Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 143: How to Maintain Gains on Vacation/Holiday(s) +3 Overrated and 3 Underrated Exercises

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

In this episode, coach Danny reviews the tactics he thinks worse for managing your fitness pursuits while traveling or enjoying the holiday season outside of your normal structured routine.---Thanks F...or Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenka. And if you are listening to this, it's the week of Thanksgiving. And today's discussion is going to be about maintaining your fitness results. We'll take a look at this through the lens of somebody who perhaps wants to build muscle or perhaps somebody who might be looking to change their body composition. Now you might navigate the holidays or vacation time outside of your structured routine in general to stay on track without making too many egregious sacrifices. Being the guy at the family gathering with the Tupperware isn't for everyone, so I want to make sure this stuff is actionable.
Starting point is 00:00:43 Tupperware isn't for everyone, so I want to make sure this stuff is actionable. But before we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, as it is the week of Thanksgiving, I just wanted to relay an honest and genuine thank you to every single one of you who listens to the podcast, who subscribed, who has shared this, who has helped leave a five-star rating and review, things that help the podcast grow. It's been very, very special to be able to create a space where I can go and communicate directly with my audience in a way that I think is so much better than what you can get out of social media. While I enjoy using social media to disseminate some of my message in ways that are perhaps broad, meaning
Starting point is 00:01:21 the message spreads very quickly, I think podcasting allows for a lot of depth. It allows us to have big time discussions about interesting topics and talk about stuff that isn't easy to talk about on social media, whether that's due to character constraints or just the lack of nuance that comes with text and all the various things that happen on those platforms. So this is such a cool space. I'm so grateful for it. I'm thankful for every single one of you for continuing to listen, especially this time of year. Many of you help pay my bills by being clients, working with my company directly, whether that's with me, with one of my other coaches, supporting the show by purchasing the different things that my sponsors offer that I think are really cool products. But again, you could purchase those
Starting point is 00:02:03 through anyone, from anyone, and you choose to purchase them through me, which is phenomenally, it's just, it's something that I think about often. It's something that I'm very, very grateful for. This didn't have to happen to me. It's a byproduct of every single one of you continuing to show up and download the episodes every week. And I'm very grateful for you. I hope you have a phenomenal holiday. I know that the holidays can be tough, that we typically paint these pictures of, you know, the entire family being around the dinner table and the media portrayal of what the holidays looks like is so picturesque, cliche and idealistic. And I know that not many people live that holiday life. You know, as a child of divorced parents who has two parents who are sick with different afflictions, it can be challenging to get
Starting point is 00:02:48 everybody together. And quite frankly, the holidays can be really stressful and you feel like sometimes you don't fit in. So for everybody out there, whether you have that more idealistic, typical holiday vibe, or maybe you're just looking to get through this part of the year because it's tough. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening, and I cannot wait to do great work together in the new year. Before I outline some of these tips for maintaining your gains or continuing your progress while on vacation, while out of a rhythm throughout the holidays, as well as going over some exercise stuff that I find very interesting, some overrated, underrated exercises, I wanted to let you guys know that the primary sponsor of the podcast, Legion Athletics, is having their best supplement
Starting point is 00:03:30 sale of the year. Most supplements are 40% off. If you're like me, you like to buy in bulk to secure a volume discount by shopping at places like Costco, where the more you buy, the more you save. This is the largest sale I've ever seen from Legion. And I would go so far as to say, I think that 40% off mark is probably the best you will see. So if you want to buy a little bit more upfront to lock in that up to 40% discount, you should definitely do that. The things I take every day are my creatine, which is recharge, my whey plus protein, my Genesis greens, my multivitamin, and my Triton omega-3 supplement. And so you can lock that up for the whole year damn near at 40%
