Mike Israetel
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I would say, I'm not so sure if it's a principle, but I would say what to keep in mind is that you have scoped out a problem and assumed the solution was possible without doing due diligence on is the solution actually probable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Like you can get out a map of the earth and the moon and you can draw a line from Houston all the way to the surface of the moon and draw a little picture of a rocket and go like, we're gonna make it. And in just the same way, people say, well, I wanna lose 25 pounds in four months And I'm just, it's like a line, it's like a straight line, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The reality is that up until the late 1960s, we just didn't have the technology to send rockets to the moon. And when we did, it cost billions of dollars.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And it's also true to say that because the human body has certain fundamental constraints on how quickly it's willing to lose fat while still keeping you sane and upright, it is highly unlikely that you will lose 25 pounds of fat in that amount of time, in four to six months. it is much more likely that you'll lose about half of that fat.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if you try to shoot for losing that much, just like shooting a rocket into space without doing your calculations, you're likely to have a bad time. You're likely to burn out of the diet. You're likely to rebound out of the diet. Even if you don't burn out, you're likely to regain all of your lost weight or the vast majority of it while doing a whole lot of suffering.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if you aim for roughly half of that amount during that time, then there's a high probability that you'll have great success and be able to keep it off. And keeping it off is good for two reasons. One, I don't suppose you want to just get fatter later. So it's good for the obvious reason. Like someone's like, hey, here's a million dollars. And you're like, great.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And they're like, but you don't get to keep it. You're like, what? So no, thank you. But the other really good reason is that your body doesn't like to lose a lot of weight at once. because of those, again, evolved evolutionary mechanisms, good God, evolved evolutionary, that's a hell of a phrase, those evolved mechanisms that kind of freak out on you and go, dude, we're starving.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I've noted this in my little body's notebook, and as soon as I get around food, I'm gonna blast you back up into the stratosphere with all the fat I can, because we're gonna fix this starvation problem. However, after you maintain your new body weight, let's say you lose weight over the course of three months, let's call it 15 pounds, significantly more reasonable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You probably need about three months more of just maintaining that new low body weight. And then the first few weeks, your body's like walking up and down the hotel hallway, chain smoking about it. Like, oh God, oh God, how do we get this body fat back on? This is bad. This is really bad. Calling all the calls and all this stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if we look at how humans evolved over the course of, let's say, just last common ancestor several million years ago, we split from primates, or actually technically still primates, I guess, we split from the great apes lineage. And what was our environment like in the interim? And it's almost completely true to say that it was largely an environment of pulsatile moments of
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
After a few weeks, your body's just kind of sitting in the hallway in like, you know, a little seat like, eh, nothing bad's happened yet. It kind of feels like a little bit normal, but still, if I get some food in me, I'm blown back up. And then about two to three months later, you catch your body in the street and you're like, hey, remember that whole weight loss thing? And it's like, what?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
No, I got to go to work, man. I don't even know you. And it walks off and you're like, oh my God, it forgot. It didn't forget entirely because as it's walking away, it's going to be like, ah, I remember that guy. But it's going to be a faint memory. And so your body gets used to whatever weight you're at much more than right after you got there, after a few months.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then you're able, if you like, to take another chunk out of that journey. So we lost 15 pounds in the first three months. Another three months we chilled. Chilling means you're still diligent about everything and making sure you don't regain the weight, which I have tons of tips on. And we have tons on our YouTube channel, all that stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then the next phase is maybe another three months of weight loss, but then you aim for 10 or 12 pounds. Why? Because as you get leaner, it's more and more difficult to lose fat. It becomes a more difficult, more expensive process for you psychologically, physically, and so on and so forth. So your goal is a little less. And then you take three months after that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So we got three, three, three, three. We have one whole year, but you might have successfully lost and kept off 27 pounds. And after that last three months, You are new, fresh you at that new 27-pound less weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And just with a few real basics in how to conduct yourself around the food environment and basic resistance training and cardiovascular work, real easy stuff, you just don't ever have to gain the weight back. So the big part of that answer is understanding the scope of the problem and not picking arbitrarily insane things to aim for. Can you imagine if you were doing a pitch for a company?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You're like, all right, so you got this product. It's a new kind of computer. What are your Q1 goals for profits? You're like 10 trillion. They're like, are you on drugs right now? Like who says things like that? But you're like, well, I was saying big, like, okay, but if we give you 10 trillion of capital and you don't spend it appropriately, we lose so much on interest that we all go broke.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There's a cost to shooting for goals that are impossible. And here's the worst one. I think probably it's the psychological cost. of having really poured your heart and soul into a plan that most nutritionists could have looked at and been like, you're not, this is crazy. You're not going to be able to do this. You're like, I got it, bro. No worries. You just never talked to anyone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then you pour everything into it. You try so dang hard. And then on the end, you just fall apart. It breaks you and you start regaining the weight. And You consider yourself an ineffectual person. You lose a substantial amount of self-efficacy of self-belief. It's good to succeed on average more than you fail in life because it teaches your brain like, I'm a competent person who can do things.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And someone's like, hey, do you want to start a 5K running program? You're like, yes. And they're like, are you sure you're going to be able to stick to it? You're like, well, generally, I stick to most things. But listen, it's not very hard to set so many goals up that are so exotically crazy for yourself that you have almost no chance of achieving them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And over time, you can teach your brain things
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
you're just not good at starting things or doing things and then next time you feel like changing your life your brain is going to low-key be like that's not an us thing we don't do that we fail remember and you're like yeah well it's not for me and so a lot of people try dieting but do it way wrong mostly because they take these crazy bites out of this like mouth more full than you can breathe air through type of situation you know a snake consuming the elephant type of goal and and then they burn out of it and then over time they learn that just dieting is not something that works for them but it
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
does work for them. They've just been doing way, way, way too much upfront. And I know it's crazy. I'm supposed to be telling you all empowerment and stuff, but the best kind of empowerment is being in touch with reality and doing things at a pace that'll require, or sorry, that cause you to have success rather than cause you to have very glorious burnout and failure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Lots of food availability here and there, you know, some running into a few trees which have a ton of apples on them sort of situation or felling a large mammoth and, you know, eating as much of that as possible. Interspersed with probably longer and more severe times of food is either just not much of it is around or none of it is around.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Yes, absolutely. And you actually can lose probably almost all, if not all of the weight that you want in most cases. But it's just not going to be in one diet. It's not going to be in this grit your teeth and do what it takes for four months and then voila, your problem is healed. It's going to take a few diets with a few maintenance breaks in between to get your body used to the situation again.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's like, imagine taking your dog to a dog trainer at the pet store and being like, I need Wolfies and new puppies. Great. But I need them trained up and they're like, okay, cool. So we'll set you up with a schedule and you're going to be like, no, no, no. Like I'm actually have tons of money. I actually own the store.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
We just, my butlers just bought the store and I'm going to raise all of your pay by four. If you just stay here and train my dog, like sleepless nights for three days straight until he's just better, there's just going to have to tell you like, The way dogs learn is like humans. And so it's a little bit at a time, but then they need to sleep and relax to let those memories take hold.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then over time, they build up their capacity. But it's going to take us like a week or two. It can't take us three days. It just doesn't work like that. And so people know that's true with dog training. Did you come to dieting? They're like, well, it took me 15 years to get overweight like this. Yeah, I think 15 weeks is enough to just reverse the whole process.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But it's a very curious assumption that doesn't mean you can't reverse the whole process. It'll just take a little bit more time Just the same way that we give dogs breaks between learning sessions and students. Can you imagine school? These are just 24-7 school. They don't let you sleep. They don't let you do anything. That's crazy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But when you're dieting straight through for months and months and months, that's what you're doing to your body. So what you want to do is give it enough dieting to make a meaningful change, but at the end, not have a lot of what we call diet fatigue, which is like insane hunger, sleeplessness, restlessness, the whole thing. That's kind of like pulling on a slingshot.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
to get your rebound back to higher weight as much as possible. We want to lose as much weight as we can without pulling back on the slingshot too much. And then you need that several months break afterwards, the equivalent of rest and sleep for dog training to come back to a point where, okay, now this weight has settled in. This is now your new body weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Your body recognizes, okay, I'm leaner now, and this is okay. It doesn't freak out as much. The diet fatigue is gone. And then you're ready to do the process again. It's a multi-stage process. Unless you have less than 10 or 15 pounds total to lose, you can do it in one fell swoop then. The maintenance period is just as important.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There's going to be three months of very due diligence you have to do after so you don't balloon back up like everyone else. But then one phase of dieting, one phase of maintenance, six months total, you could be done with 10 to 15 pounds. But if it's 30 pounds, if it's 40 pounds for many people, it's more. This is going to take months and months and years and years.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And so intermittent starvation is pretty much a thing for almost all animals, definitely a thing for humans during our evolutionary past. And so evolution doesn't design you necessarily for the future. It really only designs you for like the here and now. And it also works very slowly. And we're roughly the same biological creatures that we were, gee, 100,000 years ago, 500,000 years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's going to be a process that's at times difficult, but mostly just a matter of checking the green boxes in your daily plan. I'm eating all my meals like I should be. I'm working out like I should be. You don't have to be like bleeding to death on the gym floor. You don't have to starve all the time. especially with the new modern anti-obesity drugs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You actually just don't have to starve at all. And so you can do this. Is it just going to be a little bit more of a long haul than I think people plan for? And I think also one of the number one reasons that people have this tendency to like kind of want to do it all at once is because they're just vibing off the emotion of frustration.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
When you look in the mirror January 3rd and you see this love handle situation, Drew, you feel frustrated, right? You're like, oh, what is this? And frustration is literally kind of like a bias to the large language model of your brain. Like if you bias ChatGPT by telling it, only answer things in a funny British accent. Now it does all those things in a British accent.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Frustration biases your brain to look for really quick, short-term, let's just fix this now solution. It's frustrating to feel a mosquito like making you itch when it's like taking your blood. So you go slap and you kill the mosquito. Get out of here. Mosquito or the flies buzzing. Get get. That's what the emotion of frustration is good at handling.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The emotion of frustration is not designed to handle mega projects like re architecting your entire body. The better emotion for that is calm and patience and an optimistic attitude. And exactly the emotions you get looking at your love handles in the mirror. Can you imagine that? Someone looks at their love handles and you're like, what do you think?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Like, it just makes me so serene to know that I have a lot of awesome logical work ahead. You're like, are you, you're in a cult again. I know you keep joining cults. Stop lying. And so we get frustrated and then we think, well, I just have to do this now. I have to do all this now. I'm going to lose weight right now. This is the big change.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There's an old Debbie and there's new Debbie and new Debbie's lean and she's going to be lean and... three months and we just make up numbers in our head. And a lot of the reference frame we have for numbers is like stuff we've seen on transformation challenges on the internet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You know, Instagram posts, you look at marketing, transformation challenges and companies that promote them, mine used to all the time at RP, we don't do it anymore. It's a great thing, but also like it's this marketing 101 that companies are going to put up and clients and coaches are going to put up their absolute best results without care for maintenance.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So someone lost 33 pounds in 15 weeks, and you're like, that's me. But gee whiz, what is the probability this is you? And have you checked in with her? Well, you look at her recent Instagram, and she's posting mostly pictures of her face. You know what that means. The body's kind of gone back to its usual. And you're like, oh, oh, oh, she actually wasn't successful in the long term.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Hmm, that sure shit didn't work. So it's a lot of reeling back frustration and anxiety and impatience and instead laying a foundation of like, I'm just going to do the right things and it's going to take what it takes and I'm here for it, which is tough, but it just works.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the way we were living then is of periods of intermittently, you would just not have enough food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And so our bodies, and by our bodies, I mean animal bodies, and no change for humanity, same for humanity, developed really robust mechanisms by which that if we had access to lots of food now, we had better store that away for later because animals that did more of that in evolution simply survived more, reproduced better, and continued to pass on their genes at a higher frequency.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah, I think shooting for something like 7% of your body weight. in a 12-week fat loss phase is really sharp. Five to seven, better less than more so that you can succeed and not experience crazy diet fatigue and have that much more left for later phases and also less probability of rebounding again. five to 7% of your current body weight losing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And if you want more aggressively 10 to 12 weeks, so I really am trying to speak against the aggressive approach here. Once you have that as your goal, you're going to want to think about what you're eating, what your physical activity is like, and then what your resistance training is like. Why am I mentioning resistance training, which is training with weights in the gym?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Because if you lose weight, it's cool. Like it's better for your health and good things happen. But if you lose a lot of muscle while you're losing weight, the visual effect isn't as great. People think you look a little bit more sick maybe than lean. And if you can maintain your muscle mass, your health skyrockets, your aesthetic look looks way different and way better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Muscle fundamentally on almost everyone looks really awesome. Even if you have just a little muscle, it's like these natural curves that look really cool. Like muscle is most of the reason why young people have young people looking butts because they have muscle in there and it makes the whole thing prop up and shaped really great. So muscle is awesome for all of those reasons.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Also, it highly, highly curtails and prevents osteopenia and osteoporosis. It also makes you more enabled. You'll lose 10 pounds and you'll feel sharper. You'll feel stronger, more endurant, and you can command of your own body weight, more mobile. If you lose muscle, a lot of stuff doesn't hit nearly as much.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You just kind of feel like more blah, but congratulations, you're leaner or you weigh less. So resistance training is a critical component. That one's easy. Work out two to four times a week. for probably 20 to 40 minutes at a time. So it's very realistic to make dramatic gains to your appearance, especially if you haven't been hitting the gym.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Just going twice a week for 20 minutes, if you're training correctly, it's going to be able to keep on and grow tons of muscle on your body. Tons is a relative term. You're not going to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger or The Rock or something like that. That takes impossible because you're female, uh, where if you're male takes lots of steroids. So it's not exactly a realistic thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't, it also takes decades. So you're not going to wake up like with veins in your forehead and wonder why you even went to the gym last time. So that's the weight training component. That's very straightforward. And then the physical activity one is also very straightforward.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You generally want to get something like between eight and 12,000 average daily steps per day during that 10 or 12 week diet. So getting a step tracker like I have on, this one's like $17 from Amazon. I mean, they're super cheap. I would even say like, unless you have a compelling reason, don't get the expensive fancy ones because it's a lot of data that you almost certainly will never use.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Just track your daily steps. And this is a great thing because when you go shopping, when you're on your phone, pacing around your kitchen, talking to friends, When you go walking around with your dog or you go to the park or the zoo with your kids, you're just racking up steps. And so it integrates all of your physical activity, which is really great.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
