Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - Podcast 140: Protein Primer + 4 Easy Ways to Increase Protein Intake + When to Workout + Fat Burning Gels

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

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Welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matringa. And in today's episode, I'm titling this the protein primer, we're going to take a deep dive into dietary protein, we're going to look at the various reasons why you might want to either keep an eye on or even increase your protein intake. Because I think protein is a fundamentally important macronutrient. It's something that is beneficial for you, whether or not you have a fitness body composition performance goal. This is not some nutrient that only matters for people who are extremely active.

This is an incredibly important macronutrient that we need to better understand. And I think it would do wonders if we could have a good discussion about it here today. I'm going to give you some actionable tips as to how I recommend my clients go about increasing their protein intake if that's relevant to them. So these are really going to be some discussions today about what is protein? Why does it matter? Giving you some actionable stuff, things you can take with you, things you can implement into your life today to increase your protein intake. But again, I can't do this podcast without the help that I get from my partners, one of which, of course, is Legion

Athletics. And I love Legion Athletics Whey Protein Whey Plus. It comes in some phenomenal flavors that are all naturally sweetened, like cinnamon cereal, fruity cereal, chocolate, vanilla, like cinnamon cereal, fruity cereal, chocolate, vanilla, mocha cappuccino, mint chip, really good flavors that I don't find to be overly sweet. Some protein powders that are overly sweet are off-putting, and these are a whey protein isolate, which is better for me, because while I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm full-blown lactose intolerant, I can usually only tolerate things like yogurt and cheese. I can't really drink milk.

Too much lactose can really do me dirty. And whey concentrates can have a little bit too much lactose. So having a form of protein that is whey isolate, isolating the protein from that lactose sugar, allows me to enjoy it with less digestive distress. I also like that I'm getting over 20 grams of protein in every scoop. So if you want to try Legion's whey protein or their plant protein, Plant Plus, which is a very, very nice plant blend of two different proteins, because whenever you're trying to do a plant protein, you need to get two different plants that complement each other, like pea and rice, for example, and that

they yield the right amounts of those amino acids because plants tend not to be complete proteins in isolation. So when you get a blend, you get that crossover, you fill in the gaps, you kind of cover the blind spots, and you have a really comprehensive, going-to-do-the-job amino acid profile if you're somebody who doesn't like animal products or completely doesn't like to mess with dairy. So if you want to get more protein into your diet, you want to do it conveniently, you want to do it in a way that I would say is very, very practical, the way we live our lives on the go, then head over to legion.com, check out using the promo code Danny to save 20% on your first order and get two X points, twice the points, double points that you can use on future orders and you'd be supporting the show. So we're going

to take a deep dive here into protein. First, what I would like to do is I'd like to review a really interesting article I've pulled from the web here that I think is a phenomenally comprehensive list. And I'll add my own commentary to this. I don't have anybody working with me in the studio, pulling these things up on the TV, like producing, like a lot of podcasts are produced, which is great, but I'll just be reading directly from this list. This is from Healthline, which is one of my favorite, I would say, conglomerators of, or aggregators of good internet content. They just have high quality evidence-based fitness, nutrition, wellness content. I think it's very accessible. The barrier for entry for scientific

stuff particularly literature can be really really challenging it can be a steep learning curve a lot of the you know verbiage that's used a lot of the way things are written in literature is not super accessible we're not just scientifically literate uh as an as a country we tend to struggle in this area so most people struggle in this area. But Healthline does an awesome job of portraying what I would call really, really easy to understand scientific explanations about stuff people have questions about. And all of these articles are written by evidence-based, qualified professionals. Many of them are even medically reviewed. But this article is titled, science-backed reasons to eat

more protein it's written by chris gunner he has a bachelor's of science i thought it was a really good list after reading through it and so i'll highlight each of these points you can actually pull the article up on your own if you'd like to follow along but i'll expand on them kind of add my own commentary um great list though to work with in kind of presenting a nice case for protein intake and creating what I would like to think of as an educational resource for protein that is in audio format. All right, so number one on the list is protein has been shown to reduce appetite and hunger levels. So of all the different macronutrients, fats, carbs, and proteins, studies show that protein is by far the most filling. I see this quite a bit with clients. I have experienced this quite a bit

myself. Gram per gram, protein is going to satiate you at a level that carbs and fats simply cannot. The only thing that I think can even touch protein when it comes to its ability to satiate you on a gram per gram level, meaning if we're equating for something like food volume, which is never going to happen, but I digress. I see this a lot in my practice. Protein is an incredibly satiating nutrient. Of course, when we think of it, we think of muscle growth. Muscle is made of protein.

