Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 46 - FIVE Fitness Myths That Need To DIE!

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

In this episode, Danny sits down and outlines some of the more dubious myths in the fitness industry, including:•Does cardio REALLY kill your gains?•How bad are artificial sweeteners?•Are free weights truly better than machines?And much more!Thanks For 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 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:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome into today's episode. Today, we're talking about five fitness myths that I wish would crawl in a hole, disappear, and die. Things that just need to go away. They're moving the industry backwards. They're muddying the waters, and they're creating a dialogue and a rhetoric that's not only blatantly false, but it's also creating a lot of confusion. And I'm going to take some hot takes today because a lot of these stances are really widely accepted amongst quote-unquote professionals in our space, but really what it comes down to is, case in point, people like to have an opinion, but that opinion's not always rooted in science, physiology, and evidence.

And so I'm going to talk about five fitness myths that piss me off that are actually regularly purported and extended by fitness professionals. The low-hanging fruit, of course, is to just pick on the silly magazines and tabloids and things like that that are notorious for putting out what is essentially garbage information. However, one of the things that's come up recently, and it's really popped on my radar and frustrated me more and more, is that there's a lot of fitness professionals in our space that get away with saying shit that's just patently false because of their expertise. I have made mistakes in the past.

I've said things that weren't entirely true only because I didn't know any better. And I went on to learn more. And I think that that's a really important part of our space is being open to discourse, discussion, and open to being wrong. But what's really frustrating is when people get on their high horse, they think they know it all, and they just start spouting bullshit. So we're going to talk about five myths that have been perpetuated not by magazines, not by tabloids, not by influencers, but by people in this space who, in my opinion, have platforms and use them in many ways incorrectly. Nobody specific, nobody in particular, but these are things I see all the time from coaches,

from trainers, from influencers who have clout and who have the ability to influence people's opinions. So I think it's really important that we chat about these and we're going to start with number one. Cardio kills your gains. We have all heard it. I actually talked last week with one of my favorite people in this space and a great mentor of mine, Luke Lehman, about this. And physiologically, it makes some sense.

We've all seen the picture of the marathon runner next to the elite sprinter. of the marathon runner next to the elite sprinter. Sprinter, big, strong, very muscular, very hypertrophied, very sinewy. Marathon runner, skinny fat, kind of looks lame, has no muscle. The extrapolation here is that if you do steady state cardio, you will develop the physique of a marathon runner and it is impossible to hold on to muscle. And if you do sprints or high explosive power work that includes weight training, you will become this sinewy beast. Here's what we don't talk about when we see that picture and when we talk about cardio in general. That picture has been going around for years. It's in every exercise physiology textbook and it's in every cardio meme I've ever seen. The guy who's running the marathon is from Ethiopia, and the guy who's

sprinting is Western African of American descent. Traditionally speaking, Western Africans are a little bit bigger and a little bit more muscular, and Eastern Africans are a little bit thinner. That's partially why American football players are so hypertrophied, right? Because most of the African-American population is from Western Africa originally. And then you have marathon runners like Kenyans and Ethiopians from Central and Eastern Africa who have a build a little bit more aligned with that. So we can't even look just at the exercise modality. We have to look at the genetics. First and foremost, that entire meme is built on genetics. It's not built on training. Secondly, consider the fact that the average marathon runner is

probably putting in 100 plus hour weeks. I'm sorry, 100 plus mile weeks running. They are running a tremendous distance each and every week. That's pretty unbelievable when you really break it down. I don't think that the average individual who's going to the gym and hitting chest on Mondays, back on Tuesdays, legs on Wednesdays, if they do a fucking mile, if they run a mile, they're not going to turn into a Kenyan marathon runner who's running hundreds of miles a week. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that you can actually enhance your gains with a considerable amount of cardio. Let's talk about why this is.

