Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 64 - Q&A: Rep Ranges, Collagen, Wearables + MORE!

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

In this episode, Danny sits down to answer your questions, including:What rep ranges should I train in and when should I change them?Is collagen protein worth taking?How to get out of the "calorie burning" mentality?And much, 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.

Guys, welcome back in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And again, this is hopefully your one-stop shop for informative, evidence-based fitness, health, and performance enhancement advice. Again, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and today's episode is going to be all about answering your questions. We're going to go full-on Q&A. Now, before we get there, a quick little update. Last time I checked in with you, I had had some power outages. There were fires all over the state and years of heavy, heavy Northern California fires

between the months of September and October. And the smoke in the air is unfortunate because it gets quite hot. So oftentimes it's nice to have the windows open in the evening. However, letting any smoke into your home at all results in, at least myself, waking up with a pretty darn dry and uncomfortably scratchy throat. So if you hear that today in the episode, understand that that is exactly what you're hearing, and just bear with me a little bit as I were to hopefully try to make this episode as tolerable as possible from an audio standpoint. So all of these questions are from Instagram today, and we're going to go

rapid fire towards the end, but we'll start with some of the ones that I really like here to begin with. And the first question is from at Christian is caffeinated. And Christian wants to know how to get daily activity steps if your area is affected by the fires and air quality is terrible. So Christian is my audio video mastermind whiz. If you guys are not familiar with his work, anything you've seen on my Instagram, a lot of the work that you saw me do when I was working with Mind Pump has had Christian's magical touch on it. Not all of the work I did for YouTube was Christian, but he plays a very, very big role in my content production. And we're more or less a few hours apart here in California, and we're both just getting hammered by smoke. So that should tell

you kind of a little bit of the scale of this stuff. But it's a really good question and it actually goes hand in hand with some of the questions I've been getting in general about increasing NEAT during the pandemic, right? Because we're still in the thralls of this pandemic. So sheltering in place while it's no longer an ordinance is still something that we all try to do as much as we can

or at least many of us try to do as much as we can. So many of us have become quite comfortable with being at home, but it's really put a damper on our daily, weekly, monthly neat totals. And so I've got a few little hacks that I like. The first, it seems kind of silly, but it's this. Go to the bathroom at the farthest toilet you have. So silly as it might sound, the average person is going to the bathroom probably between, according to the bathroom at the farthest toilet you have so silly as it might sound the average person is going to the bathroom probably between according to the googler machine four to ten times a day

i don't know anybody who's active and well hydrated that goes to the bathroom less than eight to ten times a day most bodybuilders power lifters anybody who's in the athletic space anybody who's conscious of their hydration they're peeing north of 10 times a day. And for me, I have a bathroom right downstairs next to my office where I do the majority of my work. However, walking upstairs to use the bathroom in my master bedroom extends my bathroom walk from about 10 feet all the way up the stairs, down the hallway, into my master bedroom, and then into the bathroom, and then all the way back down the stairs, then it probably adds an extra 40 to 50 steps each time I do it. And if I do that 10 times a day, that's an extra 500 steps. And while that

does not seem like much, it's indoor, it's increasing your neat, it's indoor it's increasing your neat it's getting things moving around And interestingly enough it's an excellent little opportunity to kind of help yourself get those extra steps doing something that you were already going to be doing Right, you are you were already going to be going to the bathroom The other thing that you can do is and this is something that I recommend with clients When you are going to be just mindlessly scrolling on your phone Pace around the house while you do it recommend with clients, when you are going to be just mindlessly scrolling on your phone, pace around the house while you do it. So if you're wanting to use social media, if you're wanting to use apps like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and you know that time is largely mindless and you oftentimes find yourself doing it while curled up on the couch, while perhaps you're lying in bed, make a commitment that when you're going to use those apps, you're just going

to walk around while you use them. And it can just be as simple as standing in one place, alternating from foot to foot, walking around the house in a designated path, walking up and down the stairs from time to time as you use it, integrating what we call habit stacking. And habit stacking is something that I've borrowed from James Clear, the writer of the book Atomic Habits. If you know anything about me, if I've worked with you in the coaching space as a client, if you know any of my content, I'm big on habits. I think they drive effectively everything that we do with regards to behavioral and physique change. It all comes down to habits. And habit stacking is this really interesting tool that says basically, I am going to try to pin a habit I like to a habit I know I need to do.

