Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - Pod 401: Q +A unhealthy Americans, breastfeeding, weighted vests, pilates, celsius drinks + more

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

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Hey, folks, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, I'm going to be sharing with you some criticisms I have of the kind of infrastructure of America and why it is that the way many of our cities, towns, and municipalities are constructed actually leads to health issues. I'm just recently back from traveling out of the country and everywhere I go, not just where I just went,

but everywhere I go, I see opportunities for the United States to help people like you, myself, our loved ones. Many of you don't live here, but a lot of you do live healthier. So I wanna share that. We're also gonna talk today about breastfeeding, weighted vests, the Pilates craze, energy drinks and more.

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I just returned back from a four day trip to Vancouver, Canada. And for those of you who are not too familiar with Canada, Canada, like America, is divided into multiple regions that are called provinces in the same way that America's divided, subdivided into many states. Now, the westernmost province, if I'm not mistaken, is British Columbia. Perhaps like, and you know, for the contiguous United States, the western most state would be, you could be like, oh, that's California and not technically it's Hawaii. But in this context, British Columbia exists on the western side of Canada, and its coast lines up perfectly with basically the North American West Coast. So you could drive like all the way up from San Diego to Seattle on

America's West Coast and be like 45 minutes from Vancouver on the border on the neighboring side in Canada. So it's geographically similar to what you see in the Pacific Northwest, but in a really beautiful city with frankly, I'll be totally honest with you, comparatively speaking, substantially less homelessness, drug use, and cleanliness issues compared to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. So I've spent quite a bit of time in all of those cities. I live very close to San Francisco. I go often.

My dad lives 10 minutes from the city. This is just like something that I have found is one of the larger critiques of the West Coast cities in the United States is safety. They're known for having, you know, cold, chilly weather, but beautiful sunny days and occasional rain, often a lot of rain. But Vancouver really kind of stood out to me amongst those four West Coast cities of San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and of course Vancouver, as not only being the cleanest,

but also having the least issues with homelessness, which surprised me because it was clearly extremely expensive to live there. But what I really enjoyed about the city, and again, a lot of this is because of its unique geography. It's located in such a beautiful place. You can do this, and I understand you can't do this in like Fresno, but there is an unbelievable amount

of a walkable space, bikeable space. There is a fairly effective public transportation. I wouldn't say it's on level with something like Japan or other parts of Europe, but the Vancouver SkyTrain and bus system moves people around. There's still horrible traffic because there are no freeways, which I found to be quite fascinating in the city. Like you don't see like three to five lane freeways even directly in the heart of Vancouver on the waterfront there. You don't see like three to five lane freeways even directly in the heart of Vancouver on the waterfront there. You're talking about like two lane thoroughfares. So pretty tight with traffic but tons of people walking and tons of people cycling. And one thing I noticed for sure

was people of a more let's say healthy weight. I am always blown away when I go to popular US tourist destinations. I'll use Disneyland as an example at how prevalent obesity is. I work in a gym, so I spend six to eight hours a day with clients or making content in the studio at least 40 hours a week, just like whatever you do for your work,

maybe you're a fitness pro so you can relate, maybe you're not, but whatever you do for your work, I'm spending that much of my time or more in a gym. So I have a heavily skewed view. I don't see the general population that much. My clients, a lot of them are quote unquote general population adults looking to get in shape, right? But comparatively they're in quite good shape.

So many times when I go out to cities, this is more true in the American South, but it's true even here in California, which is a state that's known for being on the relatively fit side. We're definitely in the top 10 in terms of like engagement with exercise. A lot of that has to do with money and weather, but no matter how you slice it, you just see a lot of obesity in America. And when I was in Vancouver, Canada, or I should say Vancouver's the city in British Columbia where I was in in the province in Canada,

everybody was fit. A lot of people were fit. They were thinner. And again, this could be money. This could be things like access to gyms. But I really think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the city is uniquely made for walkability, bikeability, and because of the natural beauty and the safety, people are clearly excited to engage with that. Every day my wife and I were there, we saw so many people running. In fact, the final day of our trip, the Vancouver Marathon was there, which we got to enjoy.