Starting point is 00:04:12 off if you're willing to drop the coin on it. And if you shop using the checkout code Danny, you will get two times points. There's no need for a discount code. You just simply cannot beat 40% off. So stock up for the next couple months on those essentials, save you money in the long term. These things also make really good Christmas gifts. If you have people in your life that are interested in weight loss, they're inspired by you, they want to build muscle, they want to increase their performance. Things like nutritional supplements can really help them get started, especially if they're reputable, they're clinically dosed, they're evidence-based, the labeling is transparent. It's a cool gift idea for that person who might be hard to shop for that's
Starting point is 00:04:49 into fitness too. So here we go, guys, without further ado, getting into how to maintain your gains slash train when you're on vacation. Or we get to the holiday season where we're outside of our typical structure. Maybe we're visiting our parents. Maybe we're on a vacation. I'll be in Cancun for Thanksgiving. By the time you probably hear this, I will be in Cancun. So what I want you guys to remember is when it comes to training progress, it's always important to zoom out. It's very rarely a missed session, a bad session, a missed week or a bad week that sets us up for failure in the long term. It's usually multiple weeks, multiple months on end of not following through to the standard we need to follow through at to see those goals that sets us back. And I think a lot of people
Starting point is 00:05:36 go into the holidays or go into these structure breaks. I like to call them a little bit panicked. They're freaking out. They're wondering, how am I going to get my goals? How am I going to, how am I going to get my gains? Where am I going to work out? There's no equipment. I can't get to the gym. I think you can take a week off a year at least and be completely fine. And it might even help your gains. And that is something that I really struggled with. But one of the things that really, really interested me when I first started pursuing health and fitness as a passion, as a career was the sport of bodybuilding. And one of the things that I found really fascinating was almost every competitor who competes in the Mr. Olympia, which is the highest,
Starting point is 00:06:13 highest kind of stage you can get on as a bodybuilder. They almost all take several, several days or weeks off after the Mr. Olympia competition where they don't train, they don't necessarily watch what they eat because they just need a mental break. And I think a lot of us, even though we don't compete, we train really, really hard or we live these really, really rigid lives where we've got a lot of things on our schedule and we're fitting in workouts and we're fitting in our nutrition goals, which is awesome. I applaud every single one of you. But I do think stepping away from that for your mental health, for your wellbeing is really, really valuable. So a fully 100% acceptable way to handle a vacation, a holiday like Thanksgiving
Starting point is 00:06:59 or Christmas, where maybe you leave on a Wednesday and you're there Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then you come back and you start again on Monday, right? We're talking about a couple days, maybe even a couple weeks out of your routine. I think it's very, very acceptable to just step away entirely. And if you want to do a little bit of work nutritionally by aiming to hit your protein, get some sun, get moving, get good sleep, that'll help you maintain almost every ounce of gains you've made. I don't think you're going to lose gains from taking a week off. I think most bodybuilders would probably tell you that. There's also this really cool thing called
Starting point is 00:07:34 super compensation that drives most of the adaptations we see in the gym. Basically, what super compensation is, is you take a stimulus like resistance training and you apply it to the organism, the body, your body, my body. So we take that stimulus resistance training, we apply it to our body and we slowly ratchet up the amplitude or the volume of that stimulus. And so we go from a level that we can handle into a phase where we reach beyond what we've currently been capable of doing. That's what drives the results. That's what we do with the programming through my company core coaching method. We take a look at our client. We say, this is where you're at. This is where we want you to be. We've got to systemically ratchet up the programming from block to block
Starting point is 00:08:17 to block to block to block. So we inch you along by exposing your body to increased stress in a systematic way. Not so much that you totally tank, not so much that you get injured, but just enough that we push those gains along. And then when we start a new block, we usually bring the volume back down. We bring the intensity back down. We work a deload in on occasion. We're creating room for that stressor as we ratchet it up to become so much that it drives change. And it drives change after we've ratcheted the stress up to a level that then we can recover from. We go all the way up to that level. We turn that stress up just about as high as we can handle it. And then we recover. And so at the week level or