So in this instance, it would be pinning the habit of using social media to the habit of getting up and moving around more. And so those are just two quick, easy hacks that take place indoors. The other thing that you can do is you can attempt to try to get out there and make your neat hours, or I should say the hours in which you go about trying to grab some of that neat, when smoke is lower. It tends to kind of come and go with the wind, no surprises there. So if you can pick and choose your spots, you might be able to get out there and get a little neat and some outdoor walking. But as somebody who made the mistake of sleeping with my window open last night, inhaling that air, I woke up and my throat felt so dry, so cracked, it felt really, really, really poor. And so I do recommend staying inside if you're in California

right now, just because of the issues we're having with air quality. Okay. because of the issues we're having with air quality. Okay. At Jake Wagner asks, clients shoulders click with overhead press. How to avoid this and what's the cause? So this is another excellent question. Now, ideally, we would want to break this down and say, okay, what kind of shoulder press? Because the anthropometrics of the human being might be the same, but the biomechanics of a barbell press, a dumbbell press, a seated dumbbell press, a machine shoulder press, they're all marginally different from the actual nuts and bolts mechanics to the way in which the load and levers work to move said load. And for some people, a barbell overhead press is absolutely a no-go. For other people, a dumbbell overhead press from a more neutral position is completely fine.

And it really depends on the individual. But let's address the issue here in the question, which is that the client's shoulders click. And so when we're talking about the shoulder, we're talking about three primary things that work in essentially conjunction. We're talking about the scapula, right? That shoulder blade that sits on the back of the rib cage. We're talking about the clavicle or the collarbone that extends from the sternum out towards your arm.

We're talking about your glenohumeral joint, which is the ball and socket joint we conventionally think of when we think of the shoulder in the same way that we think of the hip. Those three things work in concert. In general, the biggest issues people are going to have with overhead pressing stem from the scapula and the glenohumeral joint. A few things I like to do to enhance the space and the ability and mobility people have

through those muscles, through those joints, through where those joints interact and create movement, are things like FRC-GH CARS, FRC scapular cars. I really like bottoms up kettlebell press. I like Turkish get-ups. It's something I've talked about on the show before. Things that enhance the stability and the mobility of the shoulder so that it works fluidly and in a dynamic setting. However, clicking and popping isn't necessarily a bad thing if there's no associative pain. That is what we would refer to colloquially, at least in the fitness and rehab space, as crepitus.

Crepitus, of course, is painless clicking and popping that isn't necessarily tied to any acute tissue damage or trauma. And it's incredibly common. If you're listening in the car right now, if you heard that, that was me cracking my knuckles. That is, in fact, a form of crepitus. So very interesting that joints do have the ability to click and pop. Synovial fluid isn't entirely like fluid all the time. Sometimes that makes noise as it moves around, as it is manipulated. And so our body makes sounds, but consistent clicking and

popping and dysfunctional movement patterns and associative pain, you might look at some of the mobility stuff I recommended. However, if the overhead press is looking smooth, there's progression, there's no associative pain while performing the movement, there's no referred pain during the movement, there's nothing after the fact, keep going and just understand that clicking is somewhat normal. So next question, and this is a great question, and this is from at Lauren Donovan, and it's how to get away from the calories burned mentality. I love your podcast.

Okay, so Lauren, this is a really good question. Let's first break down what exactly she's referring to when she says getting away from the calorie burning mentality. So the primary thing we're talking about here is, and I see a lot with females that I've worked with, how many calories am I going to burn during this one workout? And it's almost always gauged using a wearable like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch. So let's pick this apart. First and foremost, how many calories you burn during your workout, no matter whoogenesis, varies from person to person. It can contribute quite a bit to TDEE, but it's a very small percentage. It's a small piece of that pie.

And so just being aware of that should put your mind in alignment with, hey, no matter how many calories I burn during this workout, my behaviors and my habits across the other 22, 23 hours of my day are going to play as big, if not, and most likely a much bigger role. The second thing we have to look at is the reliability of these wearables. People give those wearables a lot of power. They say, oh, I burned 1,000 calories during my workout. I had an amazing workout. Oh, I burned 300 calories during my workout.