At five o'clock in the morning in the hotel gym, there was like six people working out, which I thought was fascinating. While we walked the seawall, runners and cyclists galore, very little automobile traffic, like in and around the park areas. It seemed substantially more the case that people were walking and running when and where they could.

And I thought that was amazing. And it really kind of got me thinking about, one of the unique challenges I think we face as a country in America is so much of the space that we live in, whether it's municipal like in this in the township type of vibe, suburbia, whether it's big urban areas like cities, it's kind of not optimal for walkability. We have some cities that have great walkability, that have great cycling, that promote movement, right? But not a ton. And we have more environments that kind of just promote sedentary behavior that aren't very walkable, that you're going to always have to get in your car. You're going to always have to find yourself fighting traffic.

And that I think is actually a big reason why a lot of people don't move as much as they could. I can tell you right now that if I lived, if I were, if I wanted to do exactly what I'm doing right now, I could take all the clients I have at the studio I own in California, transition them to an online coaching relationship, move to Vancouver and I'm sure within a year I could have a full roster of clients, however many I'd want to train. That's always been something that I've been capable of doing. And probably not need a car, right? If I could find, if I could go to a gym as an independent contractor and be

like, yeah, I'll pay a thousand bucks a month in rent and I could ease. I can make $10,000 a month in personal training, one on one clients at 30 hours a week and do online for 15 to 20 hours a week and just be crushing it with US dollars in Canada. No car needed. I could move around tons of healthy places to eat, tons of places to walk and tons of places to work out. And to me, that's really impressive because it's extremely, it seems to me that this is something that we could do in the richest country on earth. It seems to me that as people living in America, we should really demand more, not necessarily

demand but we should lean into getting more and improving our spaces, our parks, our public spaces, our walkable spaces, making sure that when we do develop we promote developing things that do not cut off people's access to mobile spaces. It sounds silly and maybe woo-woo and maybe a little too lib, but I'll be honest like being in that city knowing like wow I can get all over the place just hopping in and off the train. Mind you, I was with my wife and my baby. That does make things much more difficult transportation wise.

We didn't have to take a single Uber. We were able to happily get 30 plus thousand steps a day and people like, oh my God, 30,000. That sounds awful. It's not awful when a city is designed to be beautiful, when it has parks, when it has trees, when it has large walkways, when it has convenient bus stops and train stations. These are honestly things that in America

many people are not used to, because not all cities and locations have good public infrastructure that allows you to move a ton of people efficiently. And when you have that and more people walk and you prioritize the development of building something that's interesting, even though you have these huge, beautiful skyscrapers on a lot of the new developments, there's tons of breaks, meaning like you'll see a high rise that's like 10 stories and then a break and on top of that break, you'll have a park and then they'll go up another 12 stories, uh, on the,

on an, on the neighboring side and put a park. So there's actually like an effort not to just cut off everything with giant buildings. And I think you'd see this, uh, in places like Japan that are very vertical, but they don't want to loot for Tokyo or Yokohama or Places like that that are very vertical, but they don't want to fully take away your ability to see trees to see You know greenery so they actually build it into the verticality they feature it and I'll tell you what guys seeing beautiful things While you walk is very, very encouraging. It makes you want to walk more. So does safety. And so it's something that I think

about all the time, promoting movement by having more options. And I've always had this vision of public parks that have exercise infrastructure. I forget where I was, but it was somewhere in Florida and they had an outdoor park that had exercise equipment that was like human powered but it wasn't even bad like you could do a you could sit down and do a chest press at the park in your weight similar to the hoist machine that you've probably seen in many commercial gyms. The manufacturer hoist has a model called rocket where you push and it kind of rocks your way into a position where you're pushing your own weight as part of the load. And these machines are in many ways decent and I went to a park once and they had like five or six kind of hoisty machines that were obviously very weatherproof. I was like, dude, you could just walk around and work out and lift weights in public and

