Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 374: Training Just 2x/Week? Belly Fat, Motivation, Pregnancy Workouts, Too Much Protein?

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

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Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, episode 374 of the podcast, I'm going to talk about some of my favorite foods, fruits, vegetables, and kind of summer-centric things you can do to take advantage of where we are at in the year here during the Northern Hemisphere. This, of course, will apply to those of you who are in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Just flip ahead a little bit. In the year, you can apply these same tips, some of my favorite food tips for eating healthier and including more nutrient-dense whole foods that promote health in my diet while getting to some of your questions.

We've got questions on today's episode about motivation and routine formation, as well as specifically losing belly fat and some steps one can take to minimize the accumulation of belly fat long-term. We'll also talk about training, specifically training around pregnancy and how much protein somebody can get from non-food forms, such as things like shakes and bars. And we'll wrap it up diving into a good training routine for somebody who could only train with resistance twice a week. Should be a fun episode. Hope you enjoy. This podcast has some awesome partners. And one of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics.

Legion is my go-to supplement manufacturer for what I like to call my big rock supplements. This would be my protein powder, my pre-training formula, my post-training formula and creatine, and my kind of ancillary vitamins and micronutrient protection. So why do I like Legion so much? What sets them apart? It's quite simple. Legion uses all natural ingredients. All the formulas include natural coloring and natural sweeteners. No artificial sweeteners, just stevia. And every single formulation, be it a pre-workout or a vitamin, contains clinically effective dosages of ingredients shown to work in humans in clinical research supported by robust trials. No filler, just legit ingredients in each and every formulation

proven to work. The whey protein isolate is so light. It's fantastic. It mixes in water. It tastes amazing. And I drink it every day, even as somebody who's lactose intolerant. That's just how high quality this whey protein is. And it's sourced from Irish dairy cows that are raised well, eat their natural diet and packaged in climate friendly packaging. I love their plant protein too. For those of you who like something that's a little on the thicker side and you aren't a fan of animal products. Also, I love Legion's pre-workout, but specifically the pre-workout that does not contain caffeine. That would be their Stem Free Pulse. I'm a huge, huge fan of beta alanine and L-citrulline,

but I don't like taking in wildly high amounts of caffeine. So if you are somebody who likes pre-workout with caffeine, you can try Pulse. Or if you like it without caffeine because you maybe want to enjoy your morning coffee or monitor your caffeine consumption, try the Pulse Stim Free. My favorite flavors there for sure are the new grape and the amazing, amazing tropical punch. As for my creatine, I get that from Legion's Recharge, five grams each and every day. I take it on the days I train as well as the days I do not because Recharge also contains L-carnitine, which can help with promoting muscle recovery and decreasing soreness, as well as some ingredients to help with creatine utilization. And of course, my favorite supplements for my ancillary micronutrient health are Legion's multivitamin and Legion's greens powder.

Not only do these two products contain a ton of high quality vitamins and minerals, they also contain unique adaptogens like KSMSM 66 ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, which I like to take each and every day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine post-workout or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin, I encourage you to go over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Welcome in everybody to another episode of the

Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Getting into it today. Again, this is episode 374, and I'm going to start today kind of continuing off of this summer series. I've tried to give some seasonally specific, clearly alliterative pieces of fitness advice that are good for that northern hemisphere summer, things that you can do to improve your health, fitness, productivity, efficiency, et cetera, that are a little bit better and maybe enhanced by the summer months. And last week in the episode, we spoke all about the benefits of getting outside, hiking, taking advantage of national parks, the ability to just really lean into the summer weather,

which got me thinking, what are some summer specific food and nutrition tips that I could give to my audience? And I actually have quite a few that I think are specific to summer. So the first is just the general seasonality of so many things, makes it such that you can get a ton of fresh produce, be that fruits and vegetables, during the summer. And, you know, it might seem a little first grade to go over the benefits of eating a high amount of fruits and vegetables, specifically fruiting plant matter. This is what I'll say. There is such a large contingent of people on the internet fear-mongering about the potential dangers of vegetables and fiber and anti-nutrients or the sugar in fruit. It really is never wasted to remind people just how important it is to get enough fruits and vegetables in your diet. Not only are