because when you dependably have times of lots of food and then times of very little food or almost none, if you're just burning the food off as it comes in or you eat a couple bites and you're like, I'm pretty full and you got shredded six pack, you look really cool, but you're dead on the side of the creek because you ran out of fuel for your body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So I would say anywhere between 8,000 to 12,000 is awesome. If you don't get super tired from it, anything over 12,000 is just awesome bonus points, but not exactly something you want to shoot for because a lot of times it makes you tired. And then the diet is really where the rubber meets the road.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the diet's going to be responsible for, if I had to guess, 80% of the total magnitude of this transformation. And the diet really is this. Eat enough protein. Eat mostly or only healthy foods. and make sure that your calorie level for your whole diet is such that you're losing, you know, whatever amount of weight per week on average that's on track to meet your goal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
We have a RP Diet Coach app that we make that just does all this calculating for you. It just tells you when to increase calories or decrease. It does that for you also. Keeps track of where you are in your plan. But you can do this just with Microsoft Excel or just a little mental math in your head. You say, okay, I need to lose like, you know, 10 pounds and I have 12 weeks to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So like about a pound per week, I'm on, I'm on, I'm in the clear. And so you just dial back your calories until you're getting reliably week on week, roughly a pound lost. If it's a lot more, you need to increase your calories because you're going to burn out and have all those bad things happen that I talked about earlier from rushing the diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If you're not losing hardly anything or it's just half a pound, you need to cut the calories substantially. But fundamentally, eating higher protein, healthy foods is the way to do that. And meal timing and specific foods and all that matters almost not at all for most people's results. And I can absolutely get into what I mean by healthy food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
and what I mean by high protein diet, if you're curious.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if you are particularly good at first finding food, second, determining which food has probably the highest calories. And third, eating as much of that food as possible. And fourth, storing it away as efficiently as possible into as much body fat tissue as you can. In the times in which we evolve, you're a survivor because there's just the right answer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
To the extent that I'm aware from the current scientific literature, obesogens are some combination of poorly or undefined and account charitably for no more than 10% of the reason that people overfat and rigorously close to 0%. There's actually no need to suppose the existence of obesogens as unique chemical compounds that make you fatter.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There's a real cool chemical compound making fat are called a double cheeseburger. They discovered that a long time ago and there's no magic involved. Nobody's being poisoned. So obesogens I can talk to for you at hours length, if you'd like about the technical details and the assumptions, but they're just not a factor that almost anyone has to consider beyond that 10%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You're saying, I mean, probably not even 10%. If I had to bet my money, I would say there's probably no robust obesogen that exists in our diets today. Like,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
just not a thing i don't know i would uh it would be a curious metabolic effect indeed if something like that were discovered i'm sure there's something like that that functions in such a way but its effect is generally so small that when you account for the caloric load of a diet this doesn't leave anything left to be explained as far as why aren't people losing weight um So that's one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Seed oils, in every meta review of the literature, let's take all the studies that have been done, and they analyze them, and then they parse them, and then they say, okay, what conclusions are they coming to, and try to draw commonalities. Almost every review like that, as a matter of fact, every review that I've ever seen,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
shows that seed oils are usually healthier on average than saturated fats and are some of the healthiest sources of fat that you can have and are no more deleterious or bad for your health or likely to promote body fat than any other kinds of oils or any other kind of fats. So the seed oils myth is a myth. It's actually one of those things that borders. I don't want to sound curt when I say this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I sound curt, but I promise I mean it with all the best. It borders on a mass delusion where there never was much convincing evidence about seed oils being bad. And then everyone got on the bandwagon for them being bad. And the study after study shows that seed oils are really healthy. It costs fat loss, improved blood lipids, markers of quality of life and longevity go up.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And I just, it strains the imagination. How is it that seed oils are bad? So the reason that you're struggling with fat loss is almost certainly nothing to do with seed oils either. I'd love to take, tackle some followup questions before we get into the whole, uh, hormones and all the other stuff. But, uh,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
like if i if i go to let's say a restaurant where i know doesn't count because restaurants have a ton more calories and fats in their food than you are remotely aware of and if i showed you the real numbers of what they're putting in your food it would baffle you that they could stick that many actual calories and fats into your meal we're talking about most commercial kitchens
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Start a fettuccine Alfredo with one stick of butter. That's for one person. That's 900 calories only from fat. That's insane. And so it's usually the load. So the real study is if you buy a high quality canola oil and you put it in your kitchen and you mix it with pasta and brown rice and ground beef and veggies, do you feel worse eating normal amounts of that? that's a seed oil.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But let's fast forward now to all those mechanisms being extant in pretty much every human. Now, where are we? We walk outside and there's grocery stores with aisles as far as the eye can see of foods that companies meticulously choose with their very best marketing research so that we buy them. And these foods relative to our ever-growing incomes are cheaper all the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
How do you know how many calories are in that Korean beef?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They're more convenient all the time. They're tastier all the time. And because human tastes are determined by human consumer preferences, they're really determined by evolved preferences, which really means good tasting foods and high calorie foods have an enormous intersection. It's not 100%, but gee whiz, it's up there. And so because we live in this, what's called modern food environment,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You know, the animals, and humans are animals, animals survive with a couple of like non-negotiable needs. One of those is to acquire enough hydration, water. One of those is to stay away from predators. And another one is to acquire food in some capacity. And that's actually true for animals that even that don't reproduce.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Genetics is the answer to that question, by the way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
No, that's great. That makes total sense. Sometimes food just doesn't vibe. And I have plenty of foods that I eat. And after I'm like, I feel like I'm just not going to do that. And so a lot of times it's a very personal thing. So it's not obesogens, it's not seed oils. Let's talk about hormones.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If your thyroid hormones are insufficiently being secreted and you can get blood work to confirm this or find out if this is the case, then it's going to put a big, big damper in your ability to lose fat, 100%. But it's also true to say that the vast majority of people, 95 plus percent, and I'm being charitable, just do not have an underactive thyroid. It's actually quite rare.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And so if you suspect you have an underactive thyroid, it's absolutely great to go to your doctor and get the testing. But it sure does not explain the vast majority of people overweight do not have underactive thyroids by a long shot. It's possible, but unlikely. Other hormones are more complex. Estrogen, testosterone, they exert their effects more subtly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Their effects aren't as closely linked to body weight. And again, most people have them in the quite normal range. Now, if they aren't abnormal, fixing them can do a lot of good, but... Not going to be the thing that solves the obesity epidemic anytime soon. So we're left with this question of like, so what is causing people to like have more fat in their bodies than they want?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the answer is generally just eating more calories than your body can use at any one time. And so it puts this away into fact. The number one way people eat more calories than maybe they want is food tastes really good and you just end up eating a lot of food. And the higher calorie foods just tend to taste better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, a drippy, juicy cheeseburger or some healthy pasta with a rich olive oil cream sauce and a couple of pieces of grilled asparagus and just a juicy salmon filet Doesn't that sound great? That's even healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That's actually very healthy food that you can cram so many calories into dishes like that and eat a portion and a half that you just end up getting in too many calories and gaining weight. And there actually has been no documented instance of someone gaining a large degree of body fat and weight while simultaneously under eating calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's thermodynamically roughly saying impossible, probably strictly impossible. And so it ends up being that, yeah, it is the excess food that we're eating and it doesn't just have to be junk food. Now, junk food is the best way to get an excessive amount of calories by a long shot, but you can do it without junk food just by eating really tasty, well-prepared food.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And we have these ancestral drives of like, well, look, there's a lot of food around and it's delicious. I'm going to keep eating it so that I can, you know, like the chipmunk who stores the food in his face, I can store it for later when I'm starving.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That's pretty healthy, but you got an appetite on you. And you eat more than you need, and you just kind of keep eating, and all the healthy snacks add up. And all of a sudden, you have an excess body weight. So the real thing to do is you don't have to count calories at all.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if you know roughly how much food you eat through the day, and you know that's the amount that's been leading you to gain weight, Taking a chunk off of that, subtracting away some amount of food that's meaningful is almost certainly going to get you to maintain your weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then if you subtract out more, going to get you to lose weight at that earlier thing we were talking about of that rate of weight loss, maybe about a pound per week. That's nice and sustainable over a 10 to 12 week period.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
100%. And a lot of people who have success with ketogenic diets, carnivore diets, things like that, they see it was the hormones and not the calories. But if you look at their calories, they're eating less calories than they were before because when you cut out an entire food group like carbohydrates, it's just really difficult to stuff yourself full of proteins and fats.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You just don't feel like eating anymore. Though to your point earlier, you were successfully at a higher body fat level still eating a low carb diet. So it is possible. And for many people, we have this frustrating moment where they're like, I'm eating low carb. I'm doing all the things. Why am I not losing weight? And why am I not losing fat?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That logic is applied automatically by the parts of your brain that you're not even conscious of unless you choose to be through mindfulness meditation practice. And then what could possibly be the result of that other than lots of people becoming significantly overweight? To me, the obesity epidemic is just not a surprise. It has no mysterious cause.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the reality is it's almost always and almost everywhere a calorie situation. And this is something that like athletes in the space know very well. Like if you told your bodybuilding coach, like, Hey, like the fat's kind of not coming off this week. At some point, he's going to cut your food. Like he's just going to reduce your food intake. And you're going to be like, what, what are you doing?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
He's going to be like, what do you mean? What am I doing? Like, this is how fat loss happens functionally. At the end of the day, the way you got fatter was eating more food than you needed. And the way you're going to get less fat is to eat less food than you need so that your fat stores are liberated and power the rest of your body functions that you just don't have enough food to power anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then your body fat will So bad news, it is a food thing. Good news, it's a food thing, so there's just no reason to suspect it's any more complicated. And I do get a little passionate about the obesogens and the seed oils and all this other stuff and the processed food because on the one hand, there's some validity to that stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But on the other hand, I feel like too much, it's being used to take the onus off of the thing that really is causing it. And to some extent, taking that onus away is the easy way out because no one really wants to look at the elephant in the room. It's like if someone told you, hey, your addiction to playing video games is really kind of screwing things up at home and at work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And you're like, no, no, it's not video games. No, I'm fine. I'm fine. It's the fact that I'm just not generous enough with my family. It's the fact that I haven't been doing all the biking trips around the neighborhood. It's the fact that my boss is just a man all the time. And it's kind of annoying.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then at some point you go see a psychologist and they kind of just figure out what your life is doing. And they're like, it's the video games. And I know why you don't want to say it, because it's painful to remove them or curtail their influence on your life because you're really like playing them. And so how many people, Drew, don't like eating plenty of tasty food in an unrestricted manner?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, can you find me one person who doesn't like, at least in some capacity, to just like eat tasty food and not have to worry about what's going in their bodies? Even people that like to concern themselves with healthy food They don't want to count individual walnuts. That's crazy. And so when people are like, Hey, you know, you're over fat and like, yeah, I wonder why.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And someone's like, it's some special thing in the environment that as soon as we get rid of, you're going to be back to normal. It's so tempting to believe that. But every piece of evidence we have so far says it's just not true. And it really is just overeating. But now that we know that overeating is a problem, we have lots of solutions to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
One is just the willpower situation of just like making sure to organize your diet in a logical way. pre-plan what's going into your body, find a level of eating that's getting you to lose weight, stick to that until you get really diet fatigued 10 or 12 weeks later, and then coast into maintenance. But another one is we have a new class of drugs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I call them modern anorectic drugs or modern obesity drugs. Things like semaglutide, aka ozempic, or trizapatide, aka manjaro. And the ozempic's also in one form known as wagovi. And these medicines are, and I'm going to say this, I think this is the first time I'm saying this on a podcast. I've just done a literature review myself on this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