I had a bad workout. I know people who turn the exercise thing on on their Apple Watch before they get to the gym just to sneak in a couple extra calories because it's the gamification of things. It's the literal same thing as trying to work a high score on something like a video game. And people who make these devices like Fitbit or Apple, they're very much aware of humans' response to the gamification of things. People like to see numbers go up. They like quantifiability. It's cool. However, there's no shortage of scientific literature out there on the inaccuracy of some of these devices. They generally tend to grotesquely over-report calories burned. Most resistance training workouts don't burn nearly as many calories

while you're doing them as something like an aerobic workout. They work exclusively off of heart rate data taken from the wrist, which isn't necessarily ideal when we could use something like a polar monitor that use a chest strap. So overall, it's just like, okay, most people are coming at this not conventionally understanding how tdee works that's the nut that's the number one problem but then they're using an unreliable device to gauge the success of their workout or not and i think the number one thing we have to think about here is you should be a lot less concerned about how many calories you're burning during your workout and you should just be a lot more mindful of how many calories you're burning during your workout. And you should just be a lot more mindful

of how many calories you're taking in and nourishing your body with across the day. A better mindset, in my opinion, is saying, hey, I know about how much food I need across the day. No matter how arduous my workout is, I'm not gonna change it too much. If it's like super crazy, I might add a little bit more food.

But my mindset instead is gonna be, I'm gonna come to the gym and I'm gonna just kick. I'm going to focus on getting stronger. And then I'm going to nourish my body and give it what it needs intelligently by selecting foods that fit within my macronutrient parameters. Instead of the negative feedback loop of, oh, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to crush it. I'm going to burn hella calories. I killed it. Well, you know, I earned these calories. I'm going to go ham. I'm going to go to the cheesecake factory tonight and get the Reese's cheesecake. I burned 900 calories today, so I can have a 900 calorie piece of cheesecake. And then you end up at the gym the next day and you go, oh, I had that big old cheesecake. I need to crush my workout. I need to get a thousand

today. Like it's this really silly feedback loop of kind of just cyclical, constantly pushing, constantly trying to get that number higher. And it just doesn't really work. 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. Next question is from Emi Jarvella and Emi asks creatine for endurance athletes. What's your opinion? So creatine works by helping the body regenerate ATP by helping us convert ADP back to ATP. So it increases the rate at which we can synthesize and resynthesize ATP. It also helps us hold intramuscular fluid, which is good for, again, exercise performance. While creatine is

primarily studied as something that enhances anaerobic performance, meaning strength, power, muscle size, there's no reason for me to believe that it would be negative or deleterious in the way it impacts aerobic or endurance performance. Purely from an ATP standpoint, I see reason for taking it there. We also know that creatine can help with recovery, particularly from arduous workouts. So I think that is also a reason to take it. So while I don't think endurance athletes

might be as keen to take creatine as anaerobic athletes like lifters and bodybuilders, I do think there is a lot of positive benefit to taking it with almost no negative trade-off. And if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that I look at creatine as being much more than just a performance-enhancing supplement. I think it has an incredible ability to enhance long-term cognitive health, and the research backs that assertion up. There's plenty of data to support its ability to enhance both cognitive health and memory in the long term. So it's

something that I recommend my wellness clients take, the people who I work with just to help them be healthy, not the people I work with to help them get on stage, to help them lose fat, to help them podium at their next meet. Those clients all take creatine. But the 45-year-old mom who's like, I feel like shit. I just want to be healthy. I've got her taking creatine too. Not that I think that you should listen to anything I say and do it. I'm not a doctor. Hey, it's all, you know, there's your daily caveat. But I do find that it's an incredibly agreeable supplement for most people that has almost no negative side effects. All right, so next question is from Gross Jambon, and he asks, how often do you change rep ranges in your workouts? So

I have a variety of rep ranges that show up in every training session that I do, and I try to select repetition ranges and intensities that lend themselves, in my opinion, pretty well to the exercise that I'm selecting. So, for example, deadlifts, they're a large full body movement that require everything to work together in great sync. So I like to keep my deadlifts a little bit heavier and I like to keep my repetitions a little bit lower. And that keeps me more engaged. and I like to keep my repetitions a little bit lower, and that keeps me more engaged. It allows me to make sure that my technique is really, really good, and it allows me to get the most strength bang for your buck out of an exercise that I think is ideal for building strength. We'll talk about perhaps something here like a dumbbell chest press. That is an exercise that

