right, it's in the cannabis family,ijuana is kind of the more flowering, bud-laden, THC-rich type.

So a lot of your hemp or CBD products are being produced independently of a lot of your marijuana, THC-rich products. So it's a huge industry from the medicinal use to the recreational use, to the gray market, to the black market. And a lot of people are using cannabis. But used to the gray market, to the black market, and a lot of people are using cannabis. But CBD has been the fastest growing wing of the cannabis, let's call it, marketplace for quite some time. One of the primary reasons for this is harvesting related in that you can produce large amounts of THC for much more cost efficient margins than you could equivalent amounts of, say, psychoactive product from flour to edible. You can create CBD from the hemp plant, which is generally cheaper to cultivate and maintain

than a lot of the stringent maintenance of THC-specific strains of the marijuana plant. And because it's cheap to produce, and there is some literature out there supporting that it's good for a number of things, the strongest literature we have with regards to what CBD can be beneficial for is seizures. There are a lot of studies that show CBD can be effective at reducing seizures. And again, taking all of this into account. Remember, I'm not a doctor. I don't know the legality in your state. I'm not encouraging the utilization of cannabis or even CBD, right? Anything in that cannabis plant umbrella, right?

Whether it's pot, marijuana, hemp, CBD, you name it. Whatever the hell you want to call it, I'm not encouraging you to consume this plant. I'm probably going to say that three or four more times as we go along here. But again, there is some strong literature that supports CBD or cannabidiol having a positive impact on seizure reduction. There's also some literature, five

studies in fact, that show a notable effect on managing or mitigating symptoms of anxiety. Another correlation here, three studies show a minor impact on pain reduction. And then we have some of these claims. So of all of the evidence available, I think that these five things in order from seizures, anxiety, pain reduction, schizophrenic symptoms, and ulcerative colitis have some of the best data supporting their use. Now with CBD, you will see it sold in the fitness space as being able to enhance recovery, it sold in the fitness space as being able to enhance recovery, being able to improve your ability to manage and deal with the hard training you're doing and reducing your pain and reducing inflammation. And until very recently, there just has not been a lot of literature to support that. In fact, I can think of at least two or three studies, I know there's probably more, that shows

CBD doesn't do much of anything with regards to exercise performance. However, I did find this interesting. A new study published in August of 2021 from Eisenman, Veidt, Stark, Fenker, and Diehl titled Effects of Cannabidiol Supplementation on Skeletal Muscle Regeneration After Intensive resistance training. These titles are generally indexed this way, but what this is saying is what effect does CBD supplementation have on muscle recovery after hard exercise, right? So what we're going to get into here is kind of the nuts and bolts of this study and what we found. I've actually linked it in the show notes. But what they did was they tested to see if taking CBD after you trained, right, had an impact on your recovery and the exercises that they used to kind of

gauge how well you recovered, where your squats and drop jumps. Part of why they use these exercises and studies is because it's pretty easy to test squats and drop jumps. But again, this is how they're measuring recovery. So probably looking at like, okay, how'd you perform when you had a group taking a placebo and a group taking a CBD when one squatted on Wednesday, and then they squatted again on Friday, which group recovered better, right? You know what I mean? Like this is pretty simple, pretty easy to understand, but I understand, I get that not everybody's approaching the literature the same way. So we're looking at how does cannabis help you recover, particularly CBD? How does cannabidiol

CBD help you recover when supplemented testing using squats and drop jumps to test our recovery. So that's the nuts and bolts of it. Uh, CBD supplementation. So the group that supplemented with CBD showed lower levels of certain muscle damage biomarkers. I don't think it's super important to dive into what those biomarkers were, but if you want to know, there were things like creatine kinase and myoglobin. Again, that's not really important. What is important is, okay, do we see actual change here? And CBD supplementation did lead to lower levels than the placebo group. So the group that used CBD saw lower levels of these creatine kinases and these myoglobin 72 hours after exercise. So if you supplement for two days, you're not going to get as much as if you supplement for three days. In fact, supplementation did not really have a lot of an impact on these outcomes

within that 24 to 48 hour timeframe. You're going to get most of the juice from CBD supplementation two to three days after exercise. My initial thing here after reading this was I thought to myself, okay, if you have a group using CBD and a group not using CBD, but the group that is using CBD is showing enhanced recovery after three days, but not two and not as much after days one and two, I'm asking myself, does CBD take up to three days to take effect? Do we need to wait three days for some level of saturation to occur? Is within that three-day window, am I going to see decreases in these biomarkers anyway?