For most Americans that are either of normal weight, yes, I said that, and especially of overweight, it's probably better for their long-term health to be on these drugs than not on these drugs. That's how powerful they are. And they come with risks and they come with downsides and they come with side effects to manage, but these are generally quite tractable problems you can work through.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The 90-something percent cause of the obesity epidemic and why most of us are somewhat or a lot overweight compared to what's ideally healthy is because we were designed to survive in environments with intermittent starvation and capitalism has simply solved the problem of food availability in any extent that you measure it in modern countries.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Whereas the drugs power in directly reducing your hunger and food drive so that you eat less, Their power in allowing you to focus better through your day and have better sleep because you're not concerned about food all the time or ravenously hungry is immense. And their way of affecting tons of other health aspects of your body is just nearly universally
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't want to say a panacea, but it does so much good for your body that nowadays, because before it used to be before, I mean, three years ago, you try to do a diet and it's just going to be tough. And the hunger is crazy. And you go to a mixer after work and your friends are eating gourmet sushi and dipping pizza slice into the sushi. You don't even know how the physics of that work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You just want some of it in your body. And it's so difficult. But now with this new generation of medicines. you can have a higher probability of success on any diet you choose by a huge factor. So this is the era of empowerment. And the way it works is like we now know how the medicines work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Most of the reason they work to potentiate fat loss is just because they have what's called an anorectic drive. They just make you not want to eat as much. And then you get fuller faster, you stay fuller for longer. And for the first time in modern recorded history since the 60s, I think, The US in 2023 just saw its first dip down in obesity rates exclusively because of these drugs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So just something to throw out there. It's a new world we're living in. We have the technology, so to speak, to do a lot of good for our bodies if we're open-minded to that sort of thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. Did you know that Kelly Means runs a supplement company, not as a nonprofit, but as a for-profit venture? Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And you know, like that's a thing that is here with us. And now it's our job, uh, as consumers and as educated people to be like, okay, now that I know all that, what can I do to improve my situation? That's realistic. And at least a siege to the fact that yes, okay. Evolution is a thing and it really does make me want to do this. And I'm not going to try to
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. And so his critique of the pharmaceutical system as profit-driven is, to me, baffling because he's profit-driven. And he's actually selling supplements that don't go through FDA approval. And so most people on the street would be like, what's safer, something that goes through FDA approval or something that doesn't? 98% of people would be like, probably something that goes through it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And they would largely be correct, though there are many, many problems with the FDA and the approval process I can talk about. You know, the supplements he's selling are functionally unlicensed and unapproved. And somehow he's able to claim that the FDA is putting all these drugs out that are really hurting people, but oh, but his supplements, they're the ones that are going to save your health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I am not a big fan of that kind of thing. Outlay of opinion. I'll, I'll phrase it generously.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The price situation, I don't really particularly understand that criticism. What specifically is the criticism about the price?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Our healthcare system suffers from an insane burden of over-regulation by a humongous, humongous factor. That's definitely a problem. Part of the ways that problem presents itself is sometimes egregiously high prices for pharmaceutical medicine. But almost never are these prices actually prices people pay. These are prices charged to insurance companies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And there's a bit of a funky thing there where you can charge an insurance company a lot more money than you can charge an individual. An individual will just be like, nah, I'm not buying that. But if you can get it approved through your insurance, they can begrudgingly approve it in some cases. And so they can pay much more money for the drug.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So in a properly competitive market oriented drug development environment, you have multiple drugs competing and a direct patient to drug purchasing pipeline with the approval of a doctor, of course. So if I'm actually able to buy these drugs out of pocket, And I see that terzapatide costs two times less than semaglutide. I'm buying terzapatide for sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
search for like some kind of corporate poisons or pollutants or marketing tricks. I know they give me the food that really I'm just buying. And so, but I can always buy different food and I can always change my approach, but I just have to recognize that all of us come from that same evolved background. And it just makes sense that this is what our bodies and brains want to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if I really want semaglutide, I'll pay double or whatever. The way this works in every single market ever studied is that eventually prices trend to very, very low levels because of the fierce competition of companies who make different drugs. There's also a bunch of drugs in development. In the next few years, we'll have a bunch more released.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then Ozempic, for example, will be like four years outdated and you will almost certainly find it super, super cheap. Am I for making drugs substantially cheaper via deregulation? By God, I couldn't say any more about that. Like, absolutely. But is it some like specifically nefarious thing between Denmark and the United States? I'm not so sure that that's the case. I would be curious.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The ideal amount of money supplement or drug companies would charge you is infinity. And the ideal amount of drug they would ship you is zero. Your ideal is that they charge you nothing and give you all the drugs you want. The market finds an equilibrium somewhere between those two points. So the price issue is a technical economic discussion.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It doesn't really belong in the realm of fat loss and obesity and those kinds of conversations, though it does in the sense that we need to try to drive these costs down as cheap as possible, which means we need more innovation and more economic freedom and more competition. Those are the absolute undisputed ways to reduce long-term price without sacrificing availability or quantity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Because governments in other countries can drive down the price by simply negotiating a lower price, but then the availability falls and very few people can get them. As a matter of fact, I have many friends in Europe who say that accessing these drugs is functionally impossible or highly unlikely for them to do. So that's a bad deal. And so the education component is a curious one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I would say the idea that we aren't focusing on nutritional education and we are focusing on pharmaceuticals is just wrong. It's just not true. The United States has had many concerted efforts of nutritional education over as many decades. And most of them just don't do that well. I'm going to tell you why. Because most people just don't care. Most people, it's not an information problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's a, I want tasty food that's in front of me and I'm going to eat it problem. You interview people coming out of a McDonald's. What fraction of them are going to tell you that's healthy food they're eating? Almost none. Regular people. No particular kind of education. We'll be like, yeah, this is burger and fries. What's that, health food? They're like, come on, man, stop.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And they'll walk away. And you and your camera guy are like, this guy's not going to talk to us anymore. He thinks you're joking, which surely you are. And so the reality is like somewhere here we lost the personal responsibility situation. The reason most people are over fat is because of the amount of food coming in. And I don't want to lay blame. There's no one at fault.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
These are mechanistic things. But now we have a class of drugs that can radically reduce your appetite and radically improve your long-term health. In addition to that, as both because of your appetite reducing and you're losing weight and in total independent mechanisms, there are like eight independent mechanisms by which these drugs are really good for your health.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And so when we have something like this and we do the appropriate work to drive the cost down, We have something that's just way more powerful than nutritional education. Even if you take nutritional education and somehow manage to propagandize and inculcate everyone into always exuding their best practices, which no one's ever succeeded with.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Here's another piece of interesting literature for you. The absolute best predictor of how teenagers eat is who they're genetically related to. There are twin and adoption studies where they have identical twins separated at birth or siblings separated at birth, adopted to different families. And so they know the genetics of their birth family. They know the genetics of their adoptive family.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And they know the genetics of the individual, which the individual, because they're adopted, genetics are no more likely to be the same as their adoptive family by chance. And it's shown that after about age 12 or 13, the variance explained in that individual teenager's eating habits
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
that can be explained by what they learned in the home growing up with their adoptive family is between zero and 10%. The best control studies show it's closer to zero. So I'm gonna say a crazy thing here. As a parent, you can 100% make sure your child is eating really, really well in the home when they're there because you have total control. And it's a good thing to do.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
As a school program, you can make sure that kids are getting healthy lunches. And healthy lunches are something we just don't have much of in the United States. And it's not for mysterious economic reasons. It's just for preference. Most people like pizza and burgers. That's what the school serves.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And I think because it's school and we want to keep people healthy, 100% we should be doing healthy food. In a cheap way, but an effective way. There's tons of ways to do that. But once those kids are off doing their own thing, Mostly it's their genetics that explains what kind of food preferences they'll have, and it's almost nothing else.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So once people turn into adults, all of that awesome nutritional education you got in the home and in the school seems to fall on relatively deaf ears. And then it's really like, what are you as a free adult interested in doing and how are you interested in changing your life? And at that point, the onus comes all the way back. It goes right by the schools. It goes by the parents.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It goes by the pharmaceutical companies. And it comes right out of your mirror and hits you right in the face. Crap. It's me again. You know that Spider-Man meme where they're pointing at each other? You. No, you. It's you again. Or the villain is unmasked Scooby-Doo meme where it's just you as an anime. You're also the villain.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or bad or terrible, but fundamentally, the reason you are currently over fat is because some of your food choices or the quantities in which you eat those foods are inappropriate or excessive. And it's really straightforward to make good choices. Healthy food is not rocket science.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It can actually give you all of the several, just five or six food groups that... That's all healthy food. And if you do that and you watch the scale, and if the scale isn't going down, you eat a little bit less food, keeping your protein up, of course, then you're just going to have very predictable results. Am I saying that's a fun process?
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Not necessarily, but it's predictable and we understand it really well. And there's just no reason to suppose that any other kind of nefarious forces are involved. And if you want to do this by yourself, listen, that's awesome. But if you want to do it with these modern obesity drugs, there's no reason to suspect they're particularly deleterious or dangerous.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There is no conspiracy to get them, you addicted to them or something like that. There's not some kind of evil corporation manufacturing them ulterior motives. They're just unbelievable breakthrough medicines that are, again, probably healthier for most people to be on rather than off.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The biggest factor is genetics by a long shot. They're Japanese people in Japan. And Japanese people just don't develop as high degree of adiposity. It's usually because they just have a lower food drive and experience less of a pleasure response and a reciprocal reinitiation of food drive after eating tasty food than the rest of us do on average.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They're like, um, you know, I went to school with a ton of Asians when I was at the university of Michigan, tons of Asian friends. And like, they'll eat like three pieces of sushi and be like, oh my God, I'm so full. will just like exist for eight hours longer.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And I'm like, oh my God, I could inhale three pieces of sushi, not even through my mouth, like just through my nose and that I can eat the rest of the sushi bar and they'll kick me out for overeating. Like, that's just a thing I can pull out of the hat anytime. It's genetics. You know, like there are absolutely physical differences between major human subpopulations and they're real.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And if we try to over index on the specific ways in which they're living their lives and thinking that's what's doing it, but we fail to address the confounder of genetics, which is going to be quote unquote learning a lot of stuff that probably either has much less of an impact.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And there are certainly things that Japanese culture does that are better than ours, but there are other things that Japanese culture does that aren't as great as ours. Like they're, they're older adults don't seem to engage in resistance training nearly as much. They have a much more muted gym culture than we do, for example.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Um, and, and so on down the line, also their bar culture is like just tied completely into junk food of the most despicable quality. Like the Japanese exclusively like oil fried, uh, uh, uh, breaded meats, uh, When they get drunk and like I had a basically stomach collapse when I tried doing that in Japan recently, but they seem to be thing is just fine.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The plenty of junk food and tasty treats, but they just don't seem to have a high food drive on average. And this is also reflected in the fact that while Japanese people in other countries, especially the United States tend to be fatter on average.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They're not fatter by nearly as much as you would expect if the obesogenic environment of the United States was really the thing causing all of us to be super fat versus just tasty foods around. And some of us like it a lot more than others. I mean, there's all kinds of subpopulation differences that present like this.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
For example, if you look at the Indian subcontinent, then you tend to notice that the average Indian person just does not hold as much skeletal muscle as naturally as the average human in the world, and nor are they particularly prone to rapid obesity.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But what you have is a situation where many folks who are genetically Indian or from related region of that world, South Asians, they tend to exhibit higher than expected rates of simultaneously low muscle mass. and relatively high body fat levels.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So like in clothing, they present as totally normal, but then you do a body fat exam and they're like at 33% and they're 32 years old and pre-diabetic, which is quite rare for most folks. And so we can say like, so what is it about Indian food? I mean, fundamentally Indian food is only one scientifically confirmed thing to do with this. It's like maybe the tastiest food in the world.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's just better. Indian food is just better. If you've never had Indian food, you'd never really eaten until you've had it. And so, but like, you know, it's not just the food that's doing that. That's a lot of that's genetics because if you fed, you know, Northern Europeans, a ton of Indian food, they would have lots of muscle mass and body weight.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They would be gigantic way over fat, but they wouldn't be skinny fat to that same extent. And so if we over index on the differences between nations or peoples and thinking, oh, it's the social and cultural factors, which do play a role, say a minor role relative to genetics, genetic genetics plays by far the biggest role in that.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I love that you're bringing that up. I'm actually potentially, I shouldn't be talking about this, but here I go yapping my mouth again. I'm highly considering writing a book that teaches people how to get more muscular and get leaner. But a big part of the book, probably the first part is going to be addressing the question of vanity.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The best in the world of processed food.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Now, Drew, to the point of cultural differences, and some of these are genetic differences expressing themselves as culture, some of these are purely cultural. Let's take a quick think, you and I, as about how different that is. Could you imagine an American corporation coming up to Linda, the overweight secretary, and going, Linda, the corporation needs you to lose weight. Lawsuit! National news!