Protein powder is memed and marketed in such a way that when people think of protein and people who want to eat a lot of protein, they think of big bulky meat heads. And I know that that conventional wisdom can be hard to shake, but protein is actually phenomenal if weight loss is a goal too, because again, the first point we're talking about is proteins empirical, the actual body of literature to support that it keeps you full. And obviously me just sitting here and saying, hey, you know, my clients do this stuff. It works.

That's not something you should listen to on its own. Like I might be able to provide some direction, but it's also important to look at the literature. I think to be evidence-based, you need to be focusing on what the body of literature tells you and shows you. You need to be looking at what you're seeing anecdotally and in the real world in practice. And you need to look at what other people are doing and what's working for them. And you need to take all that stuff into account. But having a body of evidence that says, whoa, look, this really works. And there's a lot here.

I'm looking at four separate studies right here on this page, or five now. But I think what you got to say is, okay, looking for does this show up in real life? Do I see it? And can I confirm it in the literature? You can do either one of those, I think, in either order. If you're going to say, okay, well, it shows up in the literature,

but it's impractical, we're not really going to see this in life. Okay, those are your boxes to check. And we're going to hit on all 10 points, and all 10 of these points are evidence-based. So I just want to make sure that I'm making that clear. I will add my own commentary to these things because I think there's value in that. But this is an evidence-based list, and all of the points I'm going to be making will have a citation. I'll include the link

to the article in the actual show notes here below. But we know protein is going to be effective in helping you maintain fullness. It feels satiated and reduce your appetite. When you're trying to lose weight, appetite can be problematic because we have like adjusted levels of appetite that change depending on how we eat and if you have reached a certain level where you've said okay i would like to lose a little bit of weight i'm not particularly comfortable at my weight i would like to reduce my body fat the easiest way to do that is by reducing your calorie intake yes you could exercise and not change how much you're eating, but that can be really hard and that can change how you feel.

It can make you hungry. Steep changes in your caloric intake. For example, if you're going from a level of food intake that was putting you in a calorie surplus to a level of food intake that is putting you in a deficit, there are going to be some chemical changes in your body that make you feel hungry. And that can be an incredibly frustrating feeling

when you're trying to lose weight because it's one of the many reasons people struggle with consistency. So increasing protein intake, something that makes you feel fuller, that's also generally lower in terms of total calories per gram than like a lot of the foods we're eating.

We eat a lot of foods that have a lot of fat, which have over, that's nine calories per gram essentially. And while carbs also have four calories per gram or carbs and protein, I should say both have four. We eat more carbs, we eat more fats and the protein that we do eat generally loses some of its caloric weight to digestion. It's a little bit harder to digest thanks to something called the thermic effect of feeding, which we can use to go, hmm, how much chemical energy is actually used within the body to break these things down? Well, protein uses the most, much more than carbs and fat. So even though fat has twice as many calories, and even though carbs has the same amount, the volume of which we eat those

foods and their generally lower ability to satiate us makes protein kind of stick out as this macro that, hey, it's going to keep me full. It's going to help me hold on to muscle. All that stuff really matters. Moving on to number two, increases muscle mass and strength. I don't have much to add here. You've probably heard me harp on this many times, but when you go to the gym, when you work out, you are damaging muscle tissue. Your muscle tissue is made mostly from protein. So what do you need to rebuild that muscle tissue? You need to actually take in more dietary protein. Your body then goes, okay, great. The protein we just ate is loaded with all of these amino acids,

especially if these are complete proteins like whey protein or a comprehensive plant protein supplement. Your body takes those amino acids and not all of them are necessarily super important for muscle growth and repair. Some of them are better for other things. Your body takes them all across your body. But if you're, and they do all kinds of things. Protein is not only for muscle growth.

