Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 380: 15 tips to build muscle at any age

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

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Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matrenga, and in this episode, I'm going to be sharing with you some of my favorite tips for developing muscle. Adding muscle has become super mainstream of late with regards to kind of ensuring one's health against future aging and decline. These 15 tips are my favorite to help you build muscle at any age, whether it's for aesthetic purposes, you want to look better for health purposes, you want better blood sugar, structural support of your body, less pain, all of it. Every single tip we go for today will help you with

building muscle. No matter where you're at on your training journey, there's something in here for you. Enjoy episode 380. 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 KSM 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. Okay, so getting into the topic of muscle growth and specifically sharing with you 15 of my favorite tips. Before we get into it I think it's important to have at least a brief primer on how muscle growth occurs. I think the simplest way to describe it is imagine your muscle cells, individual bundles of cells, okay? Each muscle is composed of muscle cells. When bundles of cells, okay?

Each muscle is composed of muscle cells. When you load those muscle tissues or cells with progressively challenging weight, greater proximity to failure, you stress them, they actually become damaged. And when you're recovering, eating adequate protein, getting enough sleep, those damaged muscle cells grow back usually larger and stronger. And that's kind of the entire goal of resistance training. Damage the tissue, allow it to grow back larger and stronger. It really is that simple when it comes to kind of the mechanisms that drive muscle growth.

Now, things might support it such as mechanical tension. That seems to be the chief driver of muscle growth. Now things might support it such as mechanical tension that seems to be the chief driver of muscle growth. The tension and load and proximity to failure, the stretch put on that muscle. Things like metabolites that accumulate from training, whether it's creatine, hydrogen, those might help. Right? There's lots of different things that might influence hypertrophy but it seems to be that progressive training, getting stronger, and training hard, is probably the simplest way to describe it. So what does this look like in terms of actionable tips?

Well the first would be to follow an actual program. When it comes to building muscle, following a program is great for structure and for the built-in progressions, but mostly for keeping us from our natural kind of shiny object tendencies that we have as people to want to jump around from one thing to the next. When it comes to muscle growth, consistency is key and getting better at the same things over and over and over on the margins is key, even though it is objectively pretty boring. Now, I will say you can have a fun variety-based program

and build some muscle, but you probably will build more muscle with a simple boring program. And while I wouldn't call any of my programs boring, I would say that they take complex concepts and distill them into more simplified programs. A lot of the complexity of programming them into more simplified programs. A lot of the complexity of programming of coaches want to show it off, but when it comes to programming for actual people, it is a little simpler and I think it's less about the complexity of the program, the novelty of the program. It's more about will you do the program. Okay, the second tip I have, and this is definitely going to apply to people who are falling in that classification of like hard gainers or training addicts, it's just to remember that

you only make the gains you recover from, which is another way of saying you need to rest. So the second tip I have for you is to take at least two rest days per week. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, two rest days a week? I only want to take one or none. You know, I want to build muscle. I don't want to rest on my journey. And I can empathize with that.

I am very, very, very passionate about my training. I love adding muscle, building muscle, gaining muscle, training, all these things, so much so it can make going to the gym a little bit, shall we say, addictive and that can make it hard to get the adequate and required rest. But always scheduling two rest days and lifting no more than five days a week, in my opinion, is probably the best thing you can do to ensure that you give yourself adequate time

to truly recover from hard progressive training. The harder I've trained over the years, the better I've gotten at stimulating muscle tissue, the more I realize I don't need to train five, six, seven days in a week. And I bet neither do you. Okay, number three, don't fall for the supplement bamboozling marketing garbage when it comes

to muscle growth. Specifically, there are very few natural supplements that can actually help with building muscle. There's a ton that make promises. But frankly, the best supplements for building muscle are supplements that help with recovery, sleep and overall health. None of the over-the-counter muscle builders are making a big difference. Your best supplementation protocol for building muscle is probably protein powder when you need it to hit your protein goals, creatine to support hard resistance training, and then maybe multivitamins,

electrolytes, omega-3s, things that help with your health status, hydration, training. Truthfully, you don't need that many supplements to build muscle. If any, the one that I would say is probably non-debatable is creatine. That being said, the list is really short, and people who want to build muscle are often victims of the same fitness marketing as people who want to lose fat. Just know the amount of supplements that can help with the meaningful accretion accumulation Whatever word you want to use up muscle is super limited Okay, the fourth tip

Take your final set of every exercise as long as it's safe all the way to failure It's a great way to just kind of learn what failure feels like. You can do this in any program. Let's say you've been assigned three sets of bench and it's 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps in a descending fashion. You could do 10 reps at 225, 8 reps at 245, and then train with like 265 and aim for 6. If you fail at 5, amazing. The goal is on the final set to push oneself all the way to the full limits of the muscle tissue or the movement that you're training, with the goal of kind of like better connecting with what actual failure training feels like, something that many people have lost.