lowering barriers. Increasing accessibility is huge for public health. We really do want more people to engage with the simplest of things, like walking more than they drive or exercising with resistance a couple days a week. Anyway, just something I thought about that I thought was so present over there that I think we really need to strive for as a country. I don't want to make this a partisan thing. I think, you know, many people have probably tried this,

but it is challenging to determine, you know, the most efficient ways to spend people's money when they pay taxes. And I think, you know, more parks and more walkable spaces sounds like, I don't know if I want that or if I need that, but the payoff from what I've seen is you get these unbelievably beautiful spaces and unbelievably walkable places that absolutely promote movement. Okay, so I'm getting into some of your

questions and remember I pulled these always from over on Instagram where I drop a question box every once in a while. You guys had some really good ones. This one I thought was particularly interesting. It came from at life with Ioanna and the question is know anything about trying to lose body fat while postpartum and while breastfeeding I do because my wife and I Have kind of been going down this path together. I have been helping her a lot with her food While she's in this postpartum window Because my wife's naturally very gifted with babies.

She has a niece and a nephew and she's really nurturing and her and my son have a fantastic connection so she's staying home with him most of the day and that's really tiring. So by the time I'm done with the projects I have to do, whether it's the clients I see at the gym, helping my online one-on-one clients optimize and navigate their health, working with the app groups, doing the podcast, making content. When I get home, she is usually quite fatigued and tired from having the baby and dealing with the baby, even more fatigued than I am. Right, and I just named all that stuff that I'm doing. And so I know, okay, this is really demanding,

like having to care for a baby and produce milk for a baby is really demanding. So I've stepped up as much as I can in the kitchen. And let me tell you, as a busy new mom who's breastfeeding, I promise all that prefix, I had a reason for that, as a busy new mom who's breastfeeding, you can eat a lot more calories and a lot more food than maybe you're used to and still see body composition changes and weight loss because keeping up with a kid all day if that's what your situation looks like burns a lot of calories and even if you immediately after you gave birth went

back to a totally sedentary nine-to-five job if you are breastfeeding you're burning a lot of calories producing milk. And if you are someone who just had a baby, you should focus more on recovering from the pregnancy and the labor and giving your body what it needs to produce milk if you're going to be breastfeeding. Then you should weigh loss because your health really matters postpartum, especially because you have to consider your mood and the change that your life is or the change you're going to be experiencing in your life.

As you move from a situation where maybe you were the priority in your life, this is common for people, maybe your partner was, maybe your relationship was priority in your life. This is common for people. Maybe your partner was, maybe your relationship was, maybe your family was, but most likely, your new priority is gonna be nurturing and caring for your child. And so, you can very quickly lose nurturing and caring for yourself in that, and that's dangerous.

Not dangerous, but you have to really slow down and think like, okay, is now the best time to be trying to be in a calorie deficit? It's not the best time to be in any way, shape or form, not getting the nutrients I need. Heck no, because I want to recover from this, focus on this, I need to meet the demands of a baby, which are very high and very constant.

And because breastfeeding burns so many calories, I don't think you need to get into a huge deficit. What's going on guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology

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So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days.

Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community, back to the show. In fact, I think you could eat probably closer to what your maintenance was before you were pregnant and allow the additional calories burned from breastfeeding to kind of put you in a deficit while you reengage with good exercise and movement habits, right?

You want to get back to moving postpartum not as quickly as possible, but once you're cleared and you know building muscle in your pelvic floor and your core and your glutes and your hamstrings and when I say building muscle, I more mean regaining strength and stability regaining your aerobic fitness, you know in the first six to 10 weeks post pregnancy, for some people that can look really simple and really reduced and really scaled back. For others, they're back into it more quickly. But if you are taking care of your body,

taking care of your baby, adapting to a huge change and a huge adjustment in priorities. It's not always the best time to do a super restrictive diet. So I try to tell women thoughtfully and respectfully, like, you know, I understand wanting to look a certain way and I understand being frustrated with the way that your body will change when you have a baby. But you have to be kind to yourself while you do it. And one thing I know because the question is know anything about trying to lose body fat while postpartum is personally what my wife and I have experienced and over