Your hair is made of protein. Your skin is made of protein. So many different construction pieces, pieces, parts, whatever you want to call them, knickknacks, doodads in your body are made out of proteins. But you need to get enough when you're deliberately damaging your muscles, right? Especially if your goal is to grow more muscle. So I don't have a ton to add here beyond the fact that getting protein in obviously has

been proven time and time again to increase muscle mass and strength. And if your goals are body fat reduction, longevity, performance, obviously if you want to be a bodybuilder, but those things all are aided and abetted by building muscle. Even getting older and having a little bit of extra muscle is going to help. For women in particular, it will reduce the risk of things like osteopenia and osteoporosis. And I have a lot of women who I work with in their 30s and 40s who primarily work out for body composition, but they regularly communicate to me. It's so nice to know that if I keep with this habit, I'm going to have a much easier time with like my bone density and menopause and hormones. And all that stuff is definitely true as well. Moving on to point number three, it's good for your bones. I kind of segued us there knowing that this was coming, but there's a nice point here in the article that says an ongoing myth perpetuates the idea that protein, mainly animal protein, is bad for your bones. This is based on the idea that protein increases acid load in the body, leading to calcium leaching

from your bones in order to neutralize the acid. However, the most long-term studies indicate that protein, including animal protein, has major benefits for bone health. So another one of those structures that is made out of protein is your bones. It's also made, of course, out of minerals, and that's part of the reason why we need things like calcium. But your bone isn't just like one solid lump of calcium. Your bone has many different types of bone within it. Well, depending on the type of bone, but you can have things like spongy bone, uh, for example, that if you looked at spongy bone, you're like, what the heck is that made out of? And I remember when we did anatomy dissections, uh, in college, looking at the different parts of the bone, you could tell that some of these structures were made functionally

out of different stuff. They like feel the same. Some are softer, some crack more easily than others. Um, but you're like, this is, and this is a mixture of different compounds and protein. It's actually one of the things that we need for bone health. So really good point there. But additionally, just to highlight something like menopause, cause I think that's something that we really tend to overlook when we communicate about fitness. And I've worked with a lot of women going through menopause and they tend to just feel like they've been completely forgotten about by the industry. But this is an especially important note for women who are at high risk of osteoporosis after menopause. Eating plenty of protein and staying active is a good way to prevent that from happening. So great note there. Again, this is

not my writing. This is a Healthline article. I quite like Healthline as a resource. They listed what they call here, or the author listed what he has down here as 10 science-backed reasons to eat more protein. And again, his name is Chris Gunner from healthline.com. Articles linked in the show notes. I think you guys would do well to read this

or share this with people who are concerned about their protein intake because there's so many myths that persist. You know, we just went over the one about it being bad for your bones and the evidence shows quite the opposite, but it's fascinating how much, uh,

kind of misinformation is spread about something that is so valuable, uh, like protein, like this is something that is incredibly valuable for your longterm health. And for there to just be a bunch of bullshit floating around there, it rubs me the wrong way. I think we can do better. On to point number four. This one is about cravings and protein's ability to reduce cravings. There's a study that shows overweight men. One study in overweight men showed that increasing protein 25%, so moving protein up to 25% of

calories, reduced cravings by 60% and the desire to snack at night by half. So again, I think that's just an additional kind of sub point to that original point made about satiety, but that's really, really beneficial. A lot of people deal with cravings. So something that I will often do for fat loss clients and muscle building clients or bodybuilding clients alike is paste that protein out into four feedings, not only so that we get a trickle effect, if you will, of amino acid availability, so that we're always giving our body a little bit of amino acid to work with, especially if we're trying to build, but also so that we can make better food decisions across the

day, right? So that we can make sure that we're not a victim to just being, you know, catastrophically hungry when we're in a deficit because we haven't eaten any protein. We're like, oh, I'm saving all that for dinner. Spread it out. It makes a big, big difference. Protein can increase metabolism here. That's point number five, right?

We're looking at that thermic effect of food for why that would be the case. The boost in metabolism that you get from increasing protein intake largely comes from the increase in the TEF or the actual energy cost of breaking it down. So that's another reason why it's beneficial for fat loss. Protein has been shown to lower blood pressure, point number six. Number seven, it can help maintain weight loss. I talk about this all the time with you guys here on the podcast about the importance of maintaining muscle when in a deficit. Too many people go straight into a calorie deficit and try to lose as much weight as possible as fast as possible doing crash dieting, tons of aerobic exercise, and not enough resistance training. And that's fucking shitty. That does not set you up for long-term success.