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
frigging billions down the drain. That's fat abuse. It's fat shaming. How dare you? Are you serious? I work for a corporation. My output is what I type into this computer. How dare you tell me about anything else about me? The response is 360 degrees different from anything that would occur in Japan.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Whereas in Japan, if someone's like, Hey, like the corporation cares about you, they're like, Oh, okay. Okay. Just try not to disappoint the corporation. trying to do what I'm supposed to be. I'm a big team player here, and I got to rein in my stuff, and they're instantly cooperative nine times out of 10. We're Americans.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I mean, 50-50 may be an exaggeration for how much cooperation you're going to get. Because if you are a middle manager, and your boss told you, hey, we have this health initiative. Let's say you work for General Motors or something. And you go, yep, sure, boss, we do. That's okay. So you see Jameson and your staff are like, Jameson, he does great work. He does.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Like is vanity a sin or should we actually be okay to care about how we look? Um, basically TLDR, like almost everyone is to some extent, quote unquote vein. And there's also for almost everyone, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Like it's okay for you not to love your love handles. However, at the same time, trying to forgive means probably to me that an injustice occurred.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's your job tomorrow to go talk to him about the fact that he's too over fat. You got to tell him about we have a gym in the workplace and about he's getting some food vouchers to get healthy food or whole foods. It's your job. Drew, are you looking forward to that conversation?
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So when people say we need more education... They have a really good point, but then actually doing it and actually imposing these rules and ideas requires people's buy-in at a deep level. And before we get that, all the stuff about education is kind of like, is there anyone listening? Does anyone care? Is anyone actually going to do this?
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And those are kind of the bigger questions I've been asking recently, not facetiously, but in the honest attempt to say, I think most people have a giving a shit problem. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Look, if I had to make a list of all the things you could do with your life that are better than just trying to eat lean and get skinnier or whatever, I think that's all of them.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Spending time with your children, walking your dogs, loving your grandmother more, dancing at the club all night. This is all the stuff of life. So I'm not saying that folks that just don't really care much about their health are bad people. They're awesome people. But then they have a certain health and you look because you don't really care.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Like a Japanese person tends to look a little bit more ahead. Like if I eat five Twinkies today and I do this tomorrow and the day after, where's that going to lead to? Nothing good. Some of us are more YOLO. Like I like Twinkies. They're going in my mouth and there's nothing wrong with that. the consequences will be different. And we already know the primary cause, human choice.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So as a society, we should probably look towards people to be like, listen, how can we empower you, if you'd like, to eat differently and to exercise and to do all these things that are better for you But it has to be a question because, thank God, we don't live in a totalitarian society where we just tell people to stop eating.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It has to be a gentle invitation that we have some answers and we can help. And it can't be you do this because if you say you do this, the probability you'll get traction with most Americans and most people in the world is very, very low.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So it's true to say that your desire, for example, for something like air, what's called air hunger, is higher than your desire for water. If someone said, listen, I'm either going to not let you breathe for the next 30 seconds or you just don't have to drink water for the next 30 seconds. You'd have to be unbelievably dehydrated to actually prefer the water more.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The food guide pyramid.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That's the million-dollar question. I will say that the anorectic drugs, Ozempic and et cetera, they lead to less addictive behaviors, which is awesome and actually allows you to express more personal responsibility.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They also reduce your food drive, which is your hunger and your desire to do something about eating more tasty foods so substantially that for any amount of willpower you happen to have, you'll be able to be more successful in the weight loss plan if you have that hunger reduced.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So for example, if you have the same person, in one instance, they have their full weight of their hunger and cravings, and you're like, look, you can make better choices, it's going to cost you a little bit more time, and you're going to be able to plan your whole week out, or you could just right now drive over to Wendy's and just show Dave Thomas what really business support looks like, talking about
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You don't forgive thunderstorms for like putting hail on your deck. because they're not sentient beings. There's no injustice. I'm going to tell you something crazy, but your body also isn't sentient. Your brain is, your body's not. And so like, there's no one to be mad at when you have love handles and flabby arms. There's not even anyone to forgive. So do I'll do you one better.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Throw them a hundred dollar bill and just, just jump into the window and start eating fries. When you're hungry enough, that last thing sounds like exactly what your body designed you over millions of years to do. And the first one sounds like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Like I can't plan anything. I'm starving. Get out of my face and give me a donut.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And if you're not a donut, definitely get out of my face or I'm going to eat you. That doesn't seem to comport for many people. However, you take that same person and you take their food drive and their hunger down substantially. And these medications, it's like a turn dial. The more of them you take, if you can manage the side effects, the less hunger and food drive you have.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You turn down the food drive from a 10 to a 3. You talk to the same person. You go, what do you think about eating next week? Do you want to try this healthy meal plan? You damn well know you're supposed to be doing anyway, hint, hint. Or do you want to go to Wendy's and just let it all fly? And they're like, you know what? I really should be doing something for my health. You're like, mm-mm.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Well, let me try it. And you're like, well, why are you saying yes now? And they're like, because I'm not starving to death. And that's a big deal. It's kind of a similar idea with something like, you know, I'll go on the political left here because I sound pretty right wing. Something like universal basic income. When people are dirt poor, they got nothing to build on top of nothing.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Tell them, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I don't have boots. It falls on deaf ears. The whole thing is a rat-raised maze for survival.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But if you get people some decent housing and some decent health care and some decent food to eat and a little bit of money, then all of a sudden, if they're not interested in improving their condition, you can fully blame them now because you got everything you need to start making your life better. You're clearly just being a piece of shit about this.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And on the other hand, also the folks that needed the help... now that they have a place to live and medical care and food, they're like, wow, man, this is so helpful. Now I can determine, I take all of my energy and putting it towards getting a great job, increasing my education, saving away for the future. You've enabled these people to do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So in just the same way as some universal basic income might help some folks in some instances do better because you're just de-burdening them in a similar way, the pharmaceutical drugs are de-burdening people from having psychotic hunger all the time.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
that they're typically used to after a few weeks of a diet because the psychotic hunger after a few weeks of a diet is not some weird mystery of the universe or the obesogens are causing it. This is just how most people's brain react to dieting because your brain's not designed to make you lean.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's designed to make you as fat as humanly possible when the opportunity presents itself in most cases. And again, that's why America and Mexico and Half of the world looks as obese as it does now. So empowerment is a big thing these drugs can give you precisely because they can allow you to be the best version of yourself unencumbered by insane drives to continue eating as much food as possible.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Anorectics. Anorectics.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Does that even need to forgive yourself? Cause you didn't do anything wrong. It's just your body doing what it's supposed to do. And it does it. Yeah. Well, the only question to ask is, can I change how my body looks and feels and affects my health by altering what I eat and how I train and how I live the rest of my life?
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I feel great about them. God bless them. I hope they take all the Ozempic they want. There's not a damn thing wrong with them doing that. However, if they do it in that haphazard way where you're sort of, this is a group of combined two things. One is they're less than 30 pounds overweight, right?
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the other is they also just aren't attending to anything fitness related, like eating enough protein, healthy foods, going to the gym. And they're like, oh, I don't need any of that stuff. There's a pill for that. So they're going to lose all the weight they want, probably, and that's awesome. They can even get skinnier than they planned, which most people think is cool.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't like the skinny look. That's not for me, but other people think it's great. God bless them. It's a great look. So nothing on the moral side at all, but there's a consequence to not paying attention to the quality of your diet, especially if you're on powerful drugs that can now radically reduce your body size. For example...
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If you're not eating plenty of healthy foods as the core of your diet, these drugs, you just say, you just did junk. You know, those people that aren't super overweight, but all they eat is junk. You ever have coworkers like that? Like, I swear to God, if they stopped making Twinkies and beef jerky, you would starve to death. Like, how are you real?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Those folks will eat less Twinkies and less beef jerky when they start taking these medicines. And then the total amount of micronutrition, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber that they got just barely kept them in working order because they were able to eat enough of this awful foods that have very few of those things in there.
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Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Now that they've reduced those foods, but they haven't eaten any better foods, they're like at rest. decent risk of vitamin mineral deficiencies and not getting enough D vitamins and B vitamins and calcium and all the way down the line, if they're going to like shrink down and you're going to be like, Debbie, how are you? She's like, good, good. You're like holidays treated you well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
She's like, yeah. You're like, Debbie, we haven't known each other a long time. Are you sick? Is something going on? I want to send you flowers or something. She's like, no, I'm out on Zempik. I'm feeling great. You look her up and down. You're like, okay. You just walk off. Parts of you are disappearing and not in a fun way. And bags under her eyes, her skin looks really pale.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the answer is like, that's also nearly solved problem as far as knowledge in the scientific community. There are almost no mysteries left about how to do that. And I'd love to share all of the insight with your listeners. But the good news is like, not only is your body doing what it's supposed to, all
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
She's just under nutrition. That's what we call it. And so folks like that suffer greatly from that situation, which is simply remediated by eating most of your diet as lean meats, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If you do that, then as you reduce the amount of that food, it's still so vitamin and mineral and nutrient dense that you're just going to be a leaner, more awesome version of yourself. The second problem is protein. So people don't eat enough protein when they You know, take Ozempic and they just eat mostly junk food. Now they eat less junk food. Now they're eating even less protein.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Then they can become what's called hypoproteinemic, which means they just don't have enough protein for normal body functions, which means they start to take protein from the parts of your body that need it the least for survival. So it doesn't happen like this exactly, but you could see it blown out as like your body's like, all right, everyone line up.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
We need amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. We don't have enough. Who's willing to give them up? Heart? Heart's like, dude, I'm pumping blood. We'll die if I don't have enough muscle. Heart, you're good. Get out of here. Brain? I'm thinking all of these solutions and ideas. Okay, brain, get out of here. Liver? Are you kidding me? We do all the detox. Okay, liver, get out of here.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
hey, skeletal muscle, what are you up to? And it's like hoarding amino acids. I'm good. Do you need all those? Like, well, yeah, I got to move us around. Like, where are we moving? We got elephants chasing us down. Give me up some of that. So what ends up happening is because muscle, skeletal muscle isn't critical to your survival until you have very low levels of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
These people just lose lots and lots of muscle mass, which gets looking like a zempic face and a zempic butt, which again, just makes you look sick. It increases your risk of all kinds of diseases. It does not make you more mobile. It barely makes you more attractive. Can you imagine a guy looking at a girl like,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
man she's really hot like oh why do you like her so much like she looks like she's dying of illness like what that's not anyone says that and so all of a sudden the poor nutrition is bad because now you have too little nutrition from taking these drugs and doing nothing about it the insufficient protein is real bad but you also said something which i think was awesome point number three they don't resistance train they don't lift weights they don't exercise ozempic gives you such a huge anorectic response it drives your hunger down so much
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
All you got to do is kind of turn it on to this off ramp, take it out another super highway that has all the good stuff on it. And then you're going to see radical changes without having to like, you know, berate yourself or be upset or think that something's wrong or broken with your body and I'm broken with your body. If you were eating lots and lots of food, okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
you're likely to cut your calories by a substantial amount. And that's all hunky-dory, but that means the catabolic muscle breakdown drive in your body just escalated a ton. It's a formula for muscle loss. How do you prevent that? Well, you definitely have to have enough nutrition. We covered that. Enough protein. We covered that. Lifting weights. There is an argument. I'm not endorsing it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
There is an argument for every prescription that a doctor writes in America for the next several years of these anorectic drugs to come co-prescribed with go-resistance train. Because, and Dr. Lyon probably told you this extensively, skeletal muscle is an incredibly health-promoting tissue. You don't want little of it. You want plenty of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And if you lose weight the bad way and you don't resistance train, the signal for muscle loss is profound. The signal for, hey, regain some muscle and keep it on your body just really doesn't come through. So you just lose a bunch. But if you resistance train while eating a healthy diet, while getting enough protein, while taking these drugs, it's the
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
friggin miracle cure out here, you're going to re architect your body, you're going to functionally appear, feel, look and metabolically be like 10 years younger after losing 25 pounds of weight, because you'll gain something like you did five or 10 pounds of muscle, lose a load of fat is just as hugely enormous thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So the real problem to me with those folks that are less than 30 pounds overweight that they're using the drugs, isn't that they're like taking a shortcut, or it's the easy way out. I mean, like, like, The shortcuts are there for a reason. Like we want to take a shortcut. Some of you getting on a flight of JFK to go to, you know, Dubai or something.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And someone's like, you know, you could swim to Dubai. You're like, what the hell is wrong with you? I guess hypothetically, if I had a raft to rest on all the time, sure. It's just going to be faster. Like cheater, you know, also pours carbon dioxide in the environment. When the plane turns on, you're a bad person too. But like these shortcuts are seen as normal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The drugs here are just an empowerment tool. That problem I have no, there's no problem with at all. But the fact that these people just kind of willy nilly the thing and they don't look at their healthy food intake, their protein consumption and their resistance training, they run into problems.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the only reason fatter people don't run into problems is because they have so much excess musculary from carrying their body fat around. They just can't lose as much muscle relative to their size as everyone else can. And so, yeah, they still lose muscle. Oh, my God. But but.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