Starting point is 00:08:59 the level of a week, that looks like for some people, we train really hard three days a week and we take four days to recover. For more advanced lifters, we might do five or six days a week and we take one to two days to recover. But across an entire training year, we can actually get these small little bubbles of super compensation where we train really, really hard. We push up to that threshold. And then when we make that time for recovery, that's when super compensation occurs. we make that time for recovery, that's when super compensation occurs. And super compensation is the body's new set point or baseline jumping up a notch. And basically what we're doing is we've hit that level of stress. It's triggered a stimulus. Our body goes, we've got to adapt to this. We take that recovery time, the adaptation occurs, and we actually overshoot our original
Starting point is 00:09:41 threshold. We get better. Super compensation is getting better after recovering from an imposed stress. And so for many of you, you have a hard time taking days off, days off, let alone weeks off. And so I think a lot of you have some super compensation in the tank and taking a week off might actually be a good idea if it's what's most practical for you, for your family, for your loved ones. You know, one of the things that I have done neurotically and obsessively across my training career is not missing very many sessions, even if that meant I had to make some sacrifices. And I take a lot of pride in that, but those sacrifices have opportunity costs. And those were probably meals that I could have had with friends and loved ones or phone calls, various different
Starting point is 00:10:23 things that I could have done with that time that I insisted on training a fifth, maybe sixth day a week. And it's important to remember that if you take a week off, you're making space to do other things that can fill your life with positivity, with joy, with just goodness. And that's never a bad thing. But I know a lot of you want to train. So let's talk a little bit about how we can do that. So first scenario is going to be for anybody who's looking to really do this to the max. And that's if you know where you're going to go. I think it's very valuable to call ahead to the local area and see what gyms offer a pass. Now you can ask if they will offer you a week pass. If you pay maybe a hundred dollars, sometimes these can be pretty expensive,
Starting point is 00:11:11 or you can ask the cost of a day pass. And I find that if you're going to be gone anywhere from, let's say three to seven days, that calling ahead and seeing if it's a good idea for a week pass from for a day pass, just see, okay, this is the duration of time I'm going to be gone. I'd like to do maybe two workouts. Can I call ahead and see if I can get a day pass for those two days? Or maybe even a week pass might be cheaper, right? If you're staying at a hotel or you're looking at booking a hotel and you need or want to stay active, I strongly recommend Googling the hotel name followed by the word gym or fitness center. Actually scope it out because if we're talking about like a Hilton, a Marriott, hotel chains, where perhaps the difference between these two hotels is purely aesthetic on the outside,
Starting point is 00:12:04 you're going to get a run-of-the-mill queen bed, a 32-inch flat screen, a stupid little table in the corner nobody's going to fucking sit at, and you're only going to put your bags in there before you go do the other shit you're doing on vacation and traveling. A lot of these hotels are very run-of-the-mill. They're standard. There's nothing there that's moving the needle one way or another. We often just opt for what's cheaper. If one of these has a really nice gym and you've actually scoped that out, that might be the place
Starting point is 00:12:30 to stay if you want to stay active, if you want to stay 100% dialed to your goal. So this example is for the type A person, the person who's not going to miss a workout. It's important to them that they stay on their routine. They're not looking to maybe get some extra recovery in. They're not looking to pump the brakes because they've been pushing it really hard. They're in the middle of it. They're in the thick of it. They're going to go for it. So step one, if that's you, call ahead to the local areas.
Starting point is 00:12:56 See if you can find a gym close to where you'll be staying, whether that's with a friend, with a relative at a hotel. Ask for week or month passes. Usually we're looking at days and weeks, but if it's longer, you could go month. And then if you're looking for the most convenient and cost effective, try to find the hotel or, you know, lodging situation that offers a in-house exercise facility that's going to do the job. And I tend to find what, if your goals are fat loss, that's going to do the job. And I tend to find if your goals are fat loss, this gets a little easier because it's still very important to lift, but you could easily just up your activity in
Starting point is 00:13:32 other ways. But we're looking for things that have usually dumbbells. It's very rare to find hotel gyms that offer barbells. So unfortunately, if your training protocol is going to require that you have barbells, you're going to need to probably call ahead. Very rare to find a hotel with barbells. But if you can find a gym that just has dumbbells and a bench, you can make that work. You will have to select dumbbell exercises that are efficient, but you shouldn't have any problem doing like a push day, a pull day, a leg day, an upper day, a lower day, whatever your split, whatever your routine calls for total body day, um, with just a gym that offers some dumbbells.