So first, the fear around cardio killing your gains has to do with something called the interference effect, which essentially says that too much aerobic work, your body's going to have to shift to an aerobic-based adaptation, meaning we'll probably develop more type 1 muscle fibers, we'll probably develop more mitochondria, and it will probably help to have a smaller frame for locomotion because that improves running economy. However, the interference effect doesn't happen the minute you start running. You have to run pretty considerably to get that interference effect to tangibly and impactfully change the way your physique looks. You needn't look any farther than the NFL players I referenced earlier. They do a fair amount of running. They do a fair amount of conditioning. They're all incredibly genetically blessed, but they maintain an extremely high amount of muscle. The same can be said for crossfitters,

mixed martial artists, and even bodybuilders who do quite a bit of cardio, many of whom do hours even in the off season just to maintain their insulin sensitivity, their aerobic fitness, and stay healthy while they do a ton of steroids. That being said, we know anecdotally and we know by looking at the data on the interference effect that a pretty substantial amount of cardio will impact your gains, but that line is pretty high up there. Let's talk about how cardio can actually help your gains. So aerobic fitness is going to increase the economy and the strength of the heart, the vascular tissue, and the lungs. So let's start with the lungs. If you

have better tidal volume, you can take in more oxygen. That's more oxygen you can supply to the electron transport chain to produce ATP. That's more oxygen that you can supply to the body to deal with stress and to supply working tissues with something that can buffer lactate and hydrogen. If you increase your heart health and your stroke volume and how much you can pump out with each heartbeat and you lower your resting heart rate. We know that's correlated with better stress management. We know VO2 max is incredibly correlated with longevity and health. If we look at vascular health, we know that aerobic outputs and aerobic training can increase vascular health. Vascular health can

increase the amount of fluid we can get in and out of working tissue, which helps with fatigue management. It's going to help with nutrient partitioning. All good things. All good things for lifters as well. So, cardio killing your gains. It makes sense in theory. We do see it in application. However, it's important to note that we only really see it on the extreme ends. And I know a lot of people who are foregoing their aerobic health in the name of gains. And don't get me wrong, I want to be as big as the next guy. And I wouldn't recommend running five miles a day. But I do believe that there's a sweet spot here where you can reap the benefits of being well trained aerobically, still continue to pack on considerable amounts of muscle tissue and hypertrophy. And I

think that that line in the sand is pretty far away from where most people are doing their cardio or the range in which most people are performing their cardio. So here's what I would recommend. I would recommend if your goal is maximum hypertrophy, you include cardiovascular activity sparingly, but you don't abandon it altogether. I would recommend a 5-10 minute aerobic warmup at a considerable pace, whether that's a jog, a spin, a cycle, a stairmaster, a row machine, you name it. Something to elevate the heart rate prior to training. a row machine, you name it. Something to elevate the heart rate prior to training. Muscles will conduct electrical signaling required for contraction better at warmer temperatures.

98.6 degrees is the base temperature for the human body. It's not the ideal temperature for muscle contraction. Aerobic work is a safe way to warm up skeletal muscle tissue and core body temperature. It's going to prep you for that anaerobic weight training work. A 10-minute cardio warm-up equates to, for most trainees, 30 to 60 minutes of cardio per week, depending on how many times a week you train. That is a nice amount of cardio to improve or at least maintain your aerobic fitness. So I'm not telling you to go for a mile run every single day or join a running club or run marathons. I'm telling you to warm up prior to your resistance training with a respectable amount of low-intensity steady-state cardio, something that's going to elevate the core temperature of your body, increase the temperature of the muscle tissue you're about to train for better contractility,

improve your heart health, your lung health, your vascular health. This is a reasonable middle ground. It's going to improve your performance. I promise it's going to improve your gains. But the ideology that cardio kills your gains, doing any of it is bad, and that it makes you fat, that's the one that pisses me off the most, is that cardio makes you fat. There is a ton of epidemiological data supporting that aerobic fitness is generally linked to better health and leanness. Duh. The people who are doing a ton of cardio every day and somehow finding a way to be fat are likely overeating. It's not because they've destroyed their metabolism with cardio