And those sets are undeniably stimulative for anyone who does them. So can't recommend enough incorporating more of those things. The fifth tip is don't forget to build strength on the compound lifts, okay? This shows up in all the programming I do. I'm constantly programming compound lifts that don't just live in this rep range of 10 to 15, right? We do lower rep range compound lifting to build strength,

to build intramuscular coordination, intramuscular coordination, the carryover from compound lifts that you get better at, whether it's bench, squat, deadlift, row, pull-up, whatever, getting stronger at those, getting better at those, allows you to lift substantially more weight on isolation exercises, we'll talk about those in a second,

which are so, so key. This brings me to the sixth tip, five and six almost go together. Don't forget to actually have periods of your training where you get strong. So many people I know who complain about having poor muscle growth relative to the amount of time they train are weak as fuck.

They have like no impressive lifts and I don't mean this to sound rude, but like if you can't bench two plates, I don't wanna hear about your tiny chest. If you're a guy and you can't deadlift, you know, let's say 315, I don't wanna hear about your weak low back. You've not done enough to train your low back.

If you have tiny quads and you can't do a bodyweight squat with a bar on your back, I'm not shocked. There are some basic strength standards that have tremendous carryover. And I think a lot of people are like way too into training and not enough into the strength training component of training. Real basic strength training just flat out to get stronger because it's so progressive in nature, oftentimes builds muscle on naturals better than stupid bodybuilding programs with too much volume and no effort. What's going on guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically,

our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do the reps to do exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise

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

Can't wait to see you in the Core Co core coaching collective, my app-based training community, back to the show. The seventh tip I have is to isolate your weaknesses away. Pay attention to your physique. Ask yourself, do I have links in my chain that could be stronger? Do I have muscle groups that I'd like to develop more? And if that's the case, do a considerable amount of isolation, volume and work for those muscles. If you have something that's lagging behind,

a little extra volume applied to that area won't hurt. And you can do that in four, six, eight week sprints where you really layer on the volume thick and then back off and allow that muscle to recover. But isolation work is a really good tool for generating additional gains. And it doesn't take too much time and it can be a fantastic addition to a good strength routine.

And I think strength training compound lifts and adding higher volume isolation lifts is a fantastic formula for a muscle building program. Okay. The eighth tip, perhaps the most obvious, sleep and recovery are integral. I, for many, many years, emphasized getting up very early to train because I was training clients at 5.30. So I would get to the gym at four and begin my training. And more often than not, especially when I was in college, I wasn't getting adequate sleep because of my

extremely early wake-up time. And that really hampered my ability to recover and make progress. I wasn't getting adequate sleep because of my extremely early wake up time. And that really hampered my ability to recover and make progress. And I felt flat and I felt exhausted and I didn't have optimal training. Because when you're poorly slept, not only do you recover poorly, you also probably have bad readiness in the gym. And that isn't to say that you can't tough it out. In fact, I think you can tough it out a lot longer than some people think.

Trust me, I've done it. I have absolutely, totally, and completely toughed it out many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. It's not hard. But doesn't mean it was productive. And I think if I took my sleep more seriously earlier in my training career, if I gave a shit about it, I'd have more gains to show for it, certainly less bags under my eyes, and a hell of a lot less low mood days from poor sleep and under recovery. Okay, the ninth tip, this should surprise no one, but this is for the ladies, you need to eat to grow.