Starting point is 00:14:10 And usually there will be more things. Uh, you'll find oftentimes cables, even some machines, you don't necessarily know exactly what you're going to get and that's fine. But most of these hotel chain gyms or hotel chains will have a fitness center or gym. It's always good to scope that out in advance because I have seen some that literally only have a treadmill and like two pairs of dumbbells or one kettlebell. And that's not necessarily enough to get much done. And we'll talk about some options if you are traveling and you don't want to maybe go to a gym or you're going to be traveling to a space where that's off the off, like maybe out of the question because you're off the grid, you name it. So we'll get to the next option here. But that's for type A's or people that
Starting point is 00:14:53 need to get it done or people that are really rigid to their routine and they're just not willing to sacrifice. 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 moving on to a second option,
Starting point is 00:15:29 this would be if you didn't wanna deal with a gym, maybe you didn't wanna deal with a hotel, maybe you're staying with a loved one, maybe you're doing something like what I'm doing, you're going to Mexico, but you're not going to a part of Mexico that has a gym. And so this is something that I've implemented with clients and had a lot
Starting point is 00:15:45 of success with. And that is just packing three small pieces of fitness equipment that you can get your hands on for under 200 bucks. And so the first is a TRX or suspension trainer. TRX have gotten a little bit more expensive. And those are the best. I have found that TRX is the best by far, but there are some knockoff suspension trainers that will do the trick. And these things weigh next to nothing. You can toss them over a door, time to a fence, time to a tree, and you can do a massive amount of exercises on them from core exercises, a tremendous amount of back and shoulder exercises. That's one of the best things about the suspension trainer is training body weight, shoulder exercises, that's one of the best things about the suspension trainer is training body weight back and shoulders is really, really hard if you are not super strong in your upper body,
Starting point is 00:16:32 right? Like a lot of the body weight back and shoulder exercises require tremendous amount of upper body strength. Not the case here. If you have a suspension trainer, you can do rows, T flies, Y flies, face pulls, all these awesome exercises with just that. The second piece I would pack in that bag is a set of bands. Again, also good for adding resistance to the things like arms specifically. And then I really like BFR cuffs. And so BFR cuffs are blood flow restriction cuffs that you can use to create a metabolic stimulus localized kind of in a limb by creating
Starting point is 00:17:06 a tourniquet effect. And so these metabolites build up, things like hydrogen, things like creatine, things like lactate. And those things pooling up while you get a big pump, even doing something like TRX, band or body weight exercise, is going to elicit a response, atypical of body weight training, the kind of response that might in the long term drive some hypertrophy. And so that kind of stuff is nice. And you can just sneak those three things into your bag. They take up next to no space. They weigh next to nothing. You can take them with you almost anywhere. And so if you're not going to be staying at a gym, you're not, or hopefully you're not going to be sleeping at a gym. If you're not going to be staying at a hotel
Starting point is 00:17:44 with a gym, you're not going to be going ahead to a local gym because it's just not what you want to do. I would invest in these things so that you have them available for all of your future travels. If you're somebody who wants to exercise while on vacation or during the holidays, but you're out of your rhythm, I can't stress this enough for most of you, unless you, you know, are new to training, you're in this routine, you're, you're, you're in it, but a lot of you could stand to probably take that rest. And so don't necessarily think you need to go out and get this stuff because resting is not an option. I genuinely believe it is a fine option. And for many of you who train
Starting point is 00:18:20 five, six days a week, religiously, I would just take the fucking week off straight up or a vacation week off. If you're going on vacation, if you're taking, we're talking about Thanksgiving. If you're just like, Oh my God, I need to wake up and burn calories. Cause I'm going to eat a ton. No, you don't. You're fine. Okay. So if there is not, if you're not somebody who wants to buy equipment, you're only going to maybe use body weight. Perhaps this is, this is something that tends to be pretty common. I want to maintain my gains. I want to maintain my progress, but I'm not going to go to the gym. I don't have a hotel gym and I'm not packing any equipment. What do I do? I would recommend high rep body weight exercises, one to two sets per muscle
Starting point is 00:18:56 group done pretty close to failure, sprinkled out here and there one to two times a day, every other day, whatever works exercisesises I tend to find work well with regressions and progressions. The push-up. For advanced lifters, you can do a deficit push-up. For intermediate to novice lifters, you might try a kneeling push-up or push-up on a counter. For the back, obviously a pull-up. When we think about back exercises done bodyweight, pull-ups come to mind, but that's not necessarily always practical. You can do things like inverted rows as well. Those tend to scale pretty well. For the legs, I love lunges and split squats, particularly walking
Starting point is 00:19:36 lunges and split squats. Regressed versions might be bodyweight squats done in a sit-to-stand fashion where you sit down on something and stand up. You could also include for the lunge, a reverse lunge or a lunge where you hold onto something. For the posterior chain, we have things like bridges. Those really work the glutes. You can do that as a hip thrust. That's a little more advanced. You'll pick up some extra range of motion there. For the hamstrings, it gets a little tricky, but you can do towel sliders. If you're advanced, if you're a novice, you might instead try hamstring marches. They're often called. And then for the core, you have a absolute cornucopia. There's your, there's your vocab term that's somehow relevant because it just so happens to be Thanksgiving week. You have a
Starting point is 00:20:20 literal cornucopia of body weight ab exercises you can choose from. And so throwing those together in a haphazard way where you do it fairly close to failure, enough to stimulate the muscles, enough to get a pump will be probably fine to help you maintain muscle. Now, there are some lifestyle things and also that will help you indirectly if your goals are weight loss and you just want to keep the rhythm and the routine going while you get through the holidays. There are some lifestyle things that I think you can do if keeping up with your fitness goals, fat loss, muscle building, performance, athletics, you name it, are important to you while traveling and while on vacation. The first thing is try to sleep as much as you can. Many of us take vacations or take breaks with family because we need that time to recover. We need that time to quote unquote fill our cup.