these some of the best sources of micronutrients, minerals, polyphenols, antioxidants, they're also an amazing source of macronutrients, particularly things like carbohydrates and fiber, both of which are important for looking your best and training hard and performing. You need glucose from carbohydrate. It can be fructose as well, from fruit specifically, to fuel the best brain power that we have. Our brains like to run on glucose, and fiber helps our gut health. So we have this just massive, huge influx of fresh fruits and vegetables that all get seasonal around spring, summer. So great time to start adding more of those into your diet. Another thing you can do that will also save you some money, help out your community, and probably increase your intake of

these things is see if your community has a local farmer's market. Farmer's markets are pretty cool because you're basically just going to a location where local or semi-local farmers are bringing the many different fruits, vegetables, oftentimes meats that they sell or that they raise on their farm. And they sell them absent of the grocery store middleman. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It's more just an opportunity to point out, hey, you can get these things for maybe a little less expensive and support a non-corporate grocer and instead kind of put money directly into the pocket of a local farmer if you have a farmer's market. Great thing to check out during the summer.

Again, something really fun that oftentimes encourages steps. Very cool. Okay, another great way to take advantage of the summer weather. Get a grill. Learn to cook on a barbecue grill. You can use a smoker. Everybody loves Traeger's. But really what we're taking advantage of here is an outdoor cooking modality. There's also really cool things like these flat top griddles that you see at Costco. But what's cool about cooking outside is it can increase the social connectedness of cooking by having friends around us while we cook instead of cooking in a constrained kitchen. Grilling tends to be an amazing modality for preparing vegetables and proteins. So a great thing that I'm not doing when it's cold outside and when it's rainy outside, I'm all about grilling during the summer. And I really look forward to a good summer barbecue because of the, you know, opportunity

to load up on protein and other great nutrient dense foods. The last thing I would say that you can do in the summer specifically to kind of enhance your ability to get more nutrient dense foods into your diet is to take advantage of the fact that you're going to be losing quite a bit of fluid in hot and humid weather. So for example, I've been training a ton in my garage recently with my brother-in-law. We've been really been pushing it, getting after it. It's tons of fun, but it gets hot in there. So I am losing a ton, a ton of fluid. Uh, and one thing I've been doing is I've been replacing that lost sodium, potassium, and magnesium with electrolytes, but I've also been grabbing lemons from my lemon tree,

squeezing them into my water to get some added vitamin C, drinking more tea during the evening to get some added apigenin and antioxidants, drinking more tea in the morning in place of coffee to get more fluid in with my caffeine. I'm just making a real point to get hydrated, to find fun ways to include more water in because I am sweating more and it's definitely something that happens to me in the summer. Okay. So the next portion of the episode folks is going to be Q and A. I'm going to dive into some of your questions. And these are all fielded from over on my Instagram. I post a question box on my Instagram story. That allows me to see your guys' questions anonymously. Many of them I answer on Instagram. But frankly, a lot of them I save to answer right here on the podcast because they allow for a substantial increase in depth.

I can get much deeper when I answer questions in this way. So the first question comes from Mr. Motivator NTIN. And the question is, how to start and finish exercise on a daily basis. I start, but give up after just a few days. So let's extrapolate here and just talk about sticking to an exercise routine, why it can be so hard. Okay. Why it can be so difficult. And it's actually in your username. So your username is at Mr. Motivator, right? So it comes down to motivation, this rapidly depleting resource that we feel when we're, when we're trying to, you know, implement a new habit where there's friction.

We feel we need motivation. I want to wait until I'm motivated, then I'll attack it. Oh, I'm motivated. I got to get after it. Or when the motivation comes, I'll do it. And this is the thing. Motivation is a very valuable resource.

It's highly effective, but it is, I would say, and maybe you guys will agree with this. Maybe you won't. I would say that in general, motivation is a tricky resource to rely on because it kind of tends to really, really ebb and flow. Like there can be days where you're really, really motivated and you feel like you can tackle the world. And those are awesome opportunities to push a little harder, to, you know, think about it like rocket fuel.