New lifters who've never trained will build muscle pretty well at any caloric intake level. Intermediate and advanced lifters probably need to be at calorie maintenance or in a small surplus to gain muscle optimally. And not getting enough protein to recover, not getting enough carbohydrate to fuel training, not getting enough fluid to have a good pump and not be flat, these are unacceptable for anyone,

in my opinion, who is committing days of the week to this journey. Get the most basic things done with your food and nutrition. The amount of people I know who have like A plus training scheduling, A plus training consistency, A plus training discipline, but like have B minus C plus nutritional consistency and discipline, I'm like, shit, you'd be better off

getting a B in both of those classes because they support each other so powerfully. Not getting adequate sleep, not getting adequate nutrition means even the best training is probably gonna be so limited in its ability to generate results, which really sucks. So don't forget, you have to eat adequate nutrients to stimulate tissue to grow and to recover from hard training. The 11th tip I have, it should shock nobody, but it is that more training is not always better. I get so many clients

who are doing eight exercises in a session, four sets, 15 to 20 reps, tons, tons, tons of volume. Where the hell do you go from there? You actually have to go down. You have to go down in sets, down in reps, down in volume, up and load. And I think a lot of people just forever and perpetually add volume.

And you can cycle your volume. It should build over the course of time, perhaps, but if volume and more training and more sessions and more sets and more exercises, and what if I do this, what if I do that, and your workouts go from one hour to one and a half hours to two hours, two and a half hours. I would argue that for most people doing fewer exercises, like four to six, doing fewer reps like between six and 15 instead of 15 to 20, training closer to failure will generate better results than only ever doing more volume.

More training isn't always better, better training is always better. Okay, the 12th tip I have is to hire a coach or a trainer. This could be in person or online. I obviously do both of these. I think both of them have their strengths. One thing I've noticed with clients that I've worked with in person is it is alarming how many of them are completely and entirely unaware of the fact that they train six, seven, eight reps from failure. I hate to say this, but they kind of

train like a pussy. They don't train anywhere near the threshold of intensity that they need to to stimulate muscle tissue. A few sessions in person with a good coach can really allow you to do this. Obviously, if you're working with somebody online, they've probably communicated the importance of training close to failure. We assign our clients RPEs, RIRs, repetitions in reserve,

and for almost all of those clients, we're assigning two or three reps in reserve, or RPEs of seven, eight, or nine. Like, hey, we want all of those clients, we're assigning two or three reps in reserve, or RPEs of seven, eight, or nine. Like, hey, we want all of our clients, even the general population ones, to train close enough to failure with their resistance training to stimulate the appropriate response within muscle,

not just for growth, for the metabolic benefits. Number 13 is to change your routine. Make sure that your routine allows for one to two stimulations per week per muscle group. Make sure that your routine has rest days baked into it. Make sure that your routine is complementary to how you recover and how you train. For example, if deadlifts chronically agitate your low back,

don't train back on Monday and legs with heavy deadlifts on Tuesday to hammer your lower back back to back days. In most situations, I think the ideal routine for a one to three time a week lifter is total body split. It's mostly compounds. For a four time a week lifter, it'd be an upper lower split. And for a five time a week lifter, it'd be some combination of upper lower push pull legs or upper lower upper lower with a total body day. These routines work insanely well. Almost all of the programs that we have on the app, on the website, and that we write for clients kind of fit within these kind of general split trends. But these are the ones that I find best and I think

frankly they will work for most people. The 14th tip I have for you is to hit that magic frequency number of two times per week per muscle group if you have not yet tried that. Many people train muscle groups just once per week, sometimes 3-4 times per week. I think the sweet spot is 2. Not because 3 doesn't work for some and 1 isn't ideal for others, but just because 2 hits that magic number and allows you to fully recover from the hard training that you're doing as well as stimulate it enough to not fall victim to the declining rates

of muscle protein synthesis that usually drop after about 48 hours. The last component of this kind of muscle growth toolbox I have for you, tip number 15, is to give a shit about the eccentric portion of your lift. Don't just drop the weight. I will remember, a muscular contraction is a two-part thing.

There's a eccentric contraction where the muscle lengthens under load, and a concentric where it flexes or shortens under load. Most people focus on the concentric, where they're flexing and squeezing. It tends to be the harder part of the lift, and they oftentimes relax or just drop the weight on the eccentric.

However, amazing things happen within the muscle, in the cells to actually cause damage to increase the amount of growth potential during that eccentric. So don't neglect it, pay very close attention to it. It's super, super important, huge component of the lift that drives a ton of results. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode.

I know it was a relatively quick one, but I wanted to give you some hot takes, tips and tricks for building muscle. I hope you hit this episode. I know it was a relatively quick one, but I wanted to give you some hot takes, tips and tricks for building muscle. I hope you hit that subscribe button. Be sure to leave me a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. I'll catch you on the next episode.