Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 8 - Myth Bust Monday, Back Pain, Sweating, Protein Intake, "Toning" + More!

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

In this episode of Dynamic Dialogue, Danny busts TEN of the most common fitness myths. Including:Deadlifts, backpain and there relation to one another.Is a high protein diet safe/unsafeHow fruit Does and Does NOT make you fat.There is also some in-depth information on the science of sweating, muscle growth and the anatomical components of back pain and back pain management.Support the Show.

You guys, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host, Danny Matrenga, and today's episode is a myth-busting Monday. So these will come to you on Mondays, and I'll address some common fitness myths in this space, but a little bit more in-depth in the way a lot of people do it. So when you see myths being busted, it's often in the form of a meme, in the form of dialogue going on on social media, but there's not a lot of context. And for people who are interested in expanding their knowledge and learning more about fitness, how we go about debunking those myths and providing information as to why their myths

is actually a really valuable learning tool and expands into other areas like physiology and anatomy and biochemistry and making sense of these myths actually makes you a lot smarter, a lot less likely to be duped in the future. And it expands your knowledge base beyond just kind of parroting, oh, that's a myth. Understanding why that's a myth is actually a really valuable learning tool. And that's what these episodes are going to be all about. We'll bust myths, but we'll also break down why they're myths, why they don't exactly line up and try to educate you as much as possible. So it'll be an exciting episode for you guys. And it's one that I really look forward to doing. And

we have 10 myths to bust today. Now, before we do that, let's go through the kind of rundown of last week's events. Crazy stuff. So COVID-19 is definitely here. There's plenty of states on lockdown. We have California for one, the tri-state area back east, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, I think is in on this. New Jersey, I think is in on this. These are shelter in place notices where they're kind of just recommending that people don't leave their house unless they absolutely have to, which is completely understandable as we try to flatten this curve. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm kind of in favor of like an all in boots on the ground, military interventional national lockdown, like just nobody leaves their

house, like we'll bring you the groceries or you can only leave to do that. I'm kind of leaning that way because I just have this feeling that that would get it over with more quickly. Maybe I'm crazy for wanting to do that, but that's kind of where my head's at with it now. In the news, and I thought this was very ironic, Rand Paul, a libertarian senator, he's also a former physician, was the only individual to vote against the essentially coronavirus aid bill, which should come as little surprise to anyone because he's a libertarian. And it's like if the government gets involved any more than they already are, people are going to freak out. Our libertarians are going to freak out in general. But he was also the first senator to be diagnosed with the coronavirus. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because he was at the gym, the Senate gym,

which one, I was not aware that the Senate had a gym. Kind of cool. aware that the Senate had a gym. Kind of cool. But also, it's kind of annoying that the Senate gym gets to stay open while all of the other gyms are closed. And he's now had to have three other senators quarantined because they were exposed to him in the last 24 hours before his diagnosis, which means, and it just so happens that they're all Republican. And I'm not trying to make this political at all, but it's interesting because the way they vote in the Senate usually is pretty bipartisan. The Republicans kind of team up and the Democrats kind of team up. For four of them to be out sick and unable to vote is a unique situation. So we'll see how that plays out.

situation so we'll see how that plays out um on positive notes uh espn the ocho is back on espn 2 i don't know for how long but the ocho is basically just a compilation of hilarious sporting events like competitive electrician work or contracting labor there's all types of oops sorry there goes my alarm uh yeah this is 6 20 a.m. on Monday that I'm recording this because I wanted to really try to catch up on the news going into it. But ESPN8, The Ocho, is back. If you're looking for something fun to watch that's sports-related in a world without sports, it's quite entertaining. As well as this new documentary on Netflix called Tiger King where they follow these completely, I don't want to call them crazy, but eccentric big cat owners. And it's like nothing you've ever seen. These people are unreal.

And you'll see kind of the best of what the legal system in Florida and Oklahoma, pretty much all of middle America, lets people get away with. But like this dude, for example, owns, like I think he said he owned 300 tigers, like adult tigers. It's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And it's one of the craziest documentaries I've ever seen. It's actually very interesting and I recommend it. And lastly, on a positive note again, Rosario Dawson has signed on to Star Wars to play Ahsoka Tano in what is rumored to be the second season of The Mandalorian, which should make every Star Wars fan very, very happy. So that wraps up the news and we can move on to the 10 fitness myths for this Myth Busting Monday. And we'll start very simple right out of the gate with number one, which is you can crunch your way to a six-pack.

Now, this myth is kind of rooted inside of another myth, and that would be the myth of spot fat reduction. Now, while some people have a more favorable fat reduction pattern, meaning they lose it from their belly quicker, their thighs quicker, from their desired areas quicker, that's not any reason to believe with the amount of scientific literature we have that's inconclusive that anybody can spot target fat loss. Some people have more favorable fat loss from certain areas than others, but that does not mean that any individual has kind of found out how to spot target fat loss. It's more just how genetics play out when we start losing fat. And I think that's a large reason why it persists because somebody who's more likely to lose fat from their belly because of something like genetics might do a bunch of sit-ups in conjunction with better eating and being in a calorie deficit and say, well, look, I did a bunch of abs and I lost a bunch of belly fat, which lines up in theory, but it doesn't really line up scientifically, which is unfortunate. So when it comes to getting a six pack, the number one thing you have to do

is reduce body fat by eating in a caloric deficit, right? Being in a calorie deficit is the only reliable way to lose body fat kind of week in, week out when dieting. So start there, allow yourself to reduce body fat, and that will reveal more of your rectus abdominis, which is of course the six pack muscles that lie below where most people typically would hold belly fat. Now, to increase the kind of pop of the actual six pack, you need to do a lot of what we would call spinal flexion exercises, or, you know, what some people refer to as like a reverse spinal flexion. So you have basically bringing your ribs down towards your pelvis or your pelvis up towards your ribs. You're bending your spine a little bit. And what that's doing is if you think about your rectus abdominis or

your six pack, it originates kind of up towards the top of your rib cage or middle of your rib cage, kind of by the sternum's bottom most point. So like if you follow down to the bottom of your sternum, that's kind of where your six pack starts. And then it stretches all the way across your tummy and kind of protects your internal organs and ties in all the way down to your pelvis. And when it contracts, it brings those two bones, the pelvis and the sternum, a little bit closer together. That's kind of exactly what we're doing when we do things like crunches and a lot of the different abdominal exercises. And the more we do those, the more we stress that muscle, the more we develop it. And so I always recommend training your abs like any other muscle. And if you want them to pop, you might want to incorporate some degree of load. Now, again, a myth inside a myth. So consider this myth number one, three myths.