the years I've worked with women around their pregnancy. I just don't like adding the stress of dieting onto a new mom's plate. If you eat in a way that nourishes your body and gives it what it needs, and you need protein, you need fiber, you need fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, you need lots of water, you need walking, you need some type of resistance training scaled to you, if you do that and you don't overeat

and you are breastfeeding, you're probably going to lose weight. I'm really certain of that. And if you're overindulging, you might not and you might need to dial it back. But over restriction in this particular time, very low upside, very high downside. Okay, this question is from at Decker, weighted vests for walking. Okay, so there's substantial benefits to just walking and I talked a lot about them earlier in the episode when I was talking about the Weighted vests for walking. Okay, so there's substantial benefits to just walking, and I talked a lot about them earlier in the episode

when I was talking about the value in getting outside. Not only do we know that walking is good for mental health, but we know that walking in outdoors, areas, beautiful areas is particularly good for creativity, for stress, and then of course the benefits that come with walking. Now, when you add a vest to this, weighted vest, a vest I guess you could call it, a weighted vest to this, you're going to increase the demand. So the aerobic demand might go up, let's say you add a 10% weight vest, so you add 10% of your

weight. Let's say for every 10% of your weight you add, the aerobic demand goes up 25%. I'm just picking a completely arbitrary number I made up. I do feel like it'd be fair to say that if you added 40% of your weight, like, what would that be? So for me, if I added 10% of my weight, I would add about 18 pounds. If I added 40%, it'd be like 52 pounds. Yeah, that would definitely increase the demand of my cardio like 100%. I mean, maybe not, but a 45 pound vest would be a lot of extra oomph if I were doing cardio,

especially something like running. So there's definitely an increased aerobic demand, but I do think it peaks out. And I think at some point a vest can be way too heavy and really make it unsustainable to use for cardio training for the average adult or just like almost pointless. At that point with that output, you're better off just training with resistance. Now, if you're just walking, adding a weighted vest will scale that up. And those are the people for whom I'd recommend it most. If you're a smaller person looking to lose weight, I would also recommend adding a weighted vest

to your walking because it is definitely demanding or harder for people who are smaller to lose weight. They generally have lower caloric output due to like smaller height, smaller body mass. And wearing a weighted vest has been shown in some research to kind of promote body fat reduction and already lean, already smaller body, already like contest-ready bodybuilders. And my take here is maybe from that we can take that, you know, when you're deep in a contest prep, through a bodybuilding show, your metabolism has probably adapted downward to the point where you're not moving a lot. When you're super lean and all muscle and deprived of calories, you might burn calories

very differently and lower than you're used to. And that is similar to what like a smaller person experiences when they try to lose weight. The shorter you are, the smaller you are, the less body mass you have, the more sedentary you are. Like if the hardest weight loss clients ever are short women who work like corporate jobs where they sit all the time. Because they tend to burn a lot fewer calories.

So it's like for them to be in a deficit, the number has to be tiny. And that means that they have to be super duper accurate. And if you add a weighted vest to basically pseudo increase that person's body mass, maybe, just maybe, you get a mildly positive effect from it. So it could be good for fat loss. Now, I think a lot of people want a weighted vest

because it's on trend and I'm seeing it a lot around women and menopause. For women and menopause, I would just say don't ever think you should, don't look for any workarounds when it comes to weights. Weighted vest ain't weights. Pilates ain't weights. Stop looking for a workaround like the literature is pretty damn clear resistance training is outstanding for Older adults for both brain for both both for both brain and bone, but of course muscle and strength like there is no fucking way a weighted vest offers nearly the benefits of a resistance training protocol.

A weighted vest is a supercharger to your walking and I think you need to have modest expectations. Train with Payal asks, what do you think about strength training plus Pilates? And I actually like this combo because I think Pilates has gotten a little ahead of itself or the movement has gotten a little ahead of itself and maybe people are starting to compare it to lifting or conflate it with lifting. And it's like Pilates is to resistance training what baseball is to football.