I oftentimes tell this to my clients. Think about the days that you're motivated as an opportunity to pick up multiple days worth of progress, right? But to consider an absence of motivation, a deficiency, an error in the system, that something's wrong, I think that is totally skewed. Motivation is the glitch in the system. Motivation is something being wrong. You are not supposed to live in a default state of motivation. You're supposed to live in a fairly default state of ambivalence. It is what it is. It's whatever. I kind of want to do the hard thing, but I don't want to do the hard thing. I know I should do the hard thing, but there's friction around doing the hard thing. Why would there be

motivation all the time to do hard things? It's kind of antithetical to humanity. We just don't live that way. We're beings who prioritize efficiency. So what you need to do is you need to tell yourself that it is okay to not have motivation there's nothing wrong with not having motivation in fact to make a fitness routine stick you'll need to be able to move forward in the absence of motivation that is in and of itself the big trick the big secret the the big secret, the missing piece, knowing that the motivation will fade. And the reason I would imagine that you continue to quit over and over and over again is you're identifying the absence of motivation as a defect or a defect, I should say, a failure when it's an entirely completely normal thing to experience. If you were to say, I never lose motivation, I always have this unrelenting,

unwavering, you know, desire to succeed, I'd call bullshit, especially with fitness, right? desire to succeed, I'd call bullshit, especially with fitness, right? So another thing here, you used the term how to start and finish exercise on a daily basis. Here is a big reason people fail. Daily basis. Nobody should be exercising hard on a daily basis. Yes, three, four, five challenging workouts a week will drive progress. It's undeniable. It's a fact. It is the truth. However, seven days a week of training, never missing a day, only allowing perfection and not leaving room for days off for recovery to be flexible, it creates a system that's rigid, unyielding, and likely to break. I would imagine that if you have not had much luck sticking with exercise long-term, you certainly don't have much benefit or much to benefit from daily exercise. A simple routine, two days a week, three days a week,

can be enough. Will you look at yourself as lacking motivation or being a failure if you hit 100% of the workouts you're supposed to do in a week because you scheduled three? I doubt it. But if you do six of the scheduled seven, you'll never hit 100%. And maybe the truth here is that your expectations of yourself are wildly out of alignment with the track record of success. And it's just unfair to expect yourself to do this much to get in shape. It's not fair for me as a trainer who's been training for 13 years to lift seven days a week. So personally, I'd make the guess that it's not okay for you. Just bite off what you can chew. Two days a week, total body.

Three days a week, total body. Four days a week, upper, lower. Five days a week, push, pull, upper, lower. There's so many ways to do it. But perhaps the best way to not do it is training seven days a week and holding yourself to this standard of daily exercise. No wonder you continue to fail. What's going on guys? Coach Danny here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my

coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for core coaching method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching

program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macro nutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email, or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with accountability in the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to

corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. Okay. This question comes from Alison Hailstorm, eating in a deficit, training hard three days a week, belly and back fat will not go away. What's next? So unfortunately, when it comes to targeting body fat reduction and, you know, getting it to come off of certain areas, our bodies are finicky. They don't work that way. What tends to happen is much like a large reservoir of water. When you take a cup out from the very corner, all of the water rushes to the

very corner to create a level bucket of water. Like body fat, you can't make it come off of one place. It tends to gently come off of all of the places, which again has some positives, but also leads to slower, more global, not necessarily targeted fat loss. And that drives a lot of people crazy, but I'm not going to sit here and promise you results or promise you an amount of fat loss that would be unreasonable or promise that I can get it off of you in specific areas. But what I will say is it tends to be the case. It tends to be the case that the more stressed you are, the more genetically predisposed you are to abdominal fat, the more you drink and the more stressed you are, the more genetically predisposed you are to abdominal fat, the more you drink, and the more male you are, the more you're going to store belly fat.