I really enjoy for hypertrophy. It tends to be a little bit more agreeable on my shoulders than barbell bench pressing, but the stability requirements are a little bit higher. So I keep my repetition ranges there, usually between 6 to 12. And I find that that's a great way for me to get sensation in my chest. I see and feel it contracting. I am able to progressively overload it intelligently, but I don't go 20, 25, 30 reps where I can't really feel exactly what it is that I'm working and my form might break down with the stability requirements of something like a dumbbell press. Then we'll look at something like a tricep extension or a tricep kickback or a lateral raise where I feel as though the execution of the exercise is a little bit more simple because we're only using a few joints.

We're still being intelligent here. We're using a few muscles. I'm usually using relatively light loads and I don't necessarily mind going north of 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 reps. You know, I will explore those higher repetition ranges with those exercises that I feel have much less likelihood to be deleterious or potentially cause injury, I wouldn't do a 20 rep deadlift, even if it was light, because I think that after about 12 to 15 reps, when you start to get sloppy, you can run into trouble. And that's the case with all movements, right? So the way I tend to program things, and you'll see this in the female physique program I have on my website, you'll see it in foundations,

you'll see it in power build, which is only 10 days away from launch. Stay tuned, podcast fam. I will have a very, very generous coupon code coming your way here in the next couple of days that will save you even more off power lift, or sorry, power build when it drops and the power lift bundle, which is going to be power build and foundations. There's also going

to be a female physique bundle, which is going to be power build and female physique. So I kind of spilled the beans there, but stay tuned because on the website, you are going to see here very shortly in the next 10 days when we have our launch, which again is going to be the holiday weekend, first weekend of September. Foundations and Power Build as a bundle, Power Build and Female Physique as a bundle, Power Build as a standalone launch, all on sale, but podcast peeps are going to get a special discount. So stay tuned. Be sure to listen to this Friday's episode. You'll get the code there and you'll be able to use it when the program launches here shortly in the next 10 days on, I believe, the date we're aiming for here is going to be the Friday. It'll be the first Friday in September and it'll end up being, I believe, the 4th, which goes right into Labor

Day weekend, which is the 7th. So Labor Day is Monday. We're launching Friday. The sale is going to be all Labor Day weekend. And podcast peeps, you're going to get a special little gift from me to help get that. And again, the cool thing about Power Build is it's built for home gyms. All it uses is barbells, dumbbells, and bands. If you have gym access, you'll totally be able to go to the gym and absolutely crush it. And you can make exercise substitutions from the substitution list in the back of the ebook. Right now, as I'm finishing it, it's sitting at about 65 pages. I think it'll finish north of 70. It's got a full section on anatomy. It's got a ton of programming, 12 weeks baked in. So even when

you get it, you'll get 12. But when you get the bundles, you'll get 24 weeks of programming, which is almost six months. You've also got a ton of recommendations for nutrition, macro overviews, all kinds of awesome stuff in there. And I love foundations. That's how I tend to train. Female physique is amazing. It's how I train the female clients that I've trained that have had the best results. But power build is awesome. It's how I've been training during quarantine. I've got great results. I've stayed strong. I've added muscle and I've gotten leaner, which honestly is all I could have asked for during this time. I'm not mad about it at all. But to finish the question from at gross jambon, I change repetition ranges throughout my workout based on the exercise selection,

which exercise selection is always based on goal, anatomy, and function. So hopefully that answers that question. This guy asks, are weighted side bends effective or just a prayer to get rid of love handles? So no exercise is going to help you target body fat. Even if you're getting a strong sensation or a burn in that area, like if you were doing a side bend and you felt it in your side, you're not going to be helping yourself burn off any of the fat around your love handles. which might not necessarily be ideal for creating an aesthetic or at least the illusion of slimness through that region. And so no, weighted side bends are not effective and they're not a prayer to get rid of love handles. I don't necessarily think they're an ideal exercise for next to anything. But in general, we don't have the capability as an organism to spot target our fat loss. Okay. So the next question from at rjs underscore Harvey, is it possible to change posture after bone remodeling ends devices