They're entirely different. Like they are so unique. Now does Pilates, when it's done on a reformer, have resistance training like properties? Of course. Does it burn calories? Yes. Is it good for you? Yes. But I think it is better when paired with something else. I don't think any exercise modality with the exception of things like CrossFit or maybe HiRox, which I think are Modality with the exception of things like CrossFit or maybe high rocks, which I think are Really inefficient and have high injury rates probably for the average person can like totally touch everything mobility resistance cardio gymnastics

Muscle building all that shit is really hard to do in one quote-unquote program But I think Pilates is a great add-in So So if you're a lifter or a runner or an athlete doing a little Pilates could be good. And I think if you do Pilates, mainly adding a little lifting will help a lot with that. Now, I still think for both of those scenarios, you need to have something for your cardiovascular exercise, but I do think the two make a more solid combo.

And I just really don't think, though, Pilates on its own is fully adequate strength training for everyone. So this is actually a question I got on Instagram DMs. And I cut the person out because I shared it on my story. But I don't know who their little icon is or whatever. But their question was, in your professional opinion, should you show, should all red meat be classified together? I eat bacon versus grass fed beef.

And I thought that was an awesome question to answer here because it's really relevant. And my answer is, was this is what I wrote. I shared this on my story as well, but I think high quality cuts of red meat can be health promoting I don't see a context where in which ultra processed cured meats like bacon can be Those are a stage one carcinogen In fact it baffles me how few people talk about the fact that processed meat is a group one Carcinogen just like cigarettes and alcohol. However, that does not mean that all red meat should be classified as such. I think things

like bacon, pepperoni, and sausage are uniquely different from things like grass-fed fillets. I am a red meat eater, but I tend to have it one to two times per week. Usually steak. I eat more fish than I do red meat, but it's a big protein in my routine. Always be careful with processed meat. Try to opt for higher quality cuts of straight up beef or red meat. I guess you could throw pork in there too. But generally that's kind of where I stand on that. You need to, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. And I do think that red meat in a athlete's diet is fine. But I do think based on all the evidence I've seen and based on all the people I talked to, a plant centric diet, one that is high in protein from fish, poultry, dairy, and a little bit of red meat,

one that is rich in fiber and high in micronutrients that features whole grains and minimally processed foods is going to do the trick. You could add red meat to that up to five times a week if the context of the whole diet is good and the individual can tolerate that level of red meat intake. But if you eat like pepperoni pizza every day and you get, let's say you got all your protein

from the meat and the pepperoni and the bacon and cheese that you have for breakfast, it's like all saturated fat and like low quality cured stage one carcinogenic animal meat protein, like you might be cooked. Like I'm sorry to say that, like maybe you can't have meat every day if it's low quality shit meat and get away with it. Like we see a proliferation of things

like colorectal cancer in addition to cardiovascular disease and all kinds of things that are associated with the intake of these low, I would say red meat, but again, when you look at those studies, it's like, what are they using as red meat? It's shit like pepperoni and I don't think that's fully fair to stake. All right. The last question comes from at Drez and his question is, what are your thoughts

on drinking Celsius? I don't consume additional caffeine. So honestly, I think that's fine. I think energy drinks are fine. Personally, I think they're a little too high in caffeine and many of them are fortified with things, but I don't think they offer some of the unique like antioxidant profiles that we get from coffee and tea. So like personally, I'd go for things like coffee and tea because

I like the upside more, but they're fine. These energy drinks are fine. They're just like a pre-workout in a way. But what I like about pre-workouts is they contain ingredients that help performance in the gym. And many of these energy drinks don't, they're basically just zero calorie sodas with extra caffeine, which I don't personally love. But if you hit that Celsius before your workout, it gives you a great pump and that's all you have for caffeine. It doesn't affect your sleep. Should be good to go. All right, guys, thanks for listening to this Q&A. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and to remind you to hit subscribe on Apple and Spotify. Leave the show a five star

review so more people can find it. we can help more people get in shape. Thanks so much for listening, have a good one.