You will lose a lot of weight very quickly. Some of that will be muscle. Some of that will be water. Much of it will be fat. But if you lose a ton of muscle and you lose weight very rapidly and you restrict big time, you're setting yourself up for one of two most likely outcomes. The most likely is probably that you have a huge rebound and you put all the weight back on. The second most likely outcome is that you develop a really negative relationship with food and you kind of get stuck in this situation where you kind of stay at the weight you got to, but you have to live a miserably small existence to do it by just not ever enjoying food or eating anything. And you want to maintain muscle while you are dieting. It's critical. It's for that reason I generally recommend dieting

with a caloric intake not well below your maintenance. So not going into the biggest deficit you can handle, but going into a deficit that's small enough that it gives you space to get enough protein, gives you space to have enough fuel to resistance train, and then you can really do what you need to do to save muscle. Protein does not cause harm to kidneys. This is point number eight. This is something that often is spread around. I talked about why protein misinformation kind of irks me. I think we can just do better as an industry in communicating how positive it is because so much of the communication amongst lay people and non-fitness fanatics is that protein is like not the best for you and it could be bad for your kidneys, which doesn't seem to be the case unless you already have kidney issues. Again, that's

highlighted in this article, which is really great. Number nine, helps your body repair itself after injury. You're probably aware of protein's ability to help you repair musculature, right? If you damage your muscle in the gym, you can build it back up. We highlighted that earlier in the episode, but we use protein to recover from things like injuries, whether that be soft tissue or even surgery. If you're healing from an incision, you need protein to bring those tissues back together. It's crazy, but you'll actually need to eat more. And then number 10 is helps you stay fit as you age because protein intake stave off sarcopenia.

Sarcopenia is age-related. Well, it's just muscle mass in general, but age-related muscle mass loss over time, similar to something you've probably heard of. We highlighted it earlier. Osteopenia. So sarcopenia happens with age. We lose muscle generally from inactivity and dietary changes, but also some of the hormonal

stuff that changes as we age. Like men, for example, aren't producing that much testosterone when they're 60, 70, 80. And testosterone is a muscle that really helps with muscle maintenance, especially with muscle growth. But even if you're not resistance training, having elevated levels of testosterone will probably benefit how much muscle mass you carry around.

So age-related muscle loss kind of sucks, especially for metabolism. And we highlighted that Ponser study a while back where we saw metabolism doesn't change too much with age. I think it was somewhere around 0.7% per year, which I think is easier to frame as 7% per decade after the age of 60 that we start to see muscle loss on that clip. And I think a lot are metabolism reductions along

that clip. I think a lot of that has to probably do with age-related muscle loss. So muscle mass will help you age more gracefully for a variety of different reasons. And I think that that's a awesome reason to increase your protein intake. If you're longevity based, you're not thinking about performance, not thinking about physique, you just want to live a long, healthy life. I might get the protein intake where it needs to be at least at a level that helps you maintain muscle, which close to about 0.7 grams per pound at the low end. 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. Now that we've got that covered, I want to share with you four really effective ways to increase the amount of protein you get throughout the day. These are

habit-based nutritional changes that I think are very actionable that you'll be able to take with you when we're finished here and start implementing into your life. So number one is to make a conscious effort to include protein in every meal. So protein breakfast, protein lunch, protein dinner and protein snacks. A lot of people eat three meals a day and a snack. If you have multiple different meals, you might have some snacks. Perhaps you have like two meals and three snacks. You might have your largest protein servings with your, you know, two big meals and maybe something small with these snacks, but it's important to get protein feeding spread across the day. So an example of a breakfast I really like with protein is something like an English muffin. I tend to have a multi-grain English muffin or even a whole