We're talking about the myth of spot reduction. We're talking about the myth of crunching your way to a six pack. But let's also talk about the myth of doing loaded ab exercises, making your abs look blocky or bulky and your waist look thicker versus slimmer. Because this is when I hear a lot, particularly from women. And I get this message a lot. Well, doing abs with weights make my waist look blocky. And I don't think that's the case at all. I haven't seen it in practice. I can understand that you're more likely to increase the hypertrophy of your waist and the hypertrophy of your abdominal muscles very, very, very quickly using weight as opposed to body weight, right? The same would be

true of basically every other exercise type. Like if you were only doing body weight and then all of a sudden you switch to using resistance, you could certainly expect more hypertrophy. But as is the case with all muscles, we're kind of in control of when we stop and when we start. So if you think you're gaining muscle in your abdominal cavity, abdominal area too quickly, and it's kind of skewing your aesthetics, you can kind of dial it back and focus on more body weight stuff as you get leaner, but a solid base of resistance training in the midsection won't blow out your waist overnight. You have time to kind of gauge how this is going and make adjustments. So don't

be afraid to lift or do at least some of your core training with some degree of weights. Movements I like are cable crunches and decline crunches. I think that those tend to work really, really well. All right, so let's talk about myth number two, and that's that you can turn fat into muscle or muscle into fat. I've heard this one a lot lately because people are scared that their muscle that they have right now is going to turn into fat because they can't go to the gym. Now, the reason this myth has been parroted for a really, really long time is because when people start heavier or start very conditioned, right, and they lose some of that tissue. So say if you're very heavy and you do a lot of weight training and you slowly

lose body fat and all of a sudden it'll really show on your physique and it's almost as if the muscle right it's almost as if the muscle turned into body fat or rather the other way around the body fat turned into muscle which isn't really the case but it's something that it appears like that's something that could have happened and then on the flip side, if you have a lot of muscle and you have to really lay out for a little while and you don't train, it almost looks like your muscles turning into fat, at least aesthetically. But that's not what's going on chemically or fundamentally. What we have to remember is that at the chemical level, meaning chemistry, you break those things down, fats, muscles,

they're very, very different from a chemical standpoint. So fundamentally, fats, meaning even body fat, and carbohydrate, meaning even carbohydrate in our body, like glycogen, are what we call hydrocarbons. That means they're molecules at their most fundamental level comprised of hydrogen and carbon. And that's all you really need to know. Nothing crazy there. At their core, those two macronutrients or those two compounds, whether it's in your diet, whether it's in your body, are primarily composed of hydrocarbons. And that has a lot to do, it's a lot of the underlying reason why they provide energy the way they do. And on the other hand, we have protein, which would be of course what muscle

is. And whether it's in our body from a tissue standpoint or in our diet from a macro standpoint, protein is very nitrogenous, meaning it contains a ton of nitrogen. So you have two compounds that are mostly hydrogen and carbon, and then you have one that has a ton of nitrogen in it. And they're so fundamentally different at that chemical level that that transfer of one into another would be incredibly difficult from an energy standpoint within your body. It would not be easy for your body to turn protein into fat and fat into protein from a structural sense, right? That's why we like a circulating pool of amino acids to be available around our training, right? Like we want a few amino acids

circulating in the bloodstream before we train. After we train, we have a little bit of protein with a meal, right? Before or after so that when we're done training, our body has the circulating nitrogenous products to help with muscle repair. And a little bit of carbohydrate can help too, right? There's a lot of different things, but it would be very difficult if we had a high fat meal and said, hey, why don't you go through the process of turning this into protein? And your body's going to be like, are you serious, dude? There's no freaking way. And again, that just comes down to the chemistry of how these things all work. And when you parrot this idea that you can't turn muscle into fat, you're not saying something

wrong. That is correct. You cannot turn muscle into fat very easily and you cannot turn fat into muscle. But understanding why is actually a really interesting thing and it opens up your mind a little bit to understanding how these things are a little bit different. So the third myth on the note of protein is that too much protein is bad for your kidneys, your liver, and your health. Now let's say this. You can certainly eat too much animal protein over the course of a lifetime that might be deleterious to long-term health effects. There's reason to believe that eating too much cooked meat might be bad in the long run. Same thing with too much processed meat. But the idea that it's bad for your kidneys and liver independently doesn't really hold up in healthy people.

If you already have kidney and liver issues, you're certainly going to see increased likelihood of an issue with a high protein diet. But if you have otherwise healthy liver and kidneys, you shouldn't have a problem. And I'm actually breaking this up into two different myths as well, which is one that too much protein is bad for your liver and kidneys. And we can kind of toss this one away with the simple caveat of so long as your liver and kidneys are already healthy, a relatively high protein diet should be completely safe. And then the second myth here is that you can only absorb 20 grams of protein at one time. That's one that I've heard a lot. People say that a lot. So let's talk about it.