Starting point is 00:21:03 Don't miss it. Sleep, sleep, sleep as much as you can. Try to lower the stress, get away from your devices, involve yourself in the people that you are with. Again, I know that not everybody has the same situation around the holidays, so I'm not trying to be inconsiderate there. But if you are fortunate enough to be in the presence of your friends, your family, your loved ones, or in a cool place because you're on vacation. Enjoy it. Get away from the device and stay moving. Get outside.
Starting point is 00:21:30 Get in nature. You know, if you can get the family moving, that's awesome. But lifestyle stuff makes a really big difference if you're not one to follow through with any of the exercise prescriptions I might have laid out earlier in the podcast. From a nutrition standpoint, big time focus on protein. So if you are not going to be training, you're going to be taking a week off or you're going to be training less or outside of your routine because you're in a new place and you don't have access to all your equipment or you're trying to get a lot out of something like a TRX bands or even body weight training, getting a bunch of protein can really make a difference. For those of you who have a muscle building gain specifically, I recommend the when in Rome diet.
Starting point is 00:22:11 The when in Rome diet is just to fucking enjoy the damn food. Like seriously, be in a surplus. It's fine. Even if you're not training, it will help you recover. It will help you bounce back. You'll hit it hard when you get home from your shit, whatever you're doing, but don't be afraid to enjoy yourself. If your goals are muscle gain, one of the best parts about the holidays and travel is the food. If you load up on the protein, you probably won't go completely buck wild on the other stuff. And it's really nice to just enjoy yourself, especially if your goals are to build muscle. Um, now if you are dieting, uh, if you're looking to lose body fat and you're not looking to backslide too much around the holidays, I always recommend bringing protein powder and protein bars with you while traveling, loading up on protein and vegetables at those family
Starting point is 00:22:54 meals for your first plate. Make that first plate mostly protein, mostly vegetables, and then have some of the stuff you want. Don't be afraid to go over too much, but front load the high volume foods like the green vegetables and the really satiating foods like the protein. So you don't just have a tendency to overeat those hyper palatable foods and you never really stop eating all day because that can lead to some slip ups. And many of you are wise to try to get ahead and do the best you can. So those are kind of my on the road, quick and dirty pieces of advice for maximizing
Starting point is 00:23:27 the results you're getting when traveling, maintaining the results you're getting while traveling. There's obviously a thousand ways to skin a cat here. And I think you need to look at your situation and go through what we talked about today and see what makes the most sense for you. For those of you who train, like I said, five to six days a week and you're going on vacations, I wouldn't necessarily worry too much about training. If you can, get a few sessions in here and there,
Starting point is 00:23:51 but remember, it's always good to take some time away to really recover. You might get some super compensation. If you're getting in a rhythm, you wanna maintain that rhythm. I love calling ahead. I love seeing what's there. I love if there's a gym,
Starting point is 00:24:03 getting away for a 30, 40 minute workout, having some stuff in the room like TRX bands, body weight, and going for it that way. Okay. Another thing I wanted to talk about today, somebody asked me on Instagram what exercises I thought were overrated and what exercises I thought were underrated. So I figured I'd share three today. I came up with three that I think are overrated. I came up with three that I feel are very much underrated. And so I want to go over the overrated ones first. One of the ones I actually believe to be overrated is the barbell bench press. Now, I don't think barbell bench pressing is bad for you, and I don't think it doesn't have some general applicability for building your chest and shoulders, but I think we've put it on a pedestal
Starting point is 00:24:45 as being a must-perform exercise, particularly when it comes to developing the chest. And I do find that dumbbell pressing and cable flies tend to be a little bit better, especially if you play sports or you do something where shoulder mobility and preserving shoulder mobility is important. I think that the barbell bench press has become something that we have put way too high up on a pedestal because it's been around forever. It's one of the big three. And look, I get it, but it's not the end-all be-all of pec training. And if you do it all the time, I found it leads to a little more wear and tear on the shoulders and the elbows than some of the other presses. So that's the first one that I think is a little bit overrated with some context. Number two is just doing planks for as long as possible.