grain one because I do like to get some of my nutrition from whole grains. Uh, I also just tend to like the robust earthy taste of whole grains. Um, why that is, I'm not so sure, but I don't hate the non, um, multi-grain English muffins. I think they taste better, uh, or they have a better texture. Let's just say that. And so when I'm dieting, I'll do these open face, which I'm doing right now to get ready for my trip to Mexico. I wanted to lose a little body fat because I feel better with a little less body fat on my frame. And when I'm dieting might not be the right way to phrase that when I'm trying to reduce body fat by being in a calorie deficit, which I think is easy for me to do. I will serve an open faced sandwich in the morning with two over-easy eggs, some ham, and some lower-fat cheese. If I'm not necessarily focusing on my calorie intake, I would just do these sandwiches with the entire English muffin and use two instead of using one and serving side-by-side two open-faced sandwiches. So that's one way that I can go about doing that for breakfast that I really like. I also love having yogurt and fruit and I love a protein shake in the morning because it's quick and it allows me to get into my workflow. It allows me to get to work with my

clients, whether that be in person or doing the various things I'm doing through core coaching method with myself and the clients that we have at core. So the second thing I'll do generally for my second meal, because I want you guys to get an idea of, hey, what does four protein-rich feedings look like? Because I tend to really enjoy having a big serving of protein at lunch. Usually these are simple things like chicken and rice that I can just microwave, take with me, go. They're quick. I don't have to do too much preparatory work in advance to have some enjoyable chicken and rice, but I will add a lot of seasonings or even hotter sauces because it adds flavor without a ton of additional calories. When I'm not watching my calories or my calories are at less of a premium, I tend to just aim

for a lunch that has protein that I will enjoy. And I like to cook a variety of different things at home. Sometimes I will have lunch delivered if I'm in my workflow because that's convenient, or I'll go out to get lunch after I finish with clients and have a later dinner. As for that dinner meal, that tends to be the best time for me to get a lot of protein. I like to barbecue and I like to use my smoker. So I generally will do things like fish, red meat, chicken at that meal paired with some pretty dense servings of carbohydrate. I like things like rice. I use my air fryer quite a bit to make things like sweet potato fries. I like a variety of different vegetables. I will often do an entire bag salad. Like I just love those quick and easy

salads that have, you know, a little packet of dressing, a small packet of cheese, a small packet of walnuts, you know, and it's like, okay, easy, quick salad. I tend to get the ones that are less ridiculous in terms of like what the flavors are. Like I'll get like raspberry vinaigrette and walnut salad. I won't get like, you know, uncle Sam's cat, you know, just taco fully loaded salad of, you know, diabetes 5,000 salad. I don't, I try to stay away from those and you can tell, you can look at the back and be like, all right, this is just fucking pure fat in the dressing. Just the most calories you could possibly get into this dressing. I'm not putting this on my salad. Like I'm not going to rip open to this and be like, yeah, this is a salad. No. Um, it's 900 calories of dressing. And so unfortunately I can't really get away with that right now, trying to stay between

25 and 2,800 calories per day. That's just where I'm at. It's not a recommendation for anybody else and it's not an indictment of those salads, but that is probably not going to be super feasible for me unless I really reduce the size of that salad down to something much smaller and I have a smaller serving. So I tend to roll with those more vinaigrette based dressings that are lower on the fat and therefore lower on the calories. Put that on there. Quick salad, big serving of protein, maybe something starchy carbohydrate based that I like. And then for snacks, like I said earlier, I love to have yogurt and protein

for breakfast. I also love to have yogurt and protein powders for snacks. I love beef jerky as a snack. I know a lot of people don't like jerky and that just bums me out. I love biltong, which is another form of jerky. I keep quick air fryer bowl or oven bakeable things around like chicken nuggets that tend to be really easy. I will often make like an almond butter. I'll put almond butter on two multi-grain English muffins, which each of those have about seven grams of protein. So it ends up being like 14 with the two English muffins

and then another little bit of almond butter and I'll get up to like 20. There's a lot of calories from carbs and fats there, but that would all depend on how I was eating. But those are some of the ways I spread my protein intake across the day into these different meals I like. And I kind of recommend you doing the same, especially if you're somebody who's trying to either build muscle or lose body fat. I think you'll benefit from doing both of those things. The second tip I have is to just make sure that you keep lots of protein snacks around the house if you are somebody who is

monitoring your calorie intake. So this is something that's working very well for me right now. And I like to load my house up with protein rich snacks. So things like yogurt, the Icelandic Greek yogurt, which I've really been liking. Cheese tends to be a fine option for me because I will eat that in reasonable amounts. Cottage cheese, I don't love, but that's something that tends to work really well. Nuts and seeds, again, protein, easy to snack on, can be high in calories. They do tend to have fiber. Just need to be mindful of the amount. Jerky, things like canned fish, tuna,