What is the difference between what bodybuilders are trying to do with a protein feeding and protein absorption? So protein absorption would be I eat the protein i digest the protein i absorb the protein cool but a lot of bodybuilders are in the world of trying to increase something called muscle protein synthesis sorry it's 6 a.m muscle protein synthesis or mps and the best way to increase mps is to have higher protein feedings and i like to aim for around 30 to 40 grams. And while digestion, assimilation and absorption might take a little longer with a larger feeding, it doesn't mean it won't happen. And a larger protein feeding is more likely to substantially trigger a higher level MPS response. Muscle protein synthesis is more likely to turn on the switch for muscle growth.

Now that seems to top off around like 30 to 40 degrees and 30 to 40 grams in most people. So it doesn't mean if I have 100 gram protein feeding, I'm turning on my muscle protein synthesis switch any louder than I would be if I had a 35 gram feeding. But what it does mean is just because somebody believes they can only digest and absorb 20 grams at a time, which hasn't been showed reliably in the research either, you might be missing out on some MPS. So don't be afraid of eating a little bit higher protein. Right? Muscle protein synthesis is important. So aim for 30 to 40 grams of feeding for men, I find to be well and work well and 20 to 35 grams for women, I find works very well. More frequent protein feedings are probably better spreading

them out across the day. If you can try to make them all about the same size, I found that works very well. The reasoning for that is because when you spread them out a little bit, you have a greater opportunity to increase muscle protein synthesis throughout the day. You have a greater opportunity to kind of flip that switch on because eventually it will turn off. So you can keep it on a greater percentage of the day by spacing out your feedings. Again, that's a little bit of a niche nutrition thing. If you're not hitting your protein total for the day, then there's no real reason to do this. But if you're already doing that, there's certainly reason to consider spacing your protein out in this way. Now, high protein diets might actually be healthy

because of their positive impact on body composition. Most people who eat a fairly high protein calorie controlled diet have a very lean and muscular physique, which without a doubt is beneficial for long term health as body composition and poor body composition has been linked to a variety of comorbidity and increased mortality. So I would go so far as to say that a moderate to high protein diet, so long as you're eating relatively healthful protein sources that are nutritious and balanced with the right amount of green vegetables, exercise and stress management can be an incredibly healthy long term diet. But I guess we won't really know until somebody does the massive RCT and meta-analyses that we would need to see it because a lot of this long-term data, this epidemiological data for nutrition is hard to rely on. And we're working to create more

and more of it every day in the nutrition space. So hopefully all of this conjecture one day will boil down into us truly knowing what's best. But in my opinion, the best would be a solid balance of all the food groups, fruits, vegetables, healthy animal proteins, and trying to find balance, but aiming for a moderate to high amount of protein. All right, guys, so that does it for the first three myths. We're moving on to myth number four, which is your knees should never travel over your toes. Now, this is one you'll hear a lot, especially from newer trainers or just kind of run-of-the-mill fitness enthusiasts. And it comes from the right place, right? We're trying to keep an eye on people's joint health and make sure that they don't overextend the capacity of their joints.

And for a lot of people, excessive forward knee travel is something they should be careful of, right? They might have knee pain, which would be a contraindication for excessive forward knee travel. And if it hurts for your knees to go over your toes, we might not want to put your knees out over your toes until we address it. However, in healthy populations and people who are not affected by orthopedic issues, knees traveling over your toes is a very natural part of human movement. It happens when we run, it happens when we jump, it happens when we land, and it's part of how our body is designed to work, right? Our ankle tissue and healthy people will

allow our knee to travel well beyond the foot or the toe. And that allows us to sit deeper into a squat to jump and land to do these various things we were designed, I don't want to say designed, but we evolved as species to do. And that's totally okay. But again, you have to look at the flip side of the coin, which is, you know, if it causes pain, we need to address the pain before we kind of go into those ranges of motion where our knee might go over our toe. And so a lot of people said, hey, you know, we just don't let the knee go over the toe because a lot of people have orthopedic issues or they have pain.

But the real answer here would probably be to say, hey, you know, let's try to get to the bottom of why when your knee goes over your toe, you have the knee pain and see if we can get back to that pattern of knee forward, forward knee travel, pain free before we just toss it out the window altogether. And I mean, there's such a huge percentage of the population that's immobile or has ankle mobility restrictions or has just mild knee pain that you could see why this myth that knee is not going over the toes would persist and that a lot of coaches would just double down on it. It's just kind of a, hey, you know, when we squat, we squat to parallel and no further

knees don't go over toes. I get it. But from a purely biomechanical standpoint, it's normal for knees to go over toes and healthy people. It's something you can work towards and generally will probably increase your performance, your mobility, and your longevity. Even if you don't load up that deep forward knee travel with like kind of ass to grass Chinese style Olympic weightlifting squats, you know, you should have some degree of mobility that allows knee to go over toes unless you have an existing

mobility issue or an existing tissue issue. That's one of my favorite things to say. But yeah, that's a myth. Knees can go over the toes. Happens all the time in athletics. It's something we should be looking towards doing if we can't do it, if we don't have an existing tissue issue. Myth number five, you should stretch before you work out. Now, this one's only what I would call a half myth because there is some truth to this, right? Let's talk about prepping the body for exercise. If you have a chronically tight tissue, a tissue that has a propensity or a likelihood to be tight, something that's just kind of nagging, like, you know, Sally with the tight traps or Steve with the tight hamstrings. Maybe we're going to look into kind of loosening that

up with a little bit of static stretching before we train so we can decrease some of that neurological tone and have a better training effect. That makes sense. That's an example of when stretching before a workout might make sense. It's also why people do a lot of foam rolling before training, to minimize that neurological tone, to kind of dissipate force throughout the tissue so that things chill out a little bit, almost like a massage, and then they get a better training effect. But the idea that you have to stretch before a workout is a myth. In fact, I found in research reports that a dynamic warm-up where you work joints through their relevant ranges of motion, you kind of simulate the needs of the exercises that are going to be done that