and also because what's low calories for them is a higher number than it is for folks that weigh, weigh less, then also don't risk the under nutrition part nearly as much. And if they don't resistance train, but they just kind of walk around, it's pretty good resistance training for their legs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
They don't pay as much of approximate cost, but if those fatter people just kept losing weight, they pay all those downsides. So yeah, long story short, sorry for the giant rant, but these drugs are awesome and amazing. You don't have to take them, but they're an excellent option, but they're even more excellent by a huge factor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
like pizza and cookies and ice cream, and you are losing weight to the point where your face looked gaunt, 100% go to the doctor, and he's probably going to do a bunch of screenings, including for cancer. That would be your body malfunctioning. You're eating lots of tasty snacks, and you're gaining weight. This is not a difficult thermodynamic mystery.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If you combine them with healthy eating, higher protein intake and resistance training. And that's to me, the big kicker here is it's not drugs versus lifestyle. It's a teamwork effort and everyone can contribute. Drugs can contribute, though not necessary. Lifestyle can contribute and it's a little bit more necessary and just has a huge yield on everything. So that's kind of how I see the space.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Let me know if I'm totally off my rocker on that one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I don't do any gambling either. How dare you insult my Jewish heritage like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Yeah. And it's tough, too. I'm glad you brought that up. There are a few reasons why it's tough. to deal with anything other than the individual at this case. One reason is they say, okay, okay, let's make weed and gambling illegal. We already tried that all around the world and all through history.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It just leads to like insane amounts of organized crime and there's just net negatives are horrendous.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
okay well that sucks because people still like precisely the people who want to gamble and do high thc weed the most are exactly the ones that are just going to go do more of it in really shady circumstances because if you don't let like new jersey's online casinos let you gamble guess who you're gambling with the guy named saul and if you lose money to saul he's not taking your money away he's taking kneecaps for that there's bad news for everyone and you know it's just shady shady stuff
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So it's difficult to make these things outright illegal, even if most of us are like, well, yeah, just make it illegal. Who cares? The other problem is most people who gamble and most people who do marijuana do so responsibly and to great effect. And it's a great time. And so you're saying, okay, well, literally one or 2% of people are having a problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
We're going to ban this for 98 or 99% of the rest of you. But that seems kind of curious, right? If we took children into account as citizens of our country, which they are, can you imagine like banning everything for adults that should also be banned for children? I mean, good God, you wouldn't be able to drive a car. It's crazy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Also, cars kill way more people than gambling and marijuana or any of that stuff. So we're left with this thing of like, okay, we can't just ban these things. That just didn't work. What are we supposed to do?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the answer, I think, just as kind of weaving through this whole podcast is getting to the individual, finding out what their needs are, what their attitudes are, what their proclivities, where they are in their mental space. Are they interested in fixing a problem?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And if there's pharmacology that we can leverage, like the Ozempics of the world, which have really awesome anti-addictive properties, in many cases, maybe that's the right answer. But I'll tell you another thing. I don't want to end on a depressing note here for this part of my rant, but you can actually avail people to drugs that help them with addiction and so on.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
What do you do when they either say no or they just take the drugs for a while and then they're like, meh, I don't wanna do this anymore. And they stop taking the drugs and they go back to their ways. That's a tough problem. And again, usually we're taught to look through a social lens, like what are the societal factors causing people to have gambling addiction?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The reality is it seems to be a human and animal universal that some fraction of people are just going to be addicted to almost anything that you can expose them to that does dopamine hits. That's tough. And that requires a much more thoughtful, nuanced approach. assisted approach and the old finger wagon and making stuff outright illegal, that's probably not the right answer. I wish it was.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's fairly straightforward to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And I feel like you really got a chance to do that today. Thank you so much. It's wonderful that you have this forum. Absolutely excellent podcast and a great diversity of speakers is always really good. If anyone derived value from that, then thank God I did something good once in my life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I think forgiveness though is such a great point because to me, the forgiveness can be best applied to earlier versions of yourself that berated yourself for having a body. You can forgive yourself for being mean to yourself because it's not nice to be mean to yourself. You could say you're, you're your number one biggest ally.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I think that's excellent advice, but because somebody already gave it, I'll give a slightly different piece of advice. I think something that I've kind of been getting to lately is the idea of treating your meals and separating them into two different categories, what I like to call business meals and then fun meals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Business meals mean that you're eating them for the purpose of fueling your body for what it needs, like as an organism. And that means that business meals aren't really designed with taste and texture and maximizing the pleasure value of food as a first principle, like this is top priority. They're designed with things like, is there enough protein in this meal of high quality?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Am I getting enough greens and combination of greens and veggies and vegetables? fruits and whole grains, other healthy fats in this meal. Is the portion size of this meal enough to squash my hunger, but not enough to stuff me? Am I eating any more of this meal than I should be because I'm already stuffed? But damn, these, you know, mac and cheese tastes so good. I have to have a few more bites.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's just a meal designed to fuel you. And there are so many ideas about how to make those meals on the internet. Just talk to ChatGPT. It'll give you a trillion different examples of just healthy food that's really good and in the right portions and all that stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
But in the, so those business meals are when you're through the workday, breakfast, lunch, dinner, they're in the work week when you're traveling, but it's not for leisure. You stick to business meals, which sometimes means just like a protein bar too. If you like at an airport late at night, business meals mean I'm not trying to optimize for tastiness.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So for example, if you ever see me at a Chipotle, And it's a business meal. I show up, I ask for rice, I ask for beans, I ask for chicken, I'll do a little bit of queso or no queso at all, do some veggies, and that's it. And they're always like, are you sure you don't want anything else? And I'm like, nope. And there's a very plain looking meal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And of course, people, I'm a weirdo, I don't eat salsa and stuff. You can have all the veggies on there that you want. Different look. Now, the other type of meal is a fun meal. It's a meal in which you, sure, you want to eat some protein in it. You want to be more healthy than not, but also it's a little bit just for the love, right? Like it's for the vibe. It's for the taste.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And there are times to be strict with yourself, but mean and berating and disparaging. You don't want to live inside of a mind that hates itself. So when you look at the love handles and you look in the mirror and you, you want to try to hate yourself a little bit for it. Look at hating things. Doesn't even help them change all that much.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's for the texture. It's for the food experience. And that's if I show up to Chipotle and I'm having a fun meal, I get a burrito, I get cheese and queso and sour cream in that mug because God, cheese and sour cream together are absolutely undefeated combination. It just so happens that they have tons and tons of calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And I want to eat another burrito as soon as I'm done with the first one because it's so goddamn good. And so that's a fun meal though. And I know I just have it quite rarely. And so I'm able by eating mostly business meals to keep in the shape that I want. And you know, a long weekend, too many fun meals. I really clamped down.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I do business through half the rest of the next weekend and I'm back to my old body weight. Everything is problem solved. And so I encourage folks to think in this dichotomy of business versus fun meals and So that they don't spend too much cognitive bandwidth trying to enhance the taste and texture and quality of their business meals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It's spending time to essentially trick your body into wanting to eat more of the food. And if we're so kind of addicted to the idea of food pleasure all the time. that it ends up being this whole thing of like, well, look, you know, like, um, if you're engineering your food to taste as good as possible, you're just going to eat more food all the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So separating meals into business meals, where the goal is just get the food in and make sure it's healthy and it can taste good, but just don't hyper optimize on that. And then if you, you can't live like a monk all the time. So every now and again, you have a meal that is a fun meal, but you know, it's a fun meal. So it doesn't have to be all this pressure to make it super healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You can eat an excess, no problem. If you have more fun meals than business meals in your week, problem solved as to why you're fatter than you want to be. If it's mostly business meals and a few fun meals, you're probably in a maintenance holding pattern and you're going to be great. If you need to lose weight, two or three months, easiest thing in the world. They're all business meals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
No fun meals for two or three months. You're not starving to death. You're not bereft of nutrients. But you're not exactly going to McDonald's and getting the new slushie they have coming out because that's not for business. That's for fun. Imagine aliens coming down when you're at McDonald's and they're like, hello, human. What is the purpose of ingesting this food?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And you're like, to support bodily function. And the alien looks at his assistant. The assistant's scrolling through our internet. He's like, that guy's just having fun. Alien looks at you like, this is for fun. You're like... Yes, sorry I lied to you guys and everyone knows why I'm here. They just know which meals are for fun, which meals are for business.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The business meals, number one is health and getting all the nutrients you need and not getting too stuffed. If you follow those basic guidelines, the more business meals you have, the more your body will look like you want. And if you're at a place where you look great, some fun meals in there every now and again are awesome. If they're all fun meals,
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
You know, like can you imagine looking at like, you know, the, the outcast golf teen at school and is not doing his homework. And someone's like, you know, if we just hated him more and really let him know, he'd really fix his ways. I mean, I just don't think reality works that way. What you want to do. Cause you're ultimately your number one teammate is love yourself in a way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
you're going to have a larger time, a really, really incisive illustration of this is, have you ever seen drew the show? My 600 pound life with the.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And for folks that haven't been availed, it's a show that chronicles people who are preparing for candidacy for bariatric surgery. There's most of them weigh over 600 pounds. And you don't have to believe me when I tell you, cause you can look at the show yourself and, Maybe every single meal that those folks eat that was chronicled before their big transformation was a fun meal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Every single meal is how can I get the most food pleasure out of this meal? You start on that journey. I don't care if you're vegan or carnivore or whatever, or you eat only at Erewhon, uh, By the way, nice flex. You must be quite wealthy to eat only an air one. I'm kidding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That would be prohibitive. But any way you slice it, because here's the thing. People will go to Whole Foods. Great establishment. Amazing store. They'll go to the hot bar. Amazing food, right? They'll eat a ton of it. And they're like, I eat healthy. It's like, okay, what did you pick in the hot bar? Was it exclusively for function or was it more for taste? And they're like, Uh, I don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Can I play the fifth? Exactly. And so it doesn't even matter if you're eating a ton of junk food or you're eating a ton of healthy food, you start eating for pleasure of the number one organizing principle of what's going into my body next. You're going to be fatter in our current food environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
If you pick most of our meals as like, how would an adult eat if they just wanted to be lean and functional? If you answer that question, the affirmative and eat most of the foods like that business wise, you're going to be onto a much, much fitter body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That's a big deal.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
We have a YouTube channel, RP Strength Renaissance Periodization on YouTube. Just look for my face. It's ugly and is everywhere. So just click on my face. And we just put out a video basically five days a week, educating people on how to get more muscle, less fat and how to eat better and be healthier. So we do it all the time. It's all free.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And in addition to that, we have the RP Diet Coach app and the RP Hypertrophy app, which you can get linked through any YouTube video to go download those. And those are paid apps. And if you're serious about your fitness journey and you want to make a big change, the RP Diet Coach app can entirely tell you what to eat and when to get you the results that you want.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
That's not like, you know, weird Hollywood dystopian, like self-love where you just stay in a mirror for forever with those wide cult eyes, but love yourself in a way like, look, I'm on my own team. I want to live in a better body. It's a mechanics problem. How do I get the body that I want?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
It'll actually even make sure you aim for realistic targets. It will like highly warn you like this is too ambitious of a diet. Most people fail this. You can always say I'm still good for it, but it does all the diet coaching. It reminds you every time you need a meal, your meal pop-up occurs and all that other stuff. It's got barcode scanning, all the, all the bells and whistles.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And the hypertrophy app is an app that just makes you a workout routine that that is plug and play. You can make it yourself. We have tons of templates for free in the app. You can download and just use those. All the customization. I think it's probably one of the better training apps ever made. And you can access those apps and they're super swell.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
The best thing about them is that they help you get in shape and it's worth the money like crazy. The second best thing is that the CEO of RP, Mr. Nick Shaw, he has a Rolls Royce collection and he hasn't bought a new Rolls Royce in a long time. And if you purchase one of our apps, you're helping a really great cause.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
So we have things right now that are easier to get and easier to fix, but here it's just a matter of work and effort. It's not a matter of mystery. So for example, if you're in an outfit that you don't like, it's unlikely you're going to hate yourself for it. Like, look at you in this dress, Linda, you ****.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
Like in the mirror to yourself, like you really thought you were going to look good in this dress. Almost no one does that. They go, oh, I look like, man, I don't like this. And what do they do? They go on Amazon. They do the returns. They return the dress. They get a better dress and they like it. They put it on. They go, boom, problem solved. They never have to hate themselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And you got air hunger, you got fluid hunger, aka thirst, and then you have food hunger, aka hunger hunger, and that drives you to consume calories and any kind of food you can get, really. There are gradations of food that you prefer more than other foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I would ask people to treat their bodies as kind of a style of clothing that they're wearing. It's just like robot thing that you exist in and you can change it just similarly to how you buy clothes. But what you'll be having to pay instead of money is diligence, effort, and time. Not a magic and psychotic amount of those.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
These are all tractable problems that most people can get a big bite into and really change how they look. But that's kind of the payment process. And here's the thing. I'm not saying that people don't have all kinds of feelings about their bodies because they do. They have all kinds of emotions about how they'd want to look, about how they look. Do I look like this? Turn to the side. I hate this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
I hate that. All that stuff is valid. But like most feelings, at the end of the day, when you want to change something in the world, You kind of get a little bit, you rest with your feelings, you let them express themselves. You're not trying to like suppress anything. But then you ask the question of, how do I change the situation for the better?