not my favorite, but some people really like that. A lot of multigrain options like I've included, but we'll have protein. Chickpeas, those are all things you can, there's so many different plant-based protein snacks available now, but Those are all things you can, there's so many different plant based protein snacks available now, but just going and making a mindful conscious effort of filling your space with snacks that contain protein. If you're somebody who either likes to snack, who is looking to build muscle and you need to up your protein intake, you're looking to lose body fat and replace maybe some of those higher calorie snack options with things that will satiate you and also help you work towards your goal. So that's a big, big one that has worked really

well for me and my clients, which is just loading up and really designing the environment from easy access protein. Number three, bars and shakes aren't the enemy. A lot of people think that protein shakes and protein bars are bad for you because they can contain some pretty interesting ingredients when it comes to things like gums, or maybe they contain artificial sweeteners. They keep the sugar low. But I think in general, they're a good, effective, quick way to get protein. One every once in a while isn't going to kill you. I think some of these whey protein isolates that are on the market right now are phenomenal. They're sourced from grass-fed cows. They're tested for from grass-fed cows.

They're tested for all kinds of shit. You can see batch numbers. You can see purity. A lot of companies are upping the ante, and you should always make sure you're buying from a reputable company like Legion, but I think that the protein side of the industry is getting better. When it comes to shakes, my go-to is whey isolate.

I also think whey concentrate is great, but if you're sensitive to lactose, you might want to be careful there. Plant proteins are phenomenal. You just need to get a blend like pea and rice. Collagen's not bad for upping your protein intake, but when you break down the amino acid profile of collagen, you'll see it's not particularly high in those amino acids most associated with muscle growth.

So those are the powders I don't mind getting protein from, but I would stick with whey isolate if you are looking to get the best response gram per gram from your protein powder and you can handle dairy. And so my fourth tip is get between 25 and four and 35. I think I could go as high as 40 depending on your size, but get between 25 and 35% of your daily protein goal with breakfast. Doing this will help you stay ahead. It's really hard to catch up if you fall behind. Meaning if you start your day with a iced coffee and scone from Starbucks, you might end up in a situation where you get to noon, you haven't had any protein, you now have like eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours to get 100

grams of protein in. And for many people, that's really, really hard. So starting your day with some protein can be really advantageous with regards to making sure you get enough across the day. And if you can get to that half point of your day and you're like, hey, you know, I'm 40 to 60% of the way to my protein goal because I had a big protein breakfast and maybe a protein snack,

that's a lot easier to manage than like getting home from a stressful night work or day at work, it's late. You got shit to deal with before you kind of turn it around and get right to your next thing the next day. Cause a lot of people are living stressful, busy lives. It's not fun to get home at five o'clock and be like, Oh, I have 70 to 80% of my daily protein total to hit. So I'm going to be eating like nothing but protein shakes and chicken. And, and I think when you spread it out, you get a lot of additional benefits for metabolism. You get additional benefits for muscle hypertrophy. You also just generally make it easier to get in a decent amount of protein. Last tip, the final tip, bonus tip. I find that generally the range my

clients perform the best in is 0.7 to 1 grams per pound. If you are heavier, if you're somebody who has a weight that you would like to lose, or you're just comfortable at a higher body weight, you might have a hard time. Like let's just say you're trying to eat a gram per pound, but you weigh 300 pounds, 300 grams of protein, because it's so satiating is going to be really hard to eat. You don't have to follow those numbers. You could use calculation uh to see what your lean mass is and do 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of lean mass or you can just try to get four decently sized protein feedings across the day we're going to finish up the episode today guys with two questions or actually no we got four questions in the doc today that i think are pretty interesting so we'll

blast through those mix things up kind of give you a little second to debrief and cool down from all the protein stuff. Just gave you a half an hour straight of riffing on protein. And I think that you're ready for something different. So this question comes from David Bahena, David underscore Bahena underscore. What's the best working out at night or in the morning? I've said this before on the podcast, but it's worth reiterating. You'll probably find most people perform better in the afternoon and evening than they do in the very early morning, but you can do well training any time of day. And depending on your schedule, it's likely that calibrating your gym appointments largely around the same cluster of time will be easier.