Of course we are, but that's why we have a control group. I mean, it raised some questions for me. I'm not willing to just move forward and say CBD is perfect. It certainly doesn't have these amazingly acute effects, but now we have a little bit of evidence that shows CBD might help with recovery, but there's plenty that shows it doesn't. I wanted to bring this up because I'm sure this is going to lead to a huge boon in CBD marketing aimed at fitness type people. Let's call us fitness fanatics. I hate to use the term, but you know, a lot of us are quite fanatic about our approach to fitness and wellbeing. And you've already seen

a lot of marketing for CBD as an anti-inflammatory for CBD as a, you know, soreness management thing. Like I see CBD all the time being sold as a topical and many spas, CBD sport plus wraps. I see, you see it all it's everywhere. And it's definitely being sold as a topical at many spas, CBD Sport Plus, Wraps. You see it all. It's everywhere. And it's definitely being sold as a product that might be able to help you with recovery. And while we do have this one study that shows that, we still have plenty more that don't. I think what we could take away from this is that there's more reason to at least look at CBD as a potentially helpful product in the recovery space. I think we might be able to say, I don't know that CBD is going to hurt you. In fact, we might have some reason to believe it's going to help. Probably now we can confidently say it's not going to hurt you and it might even help. I don't know what the

opportunity cost of what many people pay for THC supplementation, depending on where you're living, depending on the product you're using, the purity, the potency, et cetera. If you're going to be getting what you want out of just over the counter CBD product. Um, but again, something new to bring to the discussion here, because I would have told you if you asked me maybe a month and a half ago, if I thought CBD could help you out with your fitness in any way, I would have told you absolutely not. That's bullshit. The only way it's going to help you is if in some capacity you're, you're dealing with anxiety or elevated levels of pain because I'm, or obviously if you're having seizures, but, uh, cause that's you're having seizures, but because that's the

most robust evidence, but that's probably less likely. But if you were having some anxiety that was maybe making it challenging to get to the gym, or you were having some anxiety that was maybe making it challenging to get good sleep, that might help with performance. I would say that CBD could indirectly be beneficial in managing these symptoms if you wanted to experiment and you were cleared by your doctor to experiment with CBD as a means to treat anxiety. I deal with anxiety from time to time, can be sometimes quite debilitating, and I will often turn to cannabis, much of which includes THC, because if you are smoking cannabis, you're getting THC and CBD in most instances, unless you're smoking a strange form of cannabis that has very little THC and a high total of CBD or a strain that has almost no CBD but loaded with THC. But usually you're going

to get quite a bit of both. If you're just doing a CBD tincture, which is what you will find sold at places like Vitamin Shoppe, you'll find them at dispensaries if you're in a state that has medical cannabis. You're mostly just going to get CBD. And many of these products, despite being graded as having no THC, you will find traces of THC, which could be problematic if that's not allowed by your employer. Perhaps that's not allowed by your religion. There's a lot of reasons that people don't use cannabis beyond the fact that maybe they just don't like it. Many people aren't legally allowed to, or it's not supported in their faith. So it's important to take all of these things into account. But I would have told you like two months ago, I think CBD is bullshit. Unless

your anxiety or your pain is keeping you from training and you're willing to experiment and see if CBD can help that, go for it. But I don't think CBD could possibly impact performance positively because I didn't believe its ability to decrease markers of inflammation to that degree or decrease markers of damage to that degree were going to be significant. And I still really don't, but I think this one study is positive and maybe it opens the door for more. And as somebody who is an advocate and who does use cannabis, like I think that would be really cool because I want to see this stuff destigmatized because I look at it as like, okay, we have a lot of people who really don't like this drug. Hey guys, taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing sports nutrition

partner, Legion. Legion makes the best evidence-based formulas for sports performance, sports nutrition, recovery, and fat loss. I don't recommend many supplements. In fact, I think you can get the majority of the nutrition you need from a whole foods diet. But let's be honest, many of us are either on the go and need assistance, or quite frankly, we're not going to settle for average and we want to get the absolute most we can out of our training. So Legion is the company I go to for all of my supplement staples, whether it's creatine, which I get from their product Recharge, my protein that I get from either Whey Plus or Plant Plus, two of the best tasting proteins on the market. They come in a variety of flavors and they don't have a ton of fillers and gum. Just whey made from grass-fed