day, and you get your heart rate going, tends to work a lot better than simply banging out a few kind of haphazard stretches prior to training. And I actually like this myth because you hear all the time you need to stretch before you work out. But I think the best time to stretch is actually after you work out. And the reason I like stretching after a workout is because when we contract our muscles, when we train them, we're shortening them over and over and over again. There is a lengthening effect as we go through the eccentric portion of most of the contractions that we do. But for the most part, when we train, we're taking a muscle, we're shortening it, and then we're lengthening it. And after a long training bout, you might find that you're a little bit tight, but you're

warmed up, you have an elevated heart rate, and your tissue's warm. And it may be more responsive to stretching in that window than it would be pre-training before you've been warm and all that. So let's talk about like a warm-up continuum and a cool-down continuum. If you wanted to get the most out of your training, I don't think just walking over to a stretching mat and banging out some kind of random stretches is going to be the best thing to do. What you might do instead is a five to 10 minute aerobic warmup to elevate the heart rate paired with a five to 10 minute dynamic warmup that takes the relevant joints through the relevant ranges of motion and incorporates elements of mobility and potentiation or kind of really

gaining some speed or some power. So what that might look like if we were going to bench, I might do a five minute row machine warmup. I might do a 10 minute little pre-workout mobility block of perhaps banded speed pulls to open up my upper back, chest passes into the ground in FRC shoulder cars to open up my shoulder girdle versus stretching my pec, stretching my shoulders and stretching my triceps, the muscles that I'm going to use. I might not want to stretch them prior to training because I might not want to go into training with those muscles in an already lengthened position, right? Because it's not necessarily the best idea to put a ton of load into a tissue that's just been lengthened. So I tend to save my static stretching for after.

So that's kind of my two cents on the myth of you need to stretch before you work out. 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. Here's one that I was really excited to talk about, and that is that more sweat equals a better workout. Now, for most people, more sweating is going to be indicative of things like humidity, temperature, genetic variants,

diet, then it is going to be per se workout quality. Hydration level, fluid level, you can throw in there too. I get some of my best workouts in the gym without breaking a sweat. And then sometimes when I change environment, change what I eat, I sweat a lot, but I don't always have a great workout. Sweat is just not an effective means of kind of gauging workout quality. It just doesn't scale well. And that makes sense. And then again, when we compare ourselves to other people, we have to remember there's a ton of variance just between how much we sweat. Like people can have anywhere from like 2 million to 4 million sweat glands. It's a lot of variance.

That's literally double. That would be like me saying, hey, you could have anywhere from 2 million to 4 million hairs on your body. Like, if you have 2 million hairs, you don't look very hairy. But if you have 4 million hairs, you're going to look hairy as hell. So that variation really makes a difference. The other thing that's important to know is that there's different types of sweat glands, and we might have different types of the number of sweat glands. So we have the eccrine sweat glands, which are more common on like our body surface. Those are the things that we really feel sweating quite a bit when we exercise. They're also on the palms of our hands and feet. So that's kind of the stuff that starts to sweat

when we get nervous. And then you have the apocrine sweat glands, which are primarily found in the groin in the armpit. They typically attract the most bacteria, which is why they contribute more so to body odor. And they really, really pick up when we're anxious, kind of in the same way that our eccrine sweat glands do. So you can expect your hands, armpits, and groin to sweat a little bit more when you're stressed or anxious, but your hand sweat won't smell as bad as the sweat in your armpits and your groin because those are different sweat glands. Remember, ecrine sweat glands across the body and then apocrine sweat glands in the groin and armpit. And it's not the sweat itself that smells. It's the bacteria that's attracted to the sweat. And so that's why body odor seems to have so much individual variance as well. Some people can sweat is, or than we would probably want it

to be to be able to use sweating as a quantifiable performance measure. So saying more sweat equals a better workout, it doesn't scale. And then additionally saying things to yourself like, man, I didn't even sweat today. It depends on the exercise stimulus. If you're doing heavy barbell training like singles, you might not sweat at all, but you might get crushed by that workout. And if you're using sweat as a barometer for how effective that workout is, you're really, really missing the boat. And then again, hydration is huge. If you don't have adequate fluid levels, you're not going to have a lot of fluid exchange

when it actually comes time to work out, right? Because for your body to let go of water, it has to have a little bit of water to let go of. So a lot of people who train in the morning aren't going to sweat nearly as much because they're not as well hydrated. I can say for certain, if I train in the morning, this is something you'll notice a lot, morning trainees don't sweat as much either. If I train in the morning because I pounded, or I haven't had a lot of water, it's generally much cooler in the morning, right? I haven't had nearly as much movement. I'm not going to sweat that much. But if I train at like two o'clock in the afternoon, the temperature could be anywhere from say it's summer 20 to 40 degrees warmer. If it's a 90 degree day, it might be 55 when I wake up and it can be 95 at

two in the afternoon. That's 40 degree variance, at least out here in California. Those things aren't uncommon to see. What do you think I'm going to sweat more training in 55 degrees or 95 degrees? 95. What do you think I'm going to sweat more if i have one maybe one glass of water before i train in the morning or like six before i train in the afternoon obviously the afternoon but i might do the same workout of the same quality with the same volume and the same intensity but i'm going to think the one in the afternoon was better simply because i sweat more that's not that doesn't scale. That doesn't add up. So just remember that. Understand that your sweat is multifactorial. It's influenced by a variety of things like fluid intake, sodium, genetic variants of how many sweat glands you have, coupled with things like temperature and time of day. So we can't effectively use it as a barometer for whether or not you had a good workout, as much as we might like to.