Meaning if you tend to be able to go every day before work, that might be easier than some days going before work and some days going after. We do better when we're in a routine. So I would just say, if you want to take a stab at trying a couple weeks in the morning, trying a couple weeks in the afternoon,

seeing which one's better for your performance and then trying to schedule your gym times around those times for the long run, that's the best way to handle it this one's from at lily flower fit any benefits to sweet gels and belts not really not really much at all so the belts are just keeping the sweet gel or sweat oh sweat sweat gel got it any benefits to sweat gels or belts no what we're getting here with the belt the belt's just kind of holding the gel on the skin. It's making sure that it maintains surface contact and it's creating congestion. It's not allowing for heat exchange to occur. So you're

going to build up a lot of sweat, which we internally go like, Ooh, it's warm down there. I'm sweaty. I took it off and it was just full of sweat. That's good, right? Well, all the gel's really doing is like also clogging the pores, not really allowing for a lot of exchange of temperature, holding hot air and hot temperatures in with, you know, this compressive garmentry closed in around it. Then you might have a top on over that. So I don't think it's doing anything that isn't purely psychosomatic and you're just thinking it's good because of the sweat. So if you like the sweat and it motivates you to train, maybe, but it's not going to do anything for reducing midsection fat. Okay. Progressive overload. This one's from Jordan Deutsch. This one is progressive overload. Do more weight or each do more weight each week, or doesn't have to be each week. Meaning do you have to progress every

single week with weight? Absolutely not. Remember you can progressively overload by doing more reps with the same weight, by doing the same weight for the same reps with better technique, with better execution, with a reduced rest period as a function of the superset. There's so many ways you might go about driving progressive overload. And I think if you're looking for week-to-week improvements, you can find them. But it might be harder the longer you've been training to spot small week-to-week improvements, especially when working with women, given that they have the menstrual cycle to worry about, particularly women who haven't gone through menopause. I mean, obviously women who haven't gone through menopause. But when you are looking at that menstrual cycle and you go, okay, well, there's some distinct

times in the month where I might do better in the gym than others. And if I'm only looking for linear improvements, a woman, you'll find they hit that point in the gym than others. And if I'm only looking for linear improvements, I'm going to, a woman is, you'll find they hit that point in the cycle where they see their training decrease. Not all women are like this, but some women have an acute training decrease either during PMS or during the last week of that cycle. And some women do really well in the first two weeks.

So if you're looking week to week and you go from a bad week to a good week, you'll be like, oh my gosh, look how much I fucking jacked up my numbers. But if you flip week and you go from a bad week to a good week, you'll be like, oh my gosh, look how much I fucking jacked up my numbers. But if you flip that and you go from a good week into one of those weeks hormonally where you're not really primed to perform, you might go, oh, I didn't achieve progressive overload. And it's like, no, we have to change the context here of what that looks like this week. So you'd be a little patient with that.

And I think in the long run, you really have to zoom out and look at like big improvements on, on big lifts, on big physique stuff, whatever, over many months and many years, once you've been training for a while. And last question is from Lolo and co she asked, why is it whenever I eat broccoli, I feel bloated. I can't say for sure, because again, I'm not a dietician and this could be potentially potentially some type of allergy thing. But what I tend to find is when people start eating a lot of vegetables and they don't chew them thoroughly, they don't break down the cellulose enough in their mouth, like by actually mechanical digestion of chewing on the damn thing. And they swallow these big clumps of fibrous vegetables and they eat really fast.

The digestion rate, the slowness at which those things digest, it can cause some digestive discomfort and things like gas and bloating. So just generally my recommendation whenever that stuff pops up for clients is do your best to chew your food. All right, you guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode, the protein primer. It was a lot of fun and I hope you share it with anybody who might have questions about protein or might be making some dietary decisions on their own and they're looking to lose weight, but they don't yet understand the impact that protein can have for weight loss, or they're looking to build muscle and they don't understand the benefit protein can have for weight loss, or they're interested in longevity. So please feel free to share it. Leave me a five-star rating and review

on iTunes, and I'll catch you on the next one.