cows from Ireland in a plant protein blend with a fully comprehensive dose of amino acids. I like to take a pre-workout. Sometimes I like it with caffeine. Sometimes I like to enjoy coffee in the morning and have my pre-workout later without caffeine. Legion makes both. Both the pre-workout with caffeine and without come with a full dosage of clinically effective ingredients like beta-alanine, betaine anhydrous, and l-citrulline to help you perform your best. They also make a phenomenal greens powder loaded with one of my favorite things, reishi mushroom, and a men's and women's multivitamin that contain a few different things that men and women might need for their unique physiology. So when you think of your vitamins, your fish oil, your pre-workout,

your protein, all of the things that many of you take every single day, I'd encourage you to check out Legion. They have an amazing line, wonderful products, wonderful flavors, naturally sweetened, no dyes and colors. You can't go wrong. You can shop using the show notes below or by going to legionathletics.com and checking out using the promo code Danny. legionathletics.com and checking out using the promo code Danny. That will save you 20% and it will actually help you get two times points towards future orders, which you can use the same as cash. Pretty cool, guys. So head over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny to save on all your sports supplement needs. Back to the show. What's going on, guys? Coach Danny here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company core coaching method and more specifically are a one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program my online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for core coaching method for a while of course we do have pdf programming and we have app-based programming

but if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person, online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals, nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macronutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email,

or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with the accountability and the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't, put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. And I'm not one to tell you that you should or shouldn't like any drug, but I definitely think we've given it a bad rap. I think we've got

way too many people in jail for small possession related offenses right now. I don't think that's good for anybody's communities. I don't think that's good for us because we pay for these things anyway. We pay like taxpayers pay for people to be in jail for having small, trivial amounts of weed when anybody can go to any gas station and buy alcohol. And we know that alcohol is exponentially more damaging for people. know that alcohol is exponentially more damaging for people. It's, it has collateral damage in that, like, if you look at the drugs that do the most damage to the people that do not use them, things like meth, things like heroin, things like alcohol, alcohol is always at the top of the list are much more destructive. I know it's kind of an old adage on scientific way of putting it, but you know, people who are toking aren't going home

and beating their wives, right? Like, I'm not trying to minimize domestic violence at all, but if you look at the prevalence of, you know, alcohol consumption in domestic violence arrests, it's exceptionally high. And so we very much normalized alcohol. And I'm not saying we should normalize cannabis consumption, but we should certainly, I think, reduce how much we demonize it. And having discussions like this can help. That's, again, my bias. That's why we went over that. If you're interested in learning more about this stuff, Cannabis Manifesto by Steve D'Angelo is a good book. I think you'll find it quite interesting. 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. So let's talk about THC now and THC's impact on your fitness and your performance. Now, remember we talked about cannabidiol, which of course is CBD. CBD is usually productized, gathered from hemp and THC strains of the cannabis plant are usually found in marijuana. And those marijuana strains are these, there's thousands of marijuana strains, but the two primary families you're going to find of the cannabis plant are cannabis indica and cannabis sativa. Those are the parts of the cannabis family that are going to produce the end product

that yields the most THC. They have these big, beautiful flowers that ooze this resin. And when you get all the females together and you keep all the males away, they keep producing this resin because the resin is getting the flower sticky. The flower gets sticky and hopefully a male plant will pollinate and the plant sperm will float through the air, landing on the sticky flower, fertilizing the female plant. You get seeds and boom, you propagate over and over again. And in the marijuana plant, that oozy female resin that comes out of the flower is psychoactive. It's loaded with THC. Here's the thing. When people cultivate marijuana plants, they keep

the males away. So the females just ooze and ooze and ooze. You get this THC, that's what gets you high. So is that beneficial for your performance? And I don't, I really don't think it is. I've seen some evidence that shows that cannabis consumption might reduce fatigue onset in like endurance runners. I've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence from people who say, I like to smoke with cannabis before I exercise. I actually have worked with clients who insist upon showing up to their sessions after having done some cannabis. I've worked with athletes at a pretty high levels that actually like to use cannabis. I do believe that all of these people are in the minority. I think that

it works really well for them. In my experience, having used cannabis before training, it's not my favorite thing in the world. One thing I will say is I can definitely attest to THC having an impact on my ability to train. So again, not a doctor, please don't do anything I'm saying. But after having used marijuana before training, I have noticed that my ability to really perceive fatigue and muscle pain is pretty reduced. And again, there's a lot of things happening psychoactively. So that's probably just a perception thing. But I could stand after, you know, getting high,