So staying on the topic of sweating, we'll continue to myth number seven. And this is perhaps the most impactful myth I've seen floating around at this moment in time. And that is, of course, because we live in this landscape of COVID-19. And that's the myth that you can sweat out a cold or an illness. This just doesn't hold up physiologically when you think about how this stuff works. So particularly with viruses and bacterial infections, our immune system has to really ramp up to meet the demands of doing things like creating antibodies, running all of our other systems that we need to run, getting enough sleep so that we can beat these bacterial infections or viruses. And well,

in theory, the idea of sweating it out might make sense because again, certain things do come out and sweat. There's no reason to believe that viruses and bacteria that are the root of an infection would. Additionally, when you work out hard enough to sweat, this isn't to say that we're going back on everything we said on the last point because there is a lot of individual variants to sweating, but for most people, you need to work out relatively hard to sweat. You're increasing your allostatic load, which is the cumulative amount of stress on your whole body. So your allostatic load is your emotional, physical, physiological, and mental stress. So

test studying, knowing a test is coming is a good example. You have the physiological stress of kind of whatever's going on in your daily life, the emotional stress of knowing how this test is going to impact your grade, the mental stress of studying for it, and maybe even the physical stress of going to and from where you study. So that's an example of how allostatic load is kind of global. Well, exercise increases the allostatic load. Being sick increases the allostatic load. Not getting a lot of sleep because you can't breathe well at night increases the allostatic load. So we need to be smart about how we deal with this.

And going about your day and trying to sweat out your cold, you're probably going to end up increasing your allostatic load and actually dragging it out longer, right? Exercise might increase your sweat rate, but it's also going to increase your sweat. And it's going to, it's going to create some degree of kind of pick and choose for your body's energy, meaning it's got to pick and choose like, Hey, do I put my energy into this workout and the recovery that's required of it? Or do I put this finite amount of energy into ramping up my immune response? So there's going to be a degree of divergence that happens. And it's not really optimal, in my opinion, for getting over a cold or illness to be doing hard, rigorous exercise, particularly with the goal of sweating it out. And I think that's one that continues to persist simply because it's almost a meme.

It's just things people say like, oh, why don't you go sweat it out? Like, I have heard that so many times. I don't think it's ever going to really go away, but we can understand better why it's not ideal. So let's move on to myth number eight, which is heavyweights make you bulky and lightweights are better for toning. So first and foremost, let's touch on the fact that you can build muscle at any rep range, right? So any repetition range, even one rep, even 30 reps has the ability to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. The real kicker is how close to failure, what's our proximity to failure,

and can we accumulate more tension across these sets? So in general, a set of 10 closer to failure is probably going to have a greater opportunity to elicit hypertrophy or muscle growth than a set of one close to failure because of the increased tension. But that proximity to failure is very important. For higher rep sets, right? While the tension might not be as great because we're using a lower load and perhaps using a more rapid contraction to get to that high rep total,

we'll have to get closer to failure to get a hypertrophic effect. But you can build muscle at any rep range. And the quality of that muscle, which is to say how it looks in your physique, is much more correlated to your hormones than it is to your rep scheme. So if a guy's going to do 30, let's just make, let's just use this exercise, for example, if a guy's going to do 30 reps of hang cleans, which just sounds literally like the worst thing ever, and a female is going to do 30 reps of hang cleans. They're both going to see impressive development of their traps, but probably more so in the male because of the increased amount of androgen receptors in the upper back and shoulders and the just genetic propensity for men to develop their upper body.

Does that mean that this 30 rep set that's high weight is toning him? No, he's certainly growing muscle. Does that mean that this woman is toning because maybe she wants a more toned look? No, he's certainly growing muscle. Does that mean that this woman is toning because maybe she wants a more toned look? No, certainly not. She's building muscle too. Toning is a fictitious term that's used to describe building muscle in a way that's generally more aligned, in my opinion, with what women want their physique to look like, which is they want to have some muscle, but they just want it to be lean on their physique and look the way they think an athletic female would look. In most cases, everybody wants to look a certain way. That's for sure. There's no one way to look,

and I'm not telling you how you should look, but the word toned is more of a descriptive term than a concrete physiological thing that can actually happen. So for men, with that increased testosterone, we're going to get a greater bang for our buck from a hypertrophy standpoint. We'll probably build more muscle than women per unit of volume, per unit of intensity, per unit of training. And that's going to create more of that quote unquote bulkier look. And really this heavy weights make you bulky, light weights make make you toned thing, really just kind of, you can trace that back a long, long way to just how resistance training was done. Like it wasn't when I got started training in 2013, very few women were actually lifting with barbells.

Most of them, if they were lifting at all, were using things like bozu balls, dumbbells, and machines. And the barbell work was generally reserved for men it wasn't until more recently with the kind of increased popularity of things like powerlifting and crossfit and their infiltration of the gen pop space that we've seen more women lifting with barbells and i actually don't think it's any accident that we've seen an explosion in the amount of glute growth women are focusing on the amount of muscular development women are focusing on because they're able to train smarter because it's becoming more and more socially acceptable for them to work with barbells, which it always

should have been the entire time. But it wasn't long ago that we actually had men and women's only gyms. And even some gyms now have men and women's only hours. But the idea that toning is some type of physiological muscle growth response that you can aim for, and that if you lift too heavy, you flip the switch from toning muscles to building bulky muscles, that's simply not true. It doesn't show up in the research, doesn't show up in the science. The difference between that bulkier look and that more toned look is really just the description of

how a man is more likely to build the same amount of muscle with his training and what that'll look like on his physique than it would a woman. And again, we all have different genetic potential for building muscle. So if you're aware of that, you have the opportunity as a lifter to kind of pump the brakes. If you're a female who has a really easy time building muscle, you can always pump the brakes if you're worried you're going to gain too much. And it's simply, it's really that simple. There is no physiological response in the body that we would say, ah, that type of muscle growth is definitively bulky muscle, and this is definitively toned muscle. It's more, you're building muscle, how much you build has genetic and hormonal

variance between men and women and individuals. And then your level of leanness is really going to contribute to what that muscle looks like on your physique. Okay, so myth number nine, deadlifting is bad for your back. So anything can be bad for your back if you do it improperly. A lateral raise with bad form can be bad for your back. A dumbbell curl with bad form can be bad for your back. A deadlift with bad form can be bad for your back. It can also be bad for any other joint in the body. But simply stating the case that X lift is bad for X body part does not tell the whole story.