and that they're super stressed. That is highly plausible for populations who are stressed, but it's not exclusively from the cardio. So cardio won't make you fat. If you do the right amount, you can still gain muscle. If you want to do more, it's probably only going to help your health. And that interference effect will happen at higher volumes of aerobic training. But this is not a reason to poo-poo cardio altogether. 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. All right, so here is myth number two that makes me absolutely want to pull my hair out. That is this myth that artificial sweeteners are as dangerous or worthy of the same scrutiny as sugar, or what we're attempting to replace by using artificial sweeteners. Now, here's the caveat. Many artificial sweeteners, whether it's aspartame, sucralose, stevia, which is not artificial, but it's a non-nutritive sweetener, a calorie-free sweetener, we don't have the same longitudinal data examining these things that we do with sugar. We know that an excessive intake of sugar is deleterious to almost every health marker. We know it's associated with increased blood sugar.

We know it's associated with obesity. We know that there's a lot of problems with sugar. Sugar might not be inherently addictive, but it's certainly a component of many hyperpalatable foods, which makes sugar very easy to overconsume, and when paired with fat, it can be a hypocaloric hyperpalatable bomb. And artificial sweeteners and non-nutritive sweeteners effectively look to understand, hey, we know humans have these behaviors, we know they're inclined to overeat certain foods, and non-nutritive sweeteners use these calorie-free sweeteners to replace those foods. So for example, soda, very easy to overconsume.

Almost exclusively sugar and corn syrup, very, very high in calories, very, very low food volume. People can drink soda like crazy. A diet soda replaces all of those calories with effectively zero calories, and the taste is almost negligible. And so, you know, you can get down that sugar is addictive rabbit hole, but sugar is effectively the component of soda that gives it its hyper palatable properties. And people very regularly switch to diet soda with almost no problems. very regularly switch to diet soda with almost no problems. You could make the argument that they're not addicted to soda or sugar if they can switch to a non-nutritive sweetener and have no

withdrawals or no issues. It's not the sugar, but these behaviors we have around sugary foods, over-consuming them can be deleterious to health. Looking specifically at these non-nutritive sweeteners, we don't have nearly, nearly the amount of data to support that they're even close to being as deleterious. Could they impact the gut microbiome? Sure. How much so? We don't know entirely. Could they impact insulin sensitivity? There's some studies that might say yes, but more that say no. Could they kind of encourage the same behaviors that sugar does? Sure. But at the end of the day, even if we look at artificial sweeteners as a net negative, they are certainly less of a net negative than what they are replacing.

They are, in my opinion, the lesser of two evils for many people. This does not mean we go overboard with artificial sweeteners. This does not mean that you replace sugar in every instance. This does not mean that all forms of sugar are equal. For example, the fructose that we get in a nutrient dense piece of plant matter or fruit comes with associative nutrients that make it a very healthful thing to eat in context. But demonizing artificial sweeteners as this thing that just simply kills people, it's this horrible new thing, and it's disrupting our microbiome, and it's just as bad as sugar, and it causes cancer. That's a stretch. To cancer, that's a stretch. To me, that's a reach. And I think that we need to look at it as certainly there are some areas of research

that we would want to flesh out before we sign off on the unadulterated use of artificial sweeteners. However, we know sugar can be problematic in high doses. And if we can use non-nutritive or artificial sweeteners to curtail some of that, to understand that we have tendencies and behaviors and we're going to use artificial sweeteners as a crutch to get away from them, they at the very least have utility. And in my opinion, this ideology that they're on par with sugar or that they present some unknown, dubious, deleterious effects in

the way sugar does, to me, it's a stretch. I'm not here to say that you should take in all the artificial sweeteners in the world. I'm just here to say that demonizing them is, in many ways, it's extending this argument that sugar and all things sweet are bad. But I think in the long run, artificial sweeteners have a place in the diet for people who know they have a tendency to overconsume hyperpalatable foods, particularly those that are sweet. And artificial non-nutritive sweeteners can be a tool to oblige those behaviors and those tendencies, help soften the movement away from those tendencies, help create a net caloric environment that's a little bit lower than if you were just eating those same foods