I could stand there and do like a set of 50 curls and not really feel the fatigue, which is kind of weird, right? Like that's definitely not what you're feeling when you're not stoned. And I'm not saying go do that. I'm saying that that is one thing that I have felt. And personally, I didn't really like it because I also felt like the sensation and the numbness that came with that wasn't allowing me to really feel my training the way that I like. Additionally, additionally, depending on what kind of training you're doing, that could really be negative. As far as body composition is concerned, like I don't think you're going to get any benefit from CBD. And I

really don't think you're going to get much benefit from THC. I've seen some bodybuilding coaches whose athletes smoke say they like their athletes to actually pull THC as they get closer and closer to shows. They don't want them doing anything with THC because some people believe that THC can have an impact on the estrogen receptor and that it can disrupt some estrogen signaling and throw some things out of whack. And if you're doing a bodybuilding show and you're going through all of the challenges and all of the constraints that come with that, I don't think, I could totally see why you would want to have something like cannabis on your side. But with the munchies that come with that in many, many of these strains of the marijuana plant,

one of the common symptoms from ingesting it, whether it's smoking or eating it or however you're going about getting high, a lot of times people will talk about something called the munchies, which is this appetite increase that's oftenly associated with increasing your intake of THC. So when you get a little stoned, you might get a little bit of munchies and appetite, which is probably going to, paired with the reduced inhibition that often comes with cannabis, you're more likely to make bad food decisions. Not all strains do that. Meaning, you know, if you're smoking purple gummy ooey gooey haze versus, you know, blackbeard's big booty kush, you might get different stuff depending or responses. That's almost a guarantee depending on the actual phenotype that you're smoking,

the actual strain of the plant. But again, munchies is a very common side effect, if you will, in the same way that people will often say, oh, I felt very creative. I felt very relaxed. I felt very euphoric. A lot of people say, oh, I felt the munchies. So THC definitely has a chance to interact with the estrogen receptor. I don't know how much of an impact that would have on body comp. It's definitely got an ability to impact how you train. Personally, I don't like that. It definitely increases more strains than not increase my appetite. So if body comp and cutting was my primary thing, I probably wouldn't do that. But if bulking was my thing and I was having a hard time getting food in, we might have found a little bit of a secret weapon here. So I would say CBD may be beneficial for recovery, beneficial for anxiety,

beneficial for pain reduction, potentially not much else. THC, not very beneficial for body composition. If cutting, potentially very helpful for dieting if your goals are bulking and you have a hard time with appetite. So that might be the demographic in the fitness community that would respond best to THC-rich strains of the cannabis plant, which may well contain some CBD too. But overall, I would say it's not my favorite. And even though I'm an advocate for the plant, I don't think consuming massive amounts of cannabis over the long run, or even most CBD supplements are going to make much of a difference. I'd say by and large, it's a wash, but the habits

that you have in place with your training and with your nutrition are going to play the biggest role in your overall wellbeing. Okay. So moving on to the Q&A section of today's podcast. Thanks again for bearing with me. Hopefully you got something out of that. We're going to chat a little bit about food tracking apps. We're going to talk a little bit about calories, best training splits, things like that. I've got some questions dialed up from you guys on Instagram. But before we do that, I want to take a minute to pay the bills and plug one of my awesome sponsors, and that is Legion Athletics. Legion Athletics makes my favorite line of naturally flavored, naturally sweetened sports performance products. I love the strawberry

lemonade recharge creatine that's also loaded with L-carnitine, which can help reduce soreness. It tastes phenomenal. I love to have that with ice after every training session as a way to cool down and relax. It's also phenomenal in the unflavored version. Additionally, I have a shake every day with two scoops, one and a half or so scoops usually, of Legion Whey Plus, some collagen that I just get at Costco, and some Legion Genesis. So the supplements that I take from Legion every single day are my Legion Recharge Creatine for my muscular health, my endurance, my performance, my metabolic health, and my long-term cognition. I also take

the Legion Genesis because it's loaded with phytonutrients, polyphenols, but particularly the reishi mushroom I'm really big on, and the Legion whey. If you want to support, you can head on over to legion.com for all your sports supplement needs. Check out using the promo code Danny. You'll support me. You'll support the show. All right. So moving on to our questions. The first one comes from Jordan Deutsch and he asks, what app are you currently using for food tracking? So I have been playing around with Macrofactor from Stronger by Science or from Greg and Eric over at Stronger by Science. Eric has been on the podcast. He's really smart. He's really, really cool. Greg is really, really smart. I don't know if he's really, really cool because he hasn't been on the podcast yet,