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And then that is really very straightforward process instead of having to cycle through your emotions and try to find who you really are deep down inside or something like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
And that evolutionary drive is probably about as old as nervous systems, like all of them, worms and flies and parakeets and monkeys and humans and everyone. And so the drive to consume calories being one of the fundamental animal drives is also a fundamental human drive. And that means it is ultra, ultra deep drive. And it has a function, which is to make sure you get enough food.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But for, for many people, they are 100% to your point, pushing it way too far. And it's just a matter of figuring out, I guess through mindfulness, if that sounds kind of lame, why, Why am I doing this? Like, do I really believe that throwing up after every leg day is my best path to success? Logically, like I have to talk to chat GPT and justify how I train.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Could I do it in a way that makes sense? Or am I doing this shit for vibes? And because, you know, my dad didn't love me when I was between the ages of seven and 10 or some shit like that. I made, I didn't make the class one Peewee football team. I made the class two team and I never fucking let that down. I'm never going to fucking hang my head down in front of another man.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So you bet I'm doing nine cents of hack squats today. I don't care if I have a Rabido every fucking workout, I'm a goddamn human adult nail and I will be granted my respect. If that's where the shit is coming from, like listen on vibes, dope, 100% dying on fucking hack squat. What a goddamn honor. But I'm like optimality and getting the best results. Yeah. then it's a different question.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You have to experiment with yourself. It could be more, it could be less, it could be way less. And I always get a bunch of shit, you know, in the comments, like with as many, it was a fucking ego move with as many followers as I have, you know, once you hit a certain level of bullshit, fake social media fame, the number of comments you get is like intractably large. And it's so many people.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And I say like, Hey, here's a way to train. Here's a volume. that you can do that science seems to show is kind of probably the best way to do it, I get a lot of people real fucking butt hurt. And number one reason they're butt hurt is they're doing some shit that's not bad, but they're really fucking emotionally attached to it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like it matters to them that they get to like, I often say like training all the way to failure is typically unnecessary for your best gains. And in many cases, a few reps shy of failure is even better long-term sustainability wise. And like I almost never hear a technical refutation And I almost always hear, like, you fucking pussy.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like, you fucking, I was going to use another F word that might get you guys canceled. You know, so that's a derogatory term for homosexuals. And, like, they, you know, they say this shit, and I'm just like, oh, I get it. Like, you just have a lot of feelings.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And for me, it really helped to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu because all the bullshit feelings I had about being a man or whatever got real sorted out on my fifth time getting me unbellied by the fucking local blue belt. I had no more ego after that. But if you don't have that fucking combat sport outlet, I get it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like you go to the gym and you fight your demons, which again is dope, but it's a very different question than what is optimal. And optimal could be a lot less and a lot less glorious than you want. And so those are questions you have to ask yourself.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Maybe he was paid for it. So, man, fuck, that's a hell of a great question. You know, so I don't actually have body dysmorphia on the technical qualifications. And I'm not saying I'm defending myself here. I am a fucking lunatic cocksucker with 50 trillion flaws. I am not anyone's hero. Do not look up to me. I will disappoint you inevitably.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But when people say, oh, you have body dysmorphia, they forget that body dysmorphic disorder is like A diagnostic statistical manual of mental disorders, diagnosable disorders, you have to meet certain conditions. We just don't. So here's a really good start to how to figure out if you have body dysmorphia.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
If you are objectively way bigger and leaner than the average person, let's say in your age group, and you don't think that you are objectively bigger and leaner and you resist accepting that, you might have some body dysmorphia. Now, this might come off cocky, whatever. I know I'm jacked for the love of God. Look at my head shape. It's ridiculous.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I typically walk around at like five, six, 230 pounds with like faint glutes, striations. I would be fucking insane to think that's not like tank shit. Of course it's tank shit. I actually had a fucking, this one guy who worked at a gym, um, a security guard when I was a professor at temple is only, only black people have certain phrasings that are just fucking unbelievable.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
He looks me up and down. He's like, man, you want some tank shit, huh? I was like, I am on tank shit, sir. Thank you so much. So, you know, I don't actually think I'm not jacked. However, there are parts of my look I do not like. The love handles, fucking lifetime of combat against that. I finally was like, fuck it, I'm getting cut out. That's going to be a big deal.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Thanks for having me, guys. Sorry I couldn't make it in person.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And I have another like one really big demon. I have yet to put a physique on the bodybuilding stage that I think is like – And that's it right there. That is appropriately shredded and has all the things I like in a physique. I'm not trying to look like Dexter Jackson or some shit, Phil Heath. That's never going to happen. But have I reached my best look that I could? No.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Do I have a hang up about that? Yeah, I'd like to do it. And so I'm still fighting the good fight. I'll be competing again almost certainly in 2026. Okay. I think I could have bigger arms. I think I could have bigger shoulders, but is it more of like, I already know I'm jacked and lean and this is just looking for like that extra extra. Yeah. Do I love my physique all the time?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I'm not in, I'm not in love with it. So like, for example, now the love handles are gone. I look way better, but I also like genetically just have like a bigger gut. And like, I don't know if you guys have seen, like I can do this thing where I like relax and my gut looks huge. And then I can do a real legit vacuum pose in the next second. It looks kind of wild. Like, I don't love having a gut.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I've had a gut my whole life. Am I like infatuated with that? No, I think it looks fucking awful. I think it looks objectively awful. There's no one that's like, no, actually it looks great. Like that's bullshit. So at the same time, I have like ridiculous pecs. Like my pecs are like straight up obnoxious looking. I have humongous triceps. My quads, I haven't trained in a year.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
because they got outlandish and threw off the rest of my physique and to be honest they barely shrunk but the fuck okay fine so i'm just gonna like start training my legs again and full send the shit who cares so like there's parts of my body that are fucking awesome and i love and there's parts of my body that i don't love it's like a marriage you don't love everything about your wife or in some of your case fellow's husband i know y'all from california that's how you do and so just a guy you know at the bar who cares um and
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
you know, it's a, it's a mixed bag. So do I have demons about the shit? Yeah. But they're like, you don't like that for real demons. I'm not like waking up in the middle of the night, screaming, looking for my abs. No, you know, for my cock. Absolutely. And it's usually the nightmare that's real. Cause I can't find it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah, that's a great question. So, uh, this past summer I had planned to do four shows. I did the first show as a tune-up show. I didn't look that great. And, um, Then right after that show, I realized that with the amount of steroids that I was taking,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
and the amount of really huge degree of focus that you have to have to do prep, especially multiple shows in a row, I was going to be passing up a lot of opportunities in like the YouTube Insta famous land. And that's when I was like blowing up fucking like crazy. And I was having like all these invitations to go on these crazy ass, like diary of a CEO type of podcast, like a gazillion views.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And I'm like, well, fuck. either I continue to compete right now or I put the shit aside for now and focus on the YouTube shit. Cause like glory's dope, but like money, I, it comes around, these opportunities come around.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They may not come around after like, you know, um, man, it's, it's like, there's like movies every now and again in which like this person is like trying to become a singer songwriter and they, they go through these trials and tribulations and they finally have their crazy audition. And like, you know, typically like the, the people signing them to the record label are kind of cocksuckers.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They won't let them do it. They somehow get the audition. They blow it out of the water and the record label is like, do you want a deal? And they're like, nah, I'm good. It was just to prove that I could do it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
off my jewish ass i'm like motherfucker are you out of your mind it's a 50 million dollar record deal are you crazy where are you going someone bring that bitch back to sign that fucking contract you must be out of your mind so when this whole youtube bullshit happened i was like oh fuck i'm like junior league famous or whatever i was like i'm gonna milk this shit out for everything it's worth so i had to i had to take a step back
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
take way less gear, focus on more like balancing my physique instead of just training everything for size. And so that was a big deal. And then in addition to that, like, you know, being on trend and shit, not exactly good for my relationship with my wife. And so I was like, okay, that, that ship has sailed. Now I'm coming back into my physique phase, but it turns out,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I came basically back to TRT and I functionally lost almost no muscle and I was fucking blown away. I was like, oh my God, I've been taking way too much gear for so goddamn long. And so that was like, I would have never figured that out had I not backed off. So now I'm going to be coming back in the competition and I'm basically going to take no more than like 500 megs of total gear.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And I know for a fact, I can put a physique on stage. It's like 210 pounds fucking shredded, like the shredded thing. We'll see if it works out. That's aspirational, but like muscularity wise, no problem, no problem. And so I'm going to do that. So luckily the trade-offs aren't as big, but next time.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So then 2026, when I hope to come back to bodybuilding competitively, I'm going to have to carve out a lot of time from my day away from work, um,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
um and to really do the thing right because like there's a reason they call it professional bodybuilding there's actually two reasons one is you have a pro card from whatever federation you're competing in that's reason number one reason number two is you are professional athlete which means that's what you do you fucking don't you have some you know commitments to your sponsors you post some fucking tiktoks for them every now and again you wear their t-shirt to the gym but that's it you play playstation
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You bang your toxic Latina girlfriend, and you just fucking train, and you fucking go to sleep, and that's what you do, and you eat your meals. That is a reason. It's not that the guys are lazy. It's that you need everything possible to recover as much as you can. That requires tradeoffs. I was kind of trying to do it all at the same time.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I get pretty decent results at everything, and then decent isn't good enough. And so for me, next time I come through competition, I'm going to have to lessen the shit for a little while and then come back into it. But as far as will I ever want to back up and focus on other stuff? Like I could, I could tell you yes, but.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
What I want to look like and what I look like now are far enough apart that until and unless my health just throws the middle finger and is like, nah, you're done, I'm going to try to improve my look. I want significantly bigger arms and shoulders. I want a wider back. I want bigger upper pecs. And my legs are good now, but they'll probably get bigger anyway just because this is what they do.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so I can improve my physique. For me, the most important part of working on my physique is the art. It's the science and the art of actually doing it. I don't give a fuck. Like, competing is whatever. I'm not a big fan of competing. I have won my class in shows before. It was no more fun than losing my class. You stand around. You look at everyone's cock. You're like 30, 40 minutes later.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You don't have a pump anymore. They say you're going up on stage. Whatever. It's fine. Competing is fine. And a lot of people love it. And I'm trying to get into the mode where I love it. But the thing I love most is improving my physique and eating the meals and getting the sleep and knowing that I have a purpose. And I treat my body as a sculpture and I'm always trying to improve it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Am I going to be able to give that up? Yes. Do I want to give that up? Not really. Are there drugs already in the pipeline that are going to allow us with no anabolics whatsoever to radically go off?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Great question. It's actually difficult to understate muscle. sorry, it's difficult to overstate the effect of muscle memory. It is an incredibly powerful effect. So if you have trained, especially the longer you've trained, the more of a thing this is.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
fuckload of muscle and get super lean yes i could talk about those i'm waiting for them shits because when your boy gets his hands on that i'm going full send i want arms that are more inconvenient to live with now like now if i sleep on my side for long enough my arm goes dead because my delts and arms are big enough now the way it cut off their own circulation fellas i'm trying to get the whole shit i'm trying to get my arms amputated because they're so goddamn big that's when i've considered a fucking success
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Is that body dysmorphia or not?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
There's a drug that just passed primate trials and It's a dual antagonist. It antagonizes myostatin. Myostatin is the molecule that exists in all of your skeletal muscle that caps your muscle growth. Myo is muscle, statin is stopper or blocker. And the Latins really did figure all this shit out.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
um basically that is a hugely powerful molecule that if you uncork you just fucking grow muscle all the time uh if you guys listen to this podcast google like double muscle mouse or muscle greyhound or muscle cow you're gonna see pictures that you're like what are they fucking what steroids are they feeding these things none and they don't train and they have as much muscle as physiologically possible given all their other genetics um
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But there's more. There's another compound called activin A that also antagonizes muscle growth. And so this dual agonist, it antagonizes myostatin and alpha-activin. So these are blockers of muscle that these drugs uncork. They unblock. And the recent study that came out on these was, let me try to summarize the study really quick. So they had four groups of monkeys.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And they gave him all the fucking plague virus and they just released him into New York City. Wouldn't that be sweet? After outbreak with Dustin Hoffman back in the day, I've never seen research monkeys the same way. Keep them fucking demon monkeys the fuck away from me. However, so group number one, this is a 20-week diet they put these monkeys on, calorically restricted to a decent amount.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Group number one, they just did it natty, natty monkeys. You know, they're real proud of themselves and shit. They talk about how they're natty all the time in monkey language, but... The other monkeys, they just gave him semaglutide. So like, you know, like GLP-1, classic. The other group, they just gave him the myostatin inhibitor plus semaglutide.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then the fourth group, they gave him the activin alpha, the activin A inhibitor, myostatin inhibitor plus semaglutide. So three fucking vectors. And what they found was the group number one, the natty monkeys, they lost almost no muscle and they lost a bit of fat. Group 2, the semaglutide monkeys, lost almost double the fat, but a significantly more muscle. Not a ton, but you can tell.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Group 3, that had the myostatin drug plus semaglutide, lost almost double the fat that the semaglutide monkeys lost. Almost triple the fat that the natty monkeys lost. And they lost about the same amount of muscle as the monkeys who were natty, which is to say almost none. So we're talking about a drug that you can lose like 2.7 times X the fat, but with zero added muscle loss. Check this out.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But if you've trained for years, especially, and you've gotten to a certain level of muscularity, and you've been at that level for a while, when you don't train for however long and you lose however much muscle, what ends up happening is when you got much bigger and you increase the size of all of your muscle cells.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