And it perpetuates this dogmatic idea that we need to be afraid of certain lifts. And this is dangerous specifically because when you think about the back in general, it's primarily supported by the lats, the spinal erectors, the glutes, the hamstrings, and the core muscles, all of which are trained in incredible congruency when we do the deadlift. So the deadlift might actually be a great exercise to support the back if it's trained and taught properly and you progress it intelligently and you don't just constantly hammer intensity or look to max out or load it up as much as possible. There's a lot of amazing potential benefits to doing a deadlift or even something like a Romanian deadlift,

where we don't go all the way down to the ground, and we might minimize how much stress we put on the back by simply working on that hip hinge mechanic, and staying inside that lumbopelvic rhythm, and really isolating the glutes and hamstrings while we ask for a more isometric contraction of the erectors, core and lats. But really, the idea that deadlifting is bad for your back primarily stems from the fact that most lifters have experienced some type of back tweak across their training career when trying to deadlift really heavy. And most of that is related to a form mishap, a simple bad lift, a bad rep, trying to get one more than you should have, trying to go a little bit heavier than you should have. It's usually lift or error.

It's not the way that lift is constructed and it doesn't make that lift inherently bad. That would be like saying, oh man, you know, every time I barbell bench, it makes my elbows cranky. And then you would say, okay, benching is bad for your elbows. And it could be, but I think the more correct statement would be too much benching with not enough recovery and potentially improper form is bad for your elbows. Same thing with squatting is bad for your knees. No, too much squatting with perhaps too much load or improper form is bad for your knee. But let's flip all those on their head in reverse order. So say you do squats and you do a tremendous job of developing

your quads and your glutes. Both of those will work to support your knees long term, right? That's a good thing. If you do squats properly, right, it could actually be beneficial to your knees. Let's talk about bench press. Okay, there's some lat involvement in the bench, but it's primarily tricep, pec, and shoulder. But if you have more pec and shoulder development, you can have better probably stability through the shoulder girdle, which can contribute to less elbow pain. Better tricep development can be beneficial, right? The long head of the tricep actually attaches up on the scapula. So that's going to contribute to shoulder stability as well as potentially increasing your elbow health. But if you bench like an idiot and you bench too much and you don't listen to where your body's at, you could run into some problems.

But that doesn't make any of these lifts, the bench press, the squat, or the deadlift inherently bad. I think what happens is people have really high training volumes with them and they don't have adequate recovery. But perpetuating the idea that the deadlift is bad for the back really moves people away from doing what could otherwise be a really beneficial lift or movement pattern. And one of the strength coaches in the space who I really look up to, particularly because he has an unconventional way of looking at things, is Mark Ripito. And Mark Ripito is actually a huge fan of using the deadlift as a therapeutic means to mitigate back pain. And if you understand kind of this novel model of pain science, this biopsychosocial model, and you understand that a lot of back pain is idiopathic, we don't know the cause, right? It's not always disc-related, sometimes it is idiopathic. We don't know the cause, right? It's not always disc-related.

Sometimes it's idiopathic. Doing things like deadlifts increases the bio, right, the biopsychosocial, the biological strength of tissues, the psychological component of being like, hey, I can do this. I can pick up a barbell. I'm pretty strong, which can contribute to pain mitigation, as well as the social piece of feeling like you're active, and you're not deteriorating, which is really, really big. And that might be the reason why doing deadlifts has such a positive acute effect on back pain for certain populations, at least in Ripito's findings. And one of the things that I found is a lot of clients who have chronic back issues, when we do get them dead

lifting with a lighter weight, and we progress them up to some type of substantial load where they're like, hey, I can't, I can't believe that I'm doing this. All of a sudden, they have more ownership of that back pain. And it essentially disappears. And I don't think it's all the dead lift. I think a lot of it is the guarding mechanisms around back pain come down. People become much more confident with what their body is capable of doing, especially capable of doing in a dynamic setting. And they start doing more things and they start moving more freely. And that back pain releases the stranglehold it has on how we move and what we do in our day-to-day lives.

And that is a really big piece of how we go about recovery or how we go about increasing someone's ability to recover. So I have found in practice, hinging, deadlifting, hip thrusting to be very, very therapeutic for back pain so long as we're not dealing with an acute trauma or some type of acute issue or we have a fusion going on. But, you know, that's going to be super, super case by case. But overall, I think that the amount

of anecdotal evidence I've seen, the amount I've seen from other coaches, and just knowing what we know about mechanics, it's really hard to say that deadlifting is inherently bad for your back. But what we can say is that deadlifting improperly, doing too many deadlifts with inadequate recovery, or doing deadlifts past the point of fatigue where all of your musculature might not be able to kind of rely on each other in the way they were designed to, you might have things slowly go into fatigue more quickly, and you might have to rely on lower back stuff, that might not be the best long term for your back. But to say that deadlifting independently is bad for your back

is a little bit of, in my opinion, an incomplete notion that doesn't tell the whole story. And we might end up scaring people away from movement patterns that could be particularly beneficial for general population training. All right, guys, so wrapping it up with myth number 10. And this is an interesting one, because in practice, I found it to be true, but theoretically, it is not. And that is that fruit won't make you fat. Now, first, we have to outline the things that contribute to body fat gain. First and foremost, being in a calorie surplus will contribute to body fat gain regardless of the foods you eat. Period. Even if you eat all organic, non-GMO, locally sourced, nutrient dense, healthy, whole foods,

you can gain body fat if you're eating too many calories. Will you be healthier? Certainly. But the likelihood of gaining body fat, even eating whole foods, so long as you're in a calorie surplus is all but certain. So understand that fruit can contribute to body fat gain, but primarily only by increasing your calories. Here's where I say, and this is why I said earlier that I haven't found it to be true in practice, is that it's very likely that people who consume whole fruits are getting a lot of satiety, right? Because they're high in fiber and they're high in water and they're getting a lot of nutrition because fruits are dense in micronutrients. So while they do contain calories, it's very unlikely

that when you're selecting whole fruits, particularly things like berries and fibrous fruits like apples, that you're going to overeat them. Additionally, many fruits have some degree of a barrier for entry, meaning you either have to wash them first, you might have to peel them first. All of that is a really, really good tool when it comes to calorie management. Think about nuts, for example. If you have pistachios and they're already shelled, the likelihood of overeating them are exponentially greater than if they're still in the shell because they have a much higher barrier for entry. And many fruits do. They either have peels, they need to be washed, they need to be prepped in some kind, or they're just really high in fiber and nutrition.