but I do really enjoy their podcast and I've heard that Greg's a cool guy too. So they created an awesome dieting app called Macro Factor. And I'm playing with that right now. I like to jump around and try different ones. And I've tried MyFitnessPal. I've tried Fat Secret. I've tried Carbon. And I'm currently trying Macro Factor and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I don't want to give a full review just yet because I do believe I will be getting to a review at some point, probably right here on the podcast, but I am enjoying it so far. It's definitely going to give my fitness pals some competition, particularly for those of you who I think want a little bit more feedback on the micronutrient end. And I don't think the UI is that bad. A lot of these like macro apps that have come from people

in the fitness community oftentimes have really sticky buggy AI, but I'm not, or sorry, UI, but I'm not having any problems yet. And there actually is even an AI feature that I'm playing with with regards to getting some meals in there that are a little bit harder to like log in my fitness pal. So I'm kind of enjoying it. The app is macro factor. You could definitely check it out, but I will have a review coming on that, but it's in all likelihood going to be a fairly positive review. So thanks to Greg and Eric for taking the time to make something in a space that's congested full of a lot of kind of middle of the road players that I think has a lot of potential and will continue to be a great tracking app as it only gets better with use. I can tell they're updating it. And when I, they actually

have a podcast stronger by science. You might check that out too. I quite like that. And they go over some of the ways in which they're changing the app as they go for a better user experience. So they're doing a great job. This question comes from Michaela.Corson. She says, best split for building strength and muscle with a busy school schedule. So the busier you are, the less likely it's going to be that you're going to go to the gym a high number of days per week. It's just challenging to get to the gym four, five, six days a week. If you're super busy, maybe you're a student, maybe you have a job, maybe you're doing both. I know I did both when I was in school, so I know how challenging that can be. And I think if you're training any less than three times a week, you should be training total body. So if you can

only go one to two to three times a week, I would recommend training your total body. If you can get to the four time a week threshold, I would go for an upper lower split, two times a week, I would recommend training your total body. If you can get to the four time a week threshold, I would go for an upper lower split, two times a week training the upper body, two times a week training the lower, preferably doing upper than lower than resting, then upper than lower than resting. If you can go five days a week, I like upper lower, upper lower, total upper lower, push, pull leg, push, pull leg,-lower. And if you can do six times a week, then you're not that busy. I'm just kidding. Then you probably are really dedicated to the gym. You love it. It's part of your mental health. It's part of everything. You're going to go no matter what. You build your schedule around it. I love it. But if you're going to train six days a week, that's when you can get

really specialized and do things like push-pull leg splits or really specific body part splits where you spread your volume out. And the more you train, the more conscientious you have to be of how much volume you're doing with regards to number of sessions. This question comes from underscore underscore Yelly asking, can carb cycling also be effective for maintenance calories or on a surplus slash bulk goal? So it absolutely can be. If you remember, when you carb cycle traditionally, you're probably doing a day at maintenance calories where your carbs are quote unquote high or slightly above maintenance where they're high,

a day at probably a small deficit where carbs are moderate, and then a day in a really deep deficit where carbs are really low. And you're cycling through high, medium, and low carb days, not necessarily high, medium, low, high, medium, low. Maybe you go high, medium, low, low, high, medium, low, low, or high, low, low, medium, medium, high, low, low, medium, medium, whatever. If you were to flip that model on its head and say, I want to do like a day at maintenance, a day in a small surplus and a day in a large surplus, and maybe at maintenance,

you're at 300 carbs at medium day or at 350 and at high day or at 400 sure i don't think that would hurt i think you could flip it on its head as far as maintenance oh my gosh i think that would just be cumbersome i'd rather just shoot for about the same thing every single day that's my two cents anyway guys thanks so much for tuning in and listening to me rant i felt that I owed you some type of discussion about cannabis, given that many of you are aware that not only do I live in a state where it's legal, but I also interact with the plant in a way that I think is safe. I don't think it affects my life. But again, if it's illegal where you live, then definitely don't use the plant.

Definitely don't listen to anything I say. I'm not a doctor. Definitely consult your doctor before you use any drugs at all. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please stay tuned for more. If you have not yet, please leave me a five-star rating and review on the iTunes store. If you listen on iTunes, it makes a huge difference. It helps other people find the podcast.

Reviews are to podcasts what things like follows are on social media. So this stuff really makes a big difference and it helps me out a ton. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day and stay tuned for the next couple episodes because I'll be coming at you at a better frequency now and I'm excited.