Now, belly fat and low back fat, like you're describing, are common stubborn areas. And to your point, the best way to approach them is with a daily calorie deficit and multiple sessions of training to increase caloric expenditure and hold on to muscle. But if that body fat is taking a while to liquidate from the low back and the midsection, don't be surprised. It's super normal. But what you might do in the meantime, in addition to this really good plan, is see what you can do to manage your stress. See what you can do to reduce drinking to zero. See what you can do to get better sleep. There's a few things you can do to burn fat from a specific area, but there's lots of things you can avoid to promote or to, I guess, say, dispromote the accretion of body fat in certain areas. If I wanted to have lots of belly fat, I would drink

lots of alcohol, maintain lots of stress, get poor sleep, and overeat. And maybe to chip away at it, we need to do the opposite. Okay, from Karen Nunez, do you have any pregnancy workout plans? So this is a great question because it really tells me that a lot of women are taking better care of themselves as they go through one of the most challenging, physiologically demanding things on earth, producing a human baby. Any organism that can grow an organism inside itself is doing an awful lot of work. And it's definitely the case that the more you take care of yourself going into pregnancy and

during pregnancy, the easier the pregnancy should be and the better the health of the baby should be, barring so many of the wildly uncontrollable things. As somebody who's at the time of recording, wife is about five months pregnant. We've had some scares already. So I know how precious this thing is. But one thing that I've noticed that's really cool about her pregnancy is the more she trains, the more she moves, the better she takes care of herself. The more I help her take care of herself by providing her with healthy foods, smoothies in the morning, whatever I can do, right? And it's limited what I can do because I'm not carrying the baby. But the more I help her live healthfully, the better the pregnancy seems to go.

And so when I see women asking this, it's so encouraging because it tells me that they're looking at their pregnancy as an opportunity to continue taking care of themselves and also maybe set their baby up for success. And I've trained several pregnant women in the 13 years I've trained. And one thing I can say is that every pregnancy is different. Every woman is different. So you have three trimesters in pregnancy, first, second, and third. The first tends to be the one where people really struggle with symptomology like fatigue, lethargy, and nausea. It's also pretty much impossible to even distinguish a pregnancy because the baby is still so small. So if you're in trimester one and you're energetic enough to exercise, it's very likely the case

that you will be able to continue what it is that you were doing while making small adjustments for your fatigue. Trimester two is a little tricky because this is where the baby kind of starts to pop. But it is also the case that many women feel better during this time than they do the first trimester. But because there is more of a belly, there's obviously positions like planks, like you don't want to plank on your baby. There's certain positions that we tend to avoid as coaches. I tend to gravitate towards almost exclusively standing and seated training during trimesters two and three with the exclusion of what we do for legs. I'm not doing too much on the floor. Obviously, avoiding positions where we are in a face-down position, and avoiding high levels

of exertion. But again, I just want to make it clear, every pregnancy is super different. And the best thing you can do is to pair yourself with a coach, whether it's in-person or online, like myself, who's going to work with you and be like, all right, hey, you know, nausea was really bad this week. Let's keep it more mellow. Or hey, you're feeling good. Let's ramp up a little bit without being crazy. The human body is incredibly adaptive. But if you work with your physician to determine what level of activity is appropriate for your pregnancy, there's no reason you should not be able to stay active through trimesters one and two, which gets me to trimester three,

the last portion of the pregnancy. This is probably what I would say is the most variable. Trimester one can sometimes be really variable, but how big is your belly? How fatigued are you? This is oftentimes a point in a pregnancy where physicians start to say, hey, time to tone it back, right? Time to dial it back. It might be more cumbersome. You might be gaining a little more weight. This is probably the time to practice the most empathy to begin to gently slow things

down to meet your body's capabilities. But that doesn't mean turn things off. It just means adjust. So as a general rule of thumb, I would say semesters, trimesters one and two tend to be a little bit better for hard work. Trimester three is oftentimes when we tone things down as we get closer to labor, but whatever you are capable of doing coming into pregnancy, you want to try to maintain many of those properties during pregnancy, even if you have to make adjustments and scale it. But what you don't want to do is be really hard on yourself or put a big focus on your weight or your physique or any of that.

You're literally making a baby. It wouldn't be entirely fair to hold yourself to the level of physical output that you were prior to building a human inside of you. So as a man who has a pregnant wife, who he loves tremendously, and who trains many women who have been pregnant, all I'm going to say is this, you guys are already way too hard on yourselves. And this is not the time for that. This is the time to really connect with the power of fitness to enhance your health and well-being. Look at it as an opportunity to invest in your improvement as well as the health of your body.