Starting point is 00:25:30 I think that planks, particularly the RKC plank, are great exercises, but just holding a plank as long as possible, sagging your ass towards the floor, stretching the shit out of your inflexors, not training your core, I don't like that very much. I think there are many more effective core stability exercises than planks for as long as possible. I like RKC planks for 20 to 30 seconds, sometimes higher for my advanced clients. Things like stir the pot, things like pushup planks. I find all of those are better than just holding a plank as long as possible. The last exercise that I think tends to be overrated the way most people do it is the box jump. I think that box jumps are amazing for plyometrics, but I heard somebody say this the other day, and I don't remember who it was, but it was awesome. And they said,
Starting point is 00:26:14 your maximum jump height is never the height of the box you're jumping on, but it's always the height of your maximum jump height. So in many ways, doing things like depth jumps, where you step down from a box and then just jump as high as possible, that might be better than jumping up onto a box. And I find that what most people do when they jump up onto a box is many people are doing that to fatigue as an aerobic exercise, or they're jumping to heights that are really high and you can actually risk injury like skinning your shins up on the box, et cetera. And so I don't think
Starting point is 00:26:45 box jumps for cardio are really a great idea. I think that if you want to develop explosive power, there's better plyometric exercises in general than the box jump. I don't think any of these exercises are bad. I just think they're commonly misapplied and generally overrated. Three that I think are underrated and that I quite like to contrast the bench press is actually the pushup. So I think the pushup is awesome. You get that full range of motion from the scapula because you're not back against a bench. They tend to be phenomenal for all fitness levels. Like I mentioned earlier, when I was talking about bodyweight training modalities, for those who are advanced, you can do deficit pushups or even pushups with a weight on your
Starting point is 00:27:22 back. But particularly for women getting really good push-ups, because there tends to be a little bit of a discrepancy between what a fit guy could do with regards to push-ups and pull-ups and what an equivalently fit woman would be able to do on push-ups and pull-ups. Getting really good at push-ups and pull-ups, particularly for women, is amazing for building upper body strength, preserving the health of your shoulders. I just love them. for building upper body strength, preserving the health of your shoulders. I just love them.
Starting point is 00:27:52 Another, let's call this category of exercises that I think just gets totally overlooked are lunge variations. Now, split squats have become more popular recently, but I still think things like reverse lunges and walking lunges get such little love. They're phenomenal for developing coordination and stability. You can bias the quads by lunging with a little bit of a shorter stride, bias the glutes by lunging with a little bit of a longer stride. You can do them body weight to fatigue. You could do them as a conditioning exercise. You can do them as an aerobic exercise. You can do them with weights for phenomenal hypertrophy. Like I love it. I think lunges are great. I wish more people would do them. And then lastly is walking. And I got this from Brad Jensen, um, the sober bodybuilder,
Starting point is 00:28:29 cool dude. He had me on his podcast. You might go check that out, check out the one I did with him and then check out some of his stuff. But he posted something the other day about walking being underrated. And I was like, yeah, it really is. Not only is walking good for burning calories, building up your aerobic base, it also gets you outside, which can get you some exposure to the sun and help boost creativity and reduce anxiety. All of that stuff is really, really good. So those are some exercises that I think are generally overrated and some that are generally underrated as we get through the holiday weekend. Again, I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I'm so thankful for every single one of you. I know this can be a tough time of year, but if you have the opportunity to be with loved ones, enjoy it, make the most of
Starting point is 00:29:08 it. If not, I'm here for you. The whole world's here for you. We need every single one of you. You are all loved. And I hope that you have a phenomenal, phenomenal December as we head towards 2022. How crazy is that? Thank you all so much for listening. Stay tuned for the next one.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.