that were traditionally sweetened with sweeteners that contain calories. So I think that there's some utility here. And to demonize them and to hate on them and to shit on them isn't painting with a contextual brush. We're missing something. And that's really frustrating here because we have in front of us a calorie-free tool, not a godsend, not anything that's amazing or healthy or going to save you, but it's at least going to help a lot of our populations that have a very, very high sugar intake or a very, very high intake of foods that are sweetened with alternative options that are lower in calories

and lower in sugar. And like I said, the jury is still out on artificial sweeteners. But we know what sugar does. We know what hyperpalatable foods can do. We know what high-calorie foods can do. Let's stop looking at artificial sweeteners as on par or worse. The

data is not aligned with that. We know sugar can be really bad if we have really high intakes, specifically with certain populations. So let's use artificial sweeteners as a tool. Perhaps we look at them the same way we look at ibuprofen. This is an analogy I use all the time. We know in the long run, high dose ibuprofen is not a very good thing to take in. However, we also know that dealing with pain isn't exactly anyone's ideal experience. Ibuprofen allows us to manage that pain in a way that hopefully one day we won't need to take the ibuprofen. In the same way that artificial sweeteners allow us to have that same mouthfeel and that same response that sugary rich foods have, but it gives us the ability to have that without incurring those same caloric impacts or even the deleterious health impacts associated with sugar while the

body hopefully loses body fat, increases insulin sensitivity, and gets to a healthier place where maybe you move away from artificial and heavily sugared options altogether. But to assume that somebody who's been drinking soda their whole life is just going to stop, that's a difficult sell. And it's something that I don't see a lot in practice so i think that at the end of the day we just have to look at the fact that artificial sweeteners are a tool and that in demonizing them we are moving away from a tool with what i believe to be a high degree of utility and that's all i have to say on the matter there so let's move on to myth number

three that pisses me off and that is that the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift are amazing exercises for everybody. I would actually go so far as to say that I think the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift are actually shit exercises for most people. Squats require a high degree of ankle, knee, and hip mobility that the general population simply does not have, particularly barbell, back, and front squats. Additionally, we look at the bench press, which has a high degree of requirement from the shoulder. That joint, for a lot of people, just doesn't have the mobility required for people to be effective bench pressers in the long run. Obviously, the deadlift, when performed properly, can be safe. But if ever there was an exercise that people did and quite often tweaked their low back, it's probably the deadlift. Now, none of this to demonize these. I think that most people can do that. But the

argument I would make is that is the squat, barbell back squat, the best movement for the average person to develop the squat pattern? Is the barbell deadlift the best movement for the average person to develop the hinge pattern? Is the barbell bench press the best movement to develop a horizontal pressing pattern? For most populations, for the athletes I work with, for the general population I work with, for most people outside of the world of powerlifting, Olympic lifting, bodybuilding, and CrossFit, I think there tend to be better options.

I recorded an entire podcast on just this. But let it be known, I think these lifts are excellent. I think that they are great when incorporated fairly regularly, even with general population clients. But I do not believe they are the end all be all and I believe that for most people with most goals, there are alternatives that are a little bit more friendly to the average person's biomechanics, training ability, and recoverability. Not shitting on them, not saying they don't have utility, not saying they're

inherently dangerous. All i'm saying is for most people there are better ways to load tissue there are better ways to encourage that squat hinge horizontal press pattern and there are safer alternatives that generally speaking put a little bit less wear and tear on the body that's's all I'm going to say. Number four. Man, this one drives me nuts. I do not know how this myth persists in the age of social media, in the age of women parading their bodies around and men parading their bodies around on Instagram, looking fantastic, photoshopped or not, talking about how they lift weights, talking about their program. These people with incredible bodies that have been very verbal

about the fact that they lift weights, yet the myth still persists for women that lifting weights makes you bulky. I do not know how this is even possible. There are so many people in the world right now lifting weights that have incredible feminine physiques that regularly state how much they love lifting weights. It gets out there. Women are lifting. That is a good thing. But it just blows my mind that this myth persists with so many people in our space purporting the benefits of weight training. I mean, let's talk purely physiologically. Men versus women. The adaptations to resistance training are going to be almost identical. The difference in how those adaptations look physically are going to be correlated with hormonal and endocrinological differences between men and women, primarily testosterone.