slash training methods? So posture is a very, very interesting rabbit hole to dive down. There are a lot of people in the fitness space who live and die on what they believe to be corrective exercise and postural correction. There's a lot of people in the rehabilitative space who says all corrective exercise is crap and posture is 100% voluntary. My opinion tends to be somewhere in the middle. One of the things I have noticed is that in general, increasing hypertrophy and strength and awareness of the musculature in the upper back and glutes and core tends to just generally improve the way in which people move. And it might enhance their posture from an aesthetic standpoint, meaning

if you train your back more, you train your glutes more, you can move around better, walk a little bit better. Things tend to feel and sit a little bit better, you might find that, hey, it's a little bit easier to move and walk with the strength that I have here, the hypertrophy that I've developed, my skeleton is sitting a little bit differently by the way in which my musculature is pulling on this stuff. So a better posture becomes a more feasible and enjoyable way to move around over time. But one of the things that's interesting is you can find somebody with absolute trash posture and be like, well, one of the things we wanna work on is probably gonna be your posture.

And instantly that person's like, boom, they sit up straight and their posture's perfect. And it's almost as though they're unaware of the way in which they're carrying themselves day to day. And I think that a lot of the corrective exercise that people have popularized and a lot of the work that people do makes people more aware of that stuff. And it helps them voluntarily make postural changes over time. Like I said earlier, I do think hypertrophy and

awareness in those tissues can encourage that as well, probably from a different pathway. But to answer the main question here, is it possible to change posture after bone remodeling ends? Yes, because posture isn't exclusive to bone, right? Posture and the way we sit has to do with something that we would call muscle tone. It has to do with awareness. It has to do with social cues. It has to do with a lot of things. Posture and the way in which we sit is influenced by a great many things, the least of which might end up actually being bone. So it's totally possible and it's totally something that you can work on over time. So the last question of the day comes from at Jessica. Jessica, it's spelled very funny. Thoughts on collagen protein.

So Jessica wants to know what my opinion on collagen protein is. So collagen protein has a different amino acid profile than, say, whey protein or animal protein from meat. And the reason for that is because it's sourced from a different part of the animal. So again, whey protein is a derivative of milk. Steak is the actual muscle of the animal. And collagen is often the hooves and the hide. And the different structures in our body are mostly made of protein, but the amino acids we find in those different structures are unique

to the structures themselves, meaning the amino acid breakdown of meat, milk, and hide will be very different because structurally, and what we would call phenotypically, the way it's expressed visually, they're very different. And so collagen isn't necessarily as high in leucine, isoleucine, and valine, the branched-chained amino acids that seem to participate most in muscle growth, as some of the other protein sources. So if your goal is muscle growth, and you want to optimize that, and you want to get a large percentage of your protein intake daily from something like collagen, you're probably going to be leaving some gains on the table because you won't be getting those really, really important amino acids. And that's a little bit

unfortunate, but it kind of is the way it is, and it's the way this stuff breaks down. It's largely the same reason why plant proteins need to be combined to become ideal or effective for muscle growth, Because if not, we're going to be missing out on some of those really important amino acids. Now, that doesn't mean collagen doesn't have utility. As it comes from the hide and the hoof of animals, it tends to have some amino acids that are beneficial for the health of our skin and joints, some of our soft tissues. There have been data to show that exercise followed by collagen supplementation enhances tendon strength because again, tendons are made almost entirely of collagen. So that's

quite interesting. So if you want to enhance the quality of your tendon health, you might consider adding a little bit of collagen to your post-workout shake. So it's kind of an interesting thing you can do there. The lining of the intestinal tract is also very, very similar from a protein standpoint to some of the amino acids we would find in collagen. So many people who are really big in the gut health space recommend collagen for that. You'll also see collagen sold very regularly as a beauty product because hair, skin, and nails contain quite a bit of collagen. So if you want to explore some of the other areas that collagen might have utility, I'm mostly for it. I don't

think it's a bad thing to put into your body, but I think it is important to remember that it isn't necessarily as ideal for muscle growth as some of these other proteins. So hopefully that answers your questions, guys. There were a lot more, but these were the ones that I thought were really, really interesting and provided an interesting topic of conversation and would get you thinking. If you enjoyed the episode, it would make my day. If you screenshotted it and shared it to your Instagram story, better yet, tag me so I can see it, so I can say thank you. And if there's anything that you liked, be sure to include it so that I can read more into what it is that you guys are enjoying.

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