The triple monkeys, myostatin, activin, and semaglutide, they lost even more weight by a little bit. So basically three times the weight that the natty monkeys lost in fat. And they gained in muscle at the same time what the drug-free monkeys lost in fat. Wow. Wow. Wow. So let me put this really quick into common terms.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I translated these numbers into proxy for like a 200-pound person at 20% body fat. If the results hold for humans, which they'll similarly hold for humans, especially if you adjust the dosing. The natty human would be like two identical twins, one twin, 20% body fat. After 20 weeks, he's going to weigh 200 pounds, 20% body fat.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
He's going to weigh about 192 pounds at about 16.5% fat, 20 weeks of dieting, drug-free. Cool, right? Cool. That's good. That's good, right? Janice at work notices and tries to suck your dick in the bathroom as usual. Yeah. And then, but you're at work. Janice, get the fuck away from me. I got shit to do.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then the other identical twin, in this case, with the three drugs, started at 200 pounds, 20% body fat, in 20 weeks would have gotten to 181 pounds, which, okay, he lost like 10 more pounds, 11 more pounds, cool. 6.5% body fat. Wow. Wow. You guys, this is coming. Wow. It is only one of the drugs that Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is working on. It's already a drug. They already know it works.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It just has to go through FDA trials and don't you fucking bet against this. All the other pharmaceutical companies are catching on to that shit too because they realized semaglutide and all the GLP-1s and the GIP drugs that they have out now, they're unbelievable at helping people lose weight. The problem is people in a huge caloric deficit like that will lose some muscle.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And you can't have older women and older men Obese populations losing muscle because it tanks their metabolic health. It makes them fucking unable to take care of themselves. That's no good.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so these companies have been working on these non-androgenic anabolics, these drugs that do nothing to do with steroids, no mood swings, no ball shrinkage, no yelling at your girlfriend and then crying afterwards and begging her not to leave. None of that shit. Some of it's fun, right? Trend is fun. It said no one ever. And then – So none of that, they just, these drugs are here.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And they, in several years, probably three years or less, depending on the FDA regulations, will be hitting the market. This will change everything. And I can't fucking wait because your boy's going to get fucking nonsense arms.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But if you get much bigger than a moderate amount, you end up during the course of your gain in size, incorporating satellite cells into your muscle cells. These satellite cells are basically just cell nuclei that kind of like come into the regular cell and they help grow muscle, maintain muscle and control all the functions of a muscle cell. It's kind of like,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
two percent of the people become insane and homicidal it's maybe just a chance i'm kidding oh god the ceo of regeneron's like getting you know i think all ceos have like one of those old revolvers in their desk that they take out to you know and and the whole thing when the stock goes down so that's what's happening um there's a reason that myostatin exists
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And all of the other related compounds exist. And that is because muscle growth is two things in the natural evolved environment. At some point, totally fucking useless. Cause like take Ronnie Coleman in his prime. What exactly is the adaptive value of being 287 pounds of 3% body fat? Like, I mean, you're not really any better at hunting.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're not going to be picking fucking pear trees any better to gather the shit. You don't weave baskets any better. So in a typical human evolved environment, it's fucking pointless. And the second thing is it is metabolically insanely expensive to build muscle and to maintain muscle. And so your body evolved in an intermittent starvation environment.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like sometimes there was food and sometimes the fucking buffalo herd didn't zig by your village and half of you fucking starve to death. And so the body is incredibly, incredibly efficient with its calories such that you guys know this, I'm sure from personal experience, when you work out a lot, you get really tired and you sit around a lot more and your body doesn't even let you lose more weight.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
There's a reason it's really hard to diet off a bunch of weight because your body's just not interested in the shit. It's really economical. if we uncork the muscle growth process in the wild, we start to divert so many resources to muscle growth that we just don't have much food. Then you're fucking pretty jacked. You're pretty shredded and you're dead on the side of the road.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Cause you couldn't fucking like your liver that can't fucking get enough calories to operate. The good news is we have capitalism fucking grocery stores and we're all by, by, by historical standards, hyper, hyper fucking rich. And so because we have infinity food now, we, yeah, there may be no functional big downsides.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Now, of course, there's going to be some adverse effects like that with every drug. There's going to be some people that just don't take to the shit and they have some bad downsides. But on the whole, you're likely to see a side effect profile with these drugs that you do with semaglutide and terzapatide. Like, yeah, there's some shit. And if you take it wrong, it fucks you up a little bit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But on average, almost everyone tolerates it really well. And it's probably healthier to take the shit than not take the shit. One really cool thing about the GLP-1s and the GIPs is More and more research shows that regardless of if you lose weight with them or not, they have like 10 incredibly beneficial overall health and metabolic effects.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
These are fucking wonder drugs, you guys, to be used responsibly. And they can have downsides. But if you figure out the dosing and figure out your diet, for most people, these drugs are awesome. So myostatin inhibitor drugs, the activant inhibitor drugs, and I'm sure the fucking eight generations of even better versions of those that are coming up afterwards.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It's going to be one of those things of, like, what's the downside of Viagra? Like, you see slightly different shades of blue, and your head kind of hurts, and your nose is puffy, which is a problem, because if you're doing cunnilingus, how the fuck are you supposed to breathe through your nose and mouth at the same fucking time? This is the only problem.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Otherwise, your dick just gets engorged, and you're out there slaying, fellas. So, you know what I'm saying? Like, talk some shit about Cialis. I'm not going to be here for it. It's a fucking wonder drug. We should have everyone on.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
If New York City, if Manhattan only had one fire department and one police station and one hospital for all five boroughs, it would be ridiculous and all the boroughs would burn down and everyone would die and the police would never get there because it's just one nucleus for a huge area. Your cells work in much the same way.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It holds a lot of water. It's not fucking magic, but it also depends on how extreme it is. If you have a client who's 230 pounds and they lose 15 pounds, you don't need to do crazy protocols to get their metabolism backfiring. It's probably better than it's ever been. If you have a competitor who's gone down to 4% body fat, you can't even reverse diet them. You need to bulk them out of that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
One of the big myths with reverse dieting when it came up was People realized it worked pretty well. And so a lot of competitors were like, oh my God, if I reverse diet out of my show, I can stay 5% body fat and gain back all these benefits. Like, no, you just can't stay at 5%. You got to bulk your way the fuck back up out of that. But if you are adding lots of muscle to your body over time,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if you are careful to not crash your metabolism during a diet or you slowly weave back in some junk foods and just increase the amount of healthy food, you're going to get a lot of really, really big advantages that are way, way better than the kind of quote-unquote traditional method of dieting, which is don't weight train, don't put on muscle, starve yourself for a while.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You guys remember shit like the cabbage soup diet and dumb shit like that, like shit housewives would do? They would just lose a bunch of muscle, lose a bunch of fat, and then just get right back to their normal eating habits. They would be really hungry, really tired. Metabolism is slower. They would regain all their weight and then some.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then they would be a fall prey to marketers for their next fucking diet. If you properly reverse diet out of that and combine that with weight training, about two or three months after your last diet, you're down 15 pounds. You feel amazing. You look amazing. And you can totally sustain it. And if you want another run at it, you can do another bit of weight loss and kind of keep going.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
That long-term periodized approach to weight loss and management, including dieting, Using resistance training to build muscle? I mean, it is 100% the fucking correct answer. Does everyone do it now? No. Are more people doing it than ever? Yes, 100%.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so just like if a town or a city grows, it gets multiple precincts and multiple hospitals and multiple fire departments. As your muscle cells grow, the satellite cells incorporate into them and give them these multiple nuclei. The thing is, once you have a lot of nuclei in a muscle cell, once that cell shrinks down, the nuclei don't delete out. They just stay there.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah. There's like one answer that probably explains 80% of the variance. It's not very nice, but it's probably true. Uh, she was not eating 1400 calories. The way that people report their diet is typically like how you tell your dentist, you guys go to the dentist, right? Clearly you're all handsome men with great teeth. Um, The dentist is like, you've been brushing and flossing?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You fucking haven't. You've just been, you know what I'm saying? Like, is eating pussy a way of flossing? Yes. Then no. But, you know, like, you know, we're not great about it. Like, technically, the American Dental Association, I think, says, like, ideally, you should brush and floss after every meal. Fellas, what? Who the fuck does that? You don't do that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But when your dentist asks you, you know, have you been brushing and flossing? A lot of us were like, yes, yes, ma'am. And yeah, like, that's just how it goes. So when you seek out the help of a trainer, there's this kind of like, it's like going to a religious figure, like a pastor. And he's like, how have you been? And you're like, great, really trying to live a Christian lifestyle.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And it's like, no, you haven't, dude. You're basically a professional gambler at this point. Yeah. But when you talk to Pastor John, you're going to tell him a nice story. And so when people go to trainers, there's that halo effect where they want to present their best case. I was working for a fitness company with my co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Him and I were working for a fitness company in New York back in the day. I'm not going to say which company it is, but... Um, they were basically like, uh, it was a training company that had regular people come in and you train them as a private personal training studio. And the, the, the boss was like, here's a worksheet. You can give them a little thing for nutrition.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It's like a little mini diet. He's like, I'm going to tell you what's going on with diet. These people all are going to tell you that they eat in the following day. They're going to say they wake up and they have some eggs or some egg whites for breakfast. Um, and maybe some oatmeal. They're going to say they either skip lunch or they have a turkey sandwich or a salad with chicken.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And they're going to say they have some fish and some brown rice and maybe a glass of wine for dinner. And they're all fucking liars. And I was like, holy shit, this is the real world. I was just out of college. I was like, god damn, he's talking about real people. And the thing is, he was a mean, curmudgeonly Jewish man. But he wasn't wrong.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so 1,400 calories is some shit like on their good days, they 100% eat. And fuck, man, they might have six good days out of the week. But when that cycle hits of the fucking time of the month, or just like a fucking, there's like a Netflix special on the real story behind the Friends series, they don't want you to know. And it's a five pound fucking episode series.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're going to go and you're going to basically get Ben and Jerry right in front of you. And you're going to tag team the motherfuckers. You're going to have four fucking pints of ice cream. You're going to have eight cookies. You're going to cry a lot. Guess what gets the tears out? Lasagna works every time. You have fucking lasagna. You have pizza.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're so starved out from that whole week of dieting that you're like an insane person. And yeah, you can do damage. There are a lot of documentaries about how sumo wrestlers eat that typically people are like, oh my god, I can't believe they eat this many calories. They'll be like, have you been around a post-dieted sorority girl in college?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so when you start training again, you have multiples the power to manufacture muscle protein because the nucleus is what does a huge degree of the manufacturing and all the ultra structures around it. And so now you essentially have the equivalent of like ridiculous genetics when you're coming back. And so when you're coming back to regain that muscle, It happens unbelievably quickly.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I've seen that bitch suck up 12,000 calories in a matter of hours. No fucking problem. And so if you average 12,000 calories on Saturday with 1,400 calories the other six days, that maths. Because then they're like eating like 2,500 calories a fucking day and that they're not losing weight.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then if you get them to train and you put on a good deal of muscle and you get them to move more, be more physically active – and weight train, which is more calorie burn, then yeah, 2,650 is not what they're eating. And they're like, oh my God, it's fucking magic.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But because you made them eat more healthy food through the week, they don't have this temptation to go eat the fucking kitchen sink every Saturday. And then their average really is 2,700 calories. And it really does work like that because you're right. It does the math and the muscle is not enough to offset it. Now, some of them are so fucking starved down. Their metabolisms are actually lower.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
When you feed them more food, they actually burn even a couple hundred calories extra, but it's not a thousand calories. And so between the metabolism resetting up a little bit, the teeny effect you get from muscle and the 80% of them just not gorging themselves every fucking other meal sometimes or every few days,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
That is what explains most of the variance because I've dealt with clients like that. Sometimes you hear the darndest fucking shit. Like I had a woman be like, I eat like 1200 calories and I can't lose any weight. I'm like, no, like a thermodynamics is undefeated. And I'm like, just tell me about your day. And it turns out she was like walking by, like she worked from home.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
She was walking by her living room and like getting her hand into the fucking pecans and almonds mix and just jamming it down her throat like four times a day. And not counting that. Bitch, that's 300 calories every time. Are you out of your fucking mind? I had another client, no offense, former clients. She was like, I can't lose weight. I've been eating 800 calories.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