Men who lift for a considerable amount of time doing the same program as a woman might see relatively similar strength adaptations, everything of course being relative, but the hypertrophy considerations we might see a little bit more in the male camp due to that extra testosterone that can help with muscle hypertrophy. Women tend not to have that much testosterone, so the likelihood of developing a quote-unquote bulky physique, and in my opinion, bulky means masculine, is quite low. You'll develop a physique that looks athletic. You'll likely develop a physique that's quite strong, capable, and confident, but the likelihood of developing a physique that's aligned with or more closely

representative of the quote-unquote typical masculine physique is pretty rare. The other thing that just drives me nuts about this is women seem to think that they're just going to wake up one day and be bulky. You can't pump the brakes on this. Even if you had a tremendous amount of testosterone as a female and you had a really high potential for hypertrophy and you were somebody who maybe did have to be a little bit more aware of how much lifting you did to achieve the physique that you wanted to achieve, you'd be able to pump the brakes. You can see this stuff coming. That's what drives me up the wall, is this persistent ideology that all of a sudden somebody's just going to wake up and be absolutely stacked out of their mind. Hypertrophy takes time. It takes effort. It

takes work. And this idea that lifting weights is going to do anything but benefit a female's body, to me, is deleterious and harmful for the long-term success and health of individuals. I think that we should be encouraging people to do this. And I just think this idea that you're going to instantly wake up and be bulky, it like spits in the face of science and spits in the face of everything we see, and it just won't die. And it's crazy frustrating to me because it doesn't make sense physiologically, and it just won't die. So hopefully, at some point, we can move on from that. All right, so the last myth, and this one isn't nearly as frustrating to me as some of the other ones, but it is that machines are an ineffective resistance training modality. Hear me out. I

think you need to be very, very specific about what you use to call something a machine or how we define a machine. Because I believe that cables are on par with dumbbells and free weights. I think that cables are a tremendous resistance training modality. But they are effectively a machine, where they, for many people, get classified as a machine. I think some machines, in general, are very, very poor at developing the adaptations they're looking to replace with a free weight modality. I think that, in general, free weights allow for better range of motion. They require greater stability considerations. They generally can be loaded a little bit better because we have change plates. A lot of machine and selectorized equipment, you can jump by 10, 15 pounds only with a barbell. You have all kinds of different things you can do from 10, 5, 2.5, even smaller plates. So you have a

little bit better ability to progressively overload with most free weights. However, this does not mean that in general machines are terrible or that they don't have utility. I think for many people, when stability is an issue, when eliciting tension through certain tissues become an issue, being in a really fixed environment like a machine can be an effective tool. If you have joint angle considerations that you need to keep an eye out for, certain machines can be a really good tool. So machines have their place. And I don't think that they're better than free weights, but I think that abandoning them altogether and saying that they're bad is silly.

And so I think you need to select the machines that work best for the populations you're training or the type of training you're doing as a hobbyist or enthusiast because they certainly have utility. And in my opinion, the bigger your toolbox, the better. And even if you only use a tool once, if it's the right tool for the job, you'll be glad you had it. So guys, those are five fitness myths that drive me nuts. Cardio does not kill your gains. It can be a part of a very, very effective hypertrophy and health-focused practice and training program. I don't think artificial sweeteners are any worse than sugar. And I think that while the data and the jury is

still out on them, there's a lot of encouraging things they allow us to do with nutrition. I don't think you have to bench squat and deadlift. I think that there's better alternatives for a lot of people. Lifting weights doesn't make you bulky and don't throw machines out. There is some utility there.

Guys, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, do me a favor, share it, tag me. Let's start changing the industry. These myths have got to go. They continue to persist. And I would love nothing more than if you enjoyed this, that you would share it. Tag me so we can chat about it. Thank you guys so much for tuning in.

Enjoy the rest of your day. Do something healthy. Do something fun. Stay safe. you