So I haven't found in practice that most people who are overeating fruit have a hard time with body fat reduction. What I have found is that fruit products can be a little bit tricky. So what I'm talking about are things primarily like juices and smoothies. Now, here's the downside. You get a lot of the micronutrient value that you get from fruits, right? The vitamins, the minerals, and the polyphenols. That's all good. There's nothing wrong with juice from a health standpoint.

It's quite healthy. However, when you pulverize fruit into a fluid, you lose that fiber, you lose that satiety thing that makes it so powerful, right? Because when that berry is chewed up, and that's called mastication, right? When you chew something, you get feedback from mastication. It starts that digestive response and that hunger response, as well as that satiety response. When you start chewing, your body knows something good's happening, at least from a hunger response standpoint. And you break that food down, it goes to the stomach, it takes some volume in the stomach, it's slowly digested because it contains fiber. Some of it's

not digested, which feeds your microbiome, which is good. And that's the benefit of the whole fruit. But you take that same fruit and you pulverize it into a juice and you drink it down. It gets digested and absorbed very quickly with little to no mastication and little to no food volume. So the likelihood of consuming exponentially greater amounts of calories from fruit goes up and up and up. The more we process it into things like fruit snacks, fruit juices, fruit leathers, whatever you whatever you just just name it. So whole fruits on their own have a very low likelihood in practice of contributing to excessive body fat gain. And I think that makes sense, right? However, fruit based products that are designed for consumption like juices certainly can. So we

have to draw that line there. And it extends into that additional conversation that I always bring up, which is that everybody wants to make the argument that processed foods contribute more to body fat gain. And I think that we've seen this enough in research and we've seen it enough in practice to really start to hammer home to people that of all of the things sociologically that contribute to obesity, it's not sugar. Sugar is not the problem. It's highly processed food, right? Because there's certainly sugar in fruit. But when we process it into a juice, all of that sugar might, you might not even add sugar to the juice, but it would certainly be easier to over consume the juice regardless because of that processing. And, you know,

this goes for things that are not sweet at all. Like let's consider potatoes. So if I were to just steam, let's say I steamed 10 russet potatoes, those big brown kind of boring Idaho potatoes. I steam 10 of them and I lay them in front of you and I say, hey, you know, you three people right here, why don't you eat these steamed potatoes? No salt. Just go at it. It would take those three people forever. But if I said, hey, I got two bags of ruffles right here, which is approximately 10 potato chips. They're just deep fried, covered in salt and different flavor enhancers. I said, why don't you go to town? They'd eat them before the football game was done. So, you know, that's the difference in how two foods of the approximately same original product, like the same original eight to 10 potatoes, are going to be consumed a hell of a lot differently depending on how they're

prepared, how they're cooked, what they're combined with. And I think fruit products often are combined to either limit that satiety response by making them fluid and easier to consume, or they're kind of, you know, made for kids where they're like chewy and gummy and they're fun to snack on and you can just kind of pop them back and they come in different colors, different shapes, different flavors. And those would probably be a little bit easier to over consume than just plain fruit on its own. So again, fruit doesn't have a easy road to making you gain excessive amounts of body fat through increasing your caloric intake when it's in its generally unprocessed form. But once you start turning it into things like juices and smoothies and adding in other things, like smoothies is where things can get really slippery. Because I actually recommend a lot of my clients who are looking to bulk

add smoothies because it's a really easy way to get calories in. But like if you start off the day, and a lot of women do this, they're like, oh, I have to have my green smoothie because it's healthy. And then you start with like, you know, a banana, some strawberries, some spinach. Hey, you're off on the right foot. And then you add the yogurt and get some protein. Oh, and then you add the almond butter and then you add the chia seeds and then you add the hemp seeds and you're slowly adding things in there that are incredibly nutritious and that you might well like in your diet. And then you pulverize it into one like 16 ounce shake and you just pound it back, it's going to have a lot of a different impact on your diet,

your satiety, and your hunger response than had you say had two banana and strawberries for breakfast with some yogurt and chia seed on top and just eating that slowly. And then for lunch, maybe you had a tablespoon of almond butter and a spinach salad with some strawberries on top, you know, which it might be the same volume of food, but the way in which it's delivered, the way in which it enters the system plays a massive role on how full it makes us. So it's really important that we are aware of these things and that we don't just say things like, oh, fruit doesn't make you fat. We say, well, eating whole fruit has a very low likelihood of making you gain body fat because we don't want to change the argument. We don't want to create confusion. We want to,

when we talk about nutrition in general, speak in whole, complete, coherent thoughts as concisely as possible. And that doesn't mean that we try to blow everybody's mind by using big terms, but maybe instead of saying, hey, fruit can't make you fat, you say, it's really unlikely that you're going to overeat things like whole fruits. Versus, you know, one of the things that I hear a lot, which is, oh, fruit's natural. You can't get fat from eating things that are natural. Yes, you can.