Okay, from Can Cateroo, is there a limit of how much protein can come from liquid forms? So this is a great question. And I think this question, I'm gonna answer this in a weird way. So let's say all of the protein I eat, steak, chicken, eggs, whey, cottage cheese, let's say I added water to it and blended all of them up to make them all liquid forms. That means like liquid steak, liquid chicken, you name it, nasty.

If I drank those, it would not be demonstrably different than eating them with the exception of the lack of mastication or chewing and the enhanced rate of absorption from like liquefying the protein. The actual protein, the actual amino acids, the differences in the types would not change. I'd still get certain amino acids from beef that wouldn't be as high as the ones in fish or chicken or vice versa, right? I would get the unique amino acid profile of all the various proteins minus the chewing in a liquid form, which I think would yield almost all the same results in terms of muscle building and recovery. It might not be as good for fat loss because I'm not chewing and digesting these things. It will probably fill me up less, but mechanically,

I don't think there would be an issue. I do think it could wreck your digestive system, but I think it would be okay. Here's the thing. I think this question really means how many protein shakes can I drink a day? Because it tends to be the case that having a balance of proteins from different sources that yield a different array of the amino acids is good. Chicken fills holes that beef doesn't fill. Beef fills holes that fish doesn't fill. Fish has omega-3s that neither of these two have, right? Rotating proteins, including different proteins, always a good idea. Some are better than others, but a multitude of them is best.

Only getting your protein from whey is probably suboptimal, despite its incredibly high bioavailability and nutrient density. So here's a good rule. Try not to get more than one third of your daily protein from liquid. Not because there's wrong with getting two thirds. Just something. Just give yourself a cap. I would imagine that getting like 50% of your protein from liquid, you would probably just constantly be shitting your pants, which sucks. But hey, what are you going to do? Last question from Leslie D. Lung. is it enough to strength train just two days per week? I love this question. I love it because I think it is. And I think I might be one of the only coaches and trainers who's fully confident in saying that you can totally get away with training two days a week.

I know that most people who make a living in the fitness industry hate that I say that because it probably takes money out of their pocket as a trainer or a coach. But here's what I want you guys to understand. 70% of the country is overweight. Over 40% is obese. Okay. Most of those people, about 75%, don't come anywhere near getting enough daily activity. So would I love them to get on a five-day-a-week routine that looks like the one I do with my buddies? I train three days in a row during the week with my brother-in-law, two days on the weekend. We do a hybrid program. It's my forever fit program. Basically that is available at the link in the show notes. You can do that elite physique, any of our awesome programs, right? Four or five days a week programs. What I write for my app,

three to five day a week programs are what I work on for my, the majority of my online and in-person clients. So why the hell would I recommend a two day a week split? I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend it, but I also wouldn't sit here and tell you it's not going to work. In fact, I think that's like one of the biggest, like corniest things I see is just like this obsession with training a certain number of days a week. Remember most people don't do shit. So one day a week is huge. If it's total body, you train every muscle, you stimulate all your muscles once a week. That's great. The evidence says for muscle growth and strength, two times a week might be better. So if we trained two times a week, total body, that's kind of a big deal, folks. That allows us to hit that stimulation threshold that we're looking for.

We really want to hit that threshold of two stimulation opportunities a week. And if I'm training just twice and each one of those is total body, I can say I check those boxes. Given the situation, given the constraints, I would say you still need to do mostly compounds. You like compounds like squats, deadlifts, lunges, rows, presses, so that your two sessions train as much muscle as possible, but it's totally doable. And if you hit like one push, one pull, one hinge, one squat, and then trickled in some other stuff, you could totally get away with training twice a week. I think it's awesome. And I would never, ever dissuade you from trying something. So if you want to try that and you're like, hey, it kind of worked. I got in a little routine.

Awesome. I would not say if you want to like do a bodybuilding show or overhaul your physique to think you're going to get very far with two days a week. But if you just want to be in better health and look a lot better than the average person, two days a week is totally game changing. All right, folks. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, be sure to follow the show on Apple Music and Spotify.

It's the best place to catch me to learn more and more about fitness and health and getting in shape and improving your nutrition. All kinds of stuff here over on my page on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter. Just be sure to follow along, leave the show a five-star rating and review, and stay tuned for more. Catch you on the next one.