Olive oil is very natural, and it's very high in calories. And while it might be nutritious and a good cooking agent, instead of saying things like, oh, cook with olive oil instead of canola oil, you might say, olive oil is a generally healthier cooking oil, but you should still monitor the calories inside from a body composition standpoint. We can always work to improve our nutritional communication skills. And I think we need to elevate the standards with how we communicate nutrition, especially as we move into 2020. It's frustrating because politically, everybody's so willing to be careful with what they do and say. Nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Oh, I don't want to say anything offensive, or I don't want

to say anything that makes anybody upset. And that's caused a lot of problems in its own right, but it's understandable, right? We don't want to be overtly rude or overtly crass. So we watch what we say. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not impossible to say, hey, we need to just be careful about how we talk about nutrition, understanding that most people have no idea about nutrition. And if we have a little bit more of an understanding than them, speaking coherently and painting the whole picture might have more value in the long run and open up a greater nutritional dialogue than simply saying things like, oh, fruit can't make you fat, sugar is super addictive, if you eat sugar, you'll get addicted and you can't stop, and if you just stop eating sugar, you'll lose weight, which might be

true, but most people are likely to overconsume a variety of hyperpalatable foods, whether or not they contain sugar or whether they contain agents that are, you know, artificially sweetening or non-nutritive sweeteners, whatever you want to call it, they'll still overeat those because that pleasure response is much deeper than just the inclusion of sugar. So we just have to watch how we communicate things about nutrition moving forward. And I think that it's a really, really promising opportunity for us to expand the public consciousness around nutrition and how it works. All right, guys, so there you have it. Let's just recap everything really, really quickly. And again, if you're just somebody who wants to communicate with me on these or have any or has any questions, feel free to send me an email at Danny at coach Danny Matranga.com. I'd love to answer

your questions or engage in some type of dialogue about it if you disagreed with me. So one, you can't crunch your way to a six-pack. Remember, a six-pack is built by building the rectus abdominis with any other type of training and reducing overall body fat. Myth number two, you cannot turn fat into muscle. Remember, they're fundamentally different at a chemical level. Fats and carbs are hydrocarbons. Protein is more nitrogenous, and they don't transfer over to each other super easily. Third is too much protein is bad for your kidney and livers, slash you can only absorb 20 grams of protein in one feeding. Remember, muscle protein synthesis is important for muscle growth, and we might need more

than 20 grams to spike it. While absorption rates may drop off after 20 grams, that doesn't mean that having more than 20 grams of protein is bad or does not get absorbed. If you don't have an existing kidney or liver condition, it's probably okay for most people to eat a high-protein diet. More frequent feedings may be better for increasing muscle protein synthesis across a 24-hour period, and high-protein diets or moderate-protein diets are generally better for body composition than diets lower in protein. Myth number four, your knees shouldn't go over your toes.

Remember, we do this when we jump, when we run, when we land. It's part of our biomechanics. An individual variant should be at the core of all of our movement prescriptions. So we shouldn't tell anybody they shouldn't do anything until we've really assessed and looked at their body because there's a lot of people that can do a lot of different things. And using blanket phrases like that can be destructive to the general public consciousness of certain movements like squats. So number five, you should always stretch before you work out. You do not have to, you should do some type of warmup, particularly a movement prep.

you do not have to you should do some type of warm-up particularly a movement prep i'm impartial to a dynamic warm-up that includes some specific work and stretching after may actually be a better option for promoting tissue flexibility as well as individual joint mobility because again you're already warmed up and it's also a really nice time to just work on slowing down your breathing and getting into that parasympathetic state where we can relax and start to get to rest and digest where we can do things like assimilate nutrition a little better and build tissue a little bit better. Number six, more sweat equals a better workout. Remember guys, we've got between two to four million sweat glands per person. So that's a huge variance, right? We could either have on the short end or the high end. That's a big reason why people sweat different. So is temperature, time of workout, sodium level, fluid intake. So there's a lot of different things to work out. And just to touch

base on it again, remember from a fun little anatomy quiz, there's two types of sweat glands, eccrine and apocrine sweat glands. Ecrine sweat glands are more common, usually on the entirety of the body, particularly on hands and feet. And then we have those apocrine sweat glands. Ecrine sweat glands are more common, usually on the entirety of the body, particularly on hands and feet. And then we have those apocrine sweat glands, which are those interesting ones that particularly elicit that odor that are in the groin and armpit area. So myth number seven is sweating out a cold. And this one we can go over pretty quickly. Not something you want to be doing, especially right now. Exercise increases the allostatic load. If you're already stressed, we don't need to do that anymore than we already are. Heavy weights make, this is myth number eight, heavy weights make you bulky.

Light weights are for toning. Remember, all rep ranges have some degree of contribution to hypertrophy. The things we need to focus on primarily are proximity to failure and tension. And the way that your muscle group muscle growth, my apologies, looks on your physique is much more correlated to genetics, individual variants and gender than it is the type of lifting that you're doing. Also, the type of lifts you're doing plays a big role because you might develop muscle groups that might make you feel as though you're looking more bulky. Myth number nine, deadlifting is bad for your back. Remember, anything done improperly can be bad for any joint, so we want to lift with good form. But

in general, a movement like deadlifts, RDLs, anything that's hinging that develops the lats, erectors, glutes, and hamstrings might actually be a long-term beneficial thing you can do towards mitigating back pain. Last myth, of course, is fruit won't make you fat. And again, too many calories is the biggest thing that contributes to fat gain. And eating whole fruits has a very low likelihood of doing that, whereas eating processed fruits may have a greater likelihood of contributing to excessive calorie intake. So guys, there you have it. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast.

If you are liking it so far, please do me a huge favor. Leave me a five-star rating and write a review on iTunes. If you're listening on Spotify or any other platform, share this. That would make me so, so happy. I'm really trying to grow my platform here. I'm trying to reach more people and I am trying to make as big of an impact as I can on people's health, particularly during this whole COVID-19 thing. So if you liked it, do me a solid, share it. I would really appreciate that. And I'd love to interact with you and talk to you about it. And if you share it to your story and tag me, we can chat about the podcast. You can tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, what you disagreed with. And it'd be a really good way for me to get to know you better. So please keep me posted.

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