She wasn't counting fruit juice and she had it all day long. And so if the question is, are your clients bullshitting themselves low key with good intentions or did like the... Founders of modern physics misunderstand thermodynamics, man, you know, unless that bitch builds a fucking gravity canceling spaceship and is like, see, thermodynamics was wrong.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I'm going to believe the fact that she's just cramming hot dogs behind my back, which is, you know, like it's fucking sobering, but it's probably true.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
For sure. And it's like, especially the part where they've been dieting for so long that their energy expenditure subconsciously is just way lower is a big part. It's not the biggest part because I think misreporting intakes the biggest. But in some cases, that reduced energy expenditure can be the biggest part. And in many cases, it is a large part.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if you've ever experienced this yourself, you're like kind of in awe. You're like, what the hell? So I honestly anticipate that worst case scenario, after about six weeks of training again from taking six weeks off, I expect to be about as muscular as I've ever been. And it's probably pessimistic because probably after about four weeks, I should be very close to my best ever.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so not chronically dieting anymore, giving your body enough food to just kind of breathe free can be hundreds of calories difference. And I mean, like, it's really fucked. It's really sad because you can have a whole six-month period where you were starving yourself and you weighed 132 pounds. And then after four months of reverse dieting, you're eating, like –
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
500 calories more food per day on average. And you weigh 134 stable, but you're like even the same body fat. Cause you built back more muscle. What a rip off to think, man, for months and months and months, I was needlessly starving myself, which is a big deal once. That's why I like it. I think, I don't know. I think we made up this term, but. At RP, we made up a term called diet fatigue.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Months of dieting fatigues you in a big way, and it resets your body and your metabolism to work in a way that is very much against you. If you reverse diet intelligently out of that, you can have amazing, amazing results because you are in a state of incredible fatigue. And a lot of people just think that's how it is. And a lot of people live their lives like that, like supermodels and shit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They're always starving because for them, it's psychological. For them, if I allow myself to eat more food, I'm failing. And I'm just going to be a fat bitch again like I was in seventh grade and no one's going to love me. And how the hell am I supposed to get free cocaine if I don't look like a model anymore? I'm trying to pay for my Coke? That shit is expensive.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
A hundred percent. And also most of the data is on recreationally trained undergraduates who are not diet fatigued. And so, you know, if you have someone diet down like 3% of their body fat and and you show that reverse dieting doesn't make a big difference, well, yeah, no shit. But if they diet down 12% of their body fat, you may see some very different results.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Most data is not collected on bikini competitors or anything like that. And if you do get data collected on that, you can see very, very different results. I think a lot of people who hashtag science, they just don't hashtag science that well. And so they forget that ecological validity is a thing, external validity is a thing, internal validity is a thing.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
they basically just read abstracts or read like the last line of an abstract that draws conclusions and assume that this like unanimously applies to every single case. And that's just wrong. It's just sciencing bad. Science is a small sliver into the truth, but it is not like this just giant, like, you know, telescope that shows you everything.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So it's a huge part of the equation, but it's not a standalone, a thing you can rely on. And, and, It's dope if you're a fucking pencil neck motherfucker and you've never lifted a lot and you can't look a woman in the eyes, even as an adult, to do PubMed searches and jack off a lot and then dunk on stupid meatheads in the comments. It's dope.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It's a cool vibe, but it doesn't get you all the way there to explaining all of the human variation you're going to see. If you've done the shit yourself, if you've competed, and if you've coached other people, you start to be like, man, the science makes a ton of sense. And in addition, there's all this other stuff from the real world that can super, super help figure a lot of shit out.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
That's how fast it comes back. And it's such good news for people that have to take time off because I think there is this very understandable misunderstanding that many people have, which is they think, okay, I train and I'm big because I train. And I've been training for 10 years and I've gotten quite jacked.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah. Well, that's a great question. I started out as a person who was good at science science, like in school, but I hadn't read any exercise science because there was hardly any. And so I started out just doing meathead shit. And then I started learning more science because I was like, yeah, some of this shit sounds dumb. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so I came into the science with a lot of my own preconceived notions and a lot of information, both from meathead shit and about how my own body was responding. But I hadn't really coached a lot of people yet. And then I started being very adept at the science, very adept at understanding my body, but I still hadn't coached a lot of people.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then as I coached more and more people, it's that third tier that probably helped me learn the most, to be completely honest. Maybe not the most. It was indispensable. Because you can learn all the science you want and that's dope. It's actually the most straightforward part. Like if you're smart enough reading all the science and understanding, it's not that complicated. It's very accessible.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Learning about yourself is just going to require like years and years of trials and tribulations. But a lot of people learn stuff about themselves. They just assume it applies to everyone else. And then you can really tell apart who has learned science, who has learned science plus learned a lot about themselves through experimentation, and then who's actually coached a bunch of people.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Only through working with tons of other people, especially competitors, do I learn, oh, shit just doesn't quite work the same way that I thought it did. And so for me, the last thing for me to happen was –
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
coaching enough other people coaching enough competitors and then competing myself to learn like oh fuck a lot of this does make sense for example a lot of the stuff that was i read in like flex magazine and all the muscular uh development all those magazines back in the day was advice that i thought nonsensical when i was doing it myself
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I thought it was nonsensical when I read all the literature that I could. But then when I realized like, oh, there's a drug game and growth hormone is something you take X, Y, Z times during the day. That's why these guys eat like this. That makes total sense. And so a lot of that stuff you just can't have access to unless you're in the thick of it. So There's a way to be a really good scientist.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
There's a way to be a really good practitioner. But I always have a lot of time, even if they don't know science, even if they don't train themselves, for hearing experiences of elite sport coaches. Someone like Hani Rambod, who has coached dozens of Olympians, basically, and thousands of clients.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
in honey's brain is a lot of God and treasure from just seeing that many human beings go through transformation process. It gives you a color to the world that you'll never, ever see in your life. The analogy here quickly is like, um, the best communicator, the one, the person that's talked to the most number of people, um, is going to be amazing at talking to a bunch of different people.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if I detrain for, let's say, a year, then I lose kind of a lot of muscle, which is like very true. And then however much muscle I lose, let's say I was pretty jacked, 200 pounds, pretty lean. And after a year of not training, whatever, motorcycle accident, whatever, I'm 170. What they do is they look back to when they were first 170 and Fucking six years ago. And they go, oh, my God.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But there's levels to this. ChatGPT talks to like 600 million people every week. You can't ever beat it as a conversationalist. It just talks to more people. It's talked to fucking everyone about their wildest dreams, their craziest fantasies, their biggest nightmares. It's just a wisdom machine. You can't beat on numbers. And so until you've coached lots of people,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
and you've been around the process, and you've done it yourself, and you've read all the science, you can't confidently say, well, fuck, and I know it all. And of course, as you work with tons of people, as you do the shit yourself, as you read all the science, you realize, well, you know a lot, but there's always more to learn. And people say like lame shit, like, oh, I'm a lifelong learner.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It sounds dumb. It sounds like something you say at an educational conference and then go have fucking refreshments afterwards. But 100% is a real fucking thing. There's always more to learn.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And especially working with tons of different people, you start to realize, because real quick while I'm on this rant, there are a lot of people that are really good at bodybuilding, for example, and they're gifted. Like they're just fucking gifted. They just have fucking incredible genetics. And they'll tell you shit that they do. And you're like, that's ridiculous. It works for me.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then incels on the internet will be like, it works for him. You're not Dorian Yates. You can't say shit. But when that person tries to coach others, a lot of time it's a real bad deal because that person's like, oh, They're not responding how I used to respond. They got just a whole laundry list of problems. They're getting these side effects from drugs. They're crashing in the diet.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I never used to do that. And a lot of times, the amount of wisdom you can increase in yourself if you have good genetics is only be increased if you work with people that don't have great genetics. One of my biggest gifts ever, so to speak, was working with regular clients. Fuck competitors. Competitors are sometimes just the elite just because.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And you learn a ton with competitors, but with a regular fucking average clients, middle-aged women, if you know your shit, you're going to get them in shape. If you don't know your shit, you're going to do nothing because it's easy to get a 22 year old dude on steroids and shape. I fucking wonder he's 22.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
A hundred percent. He's completely compliant. He's best genetics, best youth, best everything, best drugs. Of course, of course you're going to get in shape. But when you work with a 45 year old mother of two, that's also a wall street broker and she's like Jewish and a dog shit, fucking genetics, no offense, Jews. Then like, if you get her to lose 10 pounds and keep it off, you know,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're going to have to figure some shit out. The way I learned about basically people fucking their metabolism up through dieting is with regular female clients in New York City. It was not with competitors. And you think like, how can someone have the amount of diet fatigue a typical competitor has after a 16-week prep in just eight weeks of dieting? Genetics, man, it's a motherfucker.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But you learn a lot working with people like that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
One thing is getting them to weight train in a way that builds muscle. It's just to alter their physique in a way they didn't think was imaginable. But what they're after is to be leaner and shapelier. And the way you do that fundamentally is by losing fat and building muscle. And cause no offense to orange theory. A lot of that cardio bullshit, it just doesn't do a whole lot of that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
In addition to that, cardio doesn't really do a whole lot of much for weight loss because your body just reduces your energy expenditure concomitantly and you just don't get a lot of it. It's healthy for you. If your diet is very set in stone, more cardio can help you lose a little bit more weight, which is meaningful for competitors and stuff, but it's not this big thing. Probably one of the
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Oh, my God. It took me five years to get from 170 to 200. It's going to take me five years again to put this muscle back on. But it really takes like five months. And so that is incredibly good news for anyone that's detrained. And it's news that's used in a really good way. Here's a good way to use this news.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
biggest variables is diet control. It means knowing what you're putting in your body by tracking slash programming what you put in your body, and then maneuvering from that. Because people will say, oh, I can't lose weight. I'm like, well, how much do you eat on average? Like, well, I don't know. Well, who the fuck? No shit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like, how theoretically would we be able to help you if you don't even know what's going in your body? So Getting these people to eat four meals a day of high protein and some fucking veggies, knowing what they're eating, and then going, okay, we have your maintenance. Now we're going to crank it down by 500. We're going to have you weight train. We're going to track your steps.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
All of a sudden, fat mounts off, muscle builds. Because you're actually doing the thing for the first time. It's like people are trying to build the Lego spaceship or school bus or whatever they got, but they don't look at the instructions on the fucking back of the box. They're like, it's not a school bus. No shit. Do you ever try looking at the instructions?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're like, well, I thought I could just figure it out. Well, that clearly didn't fucking work. And here's the thing. If you're some kind of genius savant, maybe you can figure it out.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
The big irony here is that as a busy mom who doesn't get enough sleep, who's diet is shit, and she's in her fucking late 40s, and there's no one in her family that had very good genetics to begin with, she is working completely at a deficit on all of these things. And so for her to get in remotely good shape,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
often requires a level of intricacy and effort and organization of diet and training that's like damn near competitor level. And the thing that, you know, that makes sense once you think about it, like, well, yeah, if you have everything going against you, you're going to have to do your best to, you know, to be as good as possible.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So that is always kind of a little bit of a shock to people when they're like, wait, I have to do all the shit to get in shape? Like, yeah. And another thing that's crazy to me is, This is understandable, especially with tech getting as good as it's getting. With tech getting as good as it's getting, you just expect things to work.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
If ChatGPT doesn't get back to me with a perfectly polite, incredibly, incredibly intelligent answer in three seconds, I think there's something wrong with the internet, and I start getting fucking pissed. And that is understandable because tech sets such a high bar.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But a lot of people who have everything going against them, not so great genetics, a lifetime of doing nothing about it, they're in real bad shape to begin with, they have tons of stress, very little sleep, no organized diet, they somehow think that when they see a personal trainer twice a week, And they take like one tip in their diet, like just eat more protein, Karen. Okay.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
That they're somehow going to like accomplish the body of their dreams. And I had so many people tell me like, well, like, so my goal physique is like Jennifer Garner. I'm like a perfect angel. Are you out of your fucking mind? Someone who's 27 years old and trains fucking three hours a day to look perfect because that's her job is to look perfect. She's elite genetics.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Don't you dare get upset or down on yourself or disappointed when you have to have a layoff of training because it will come back so goddamn fast. And also because you're not pounding your joints into oblivion all the time and you're not pushing yourself through crazy hard workouts, both your joints and your mental aspects are going to be super, super refreshed.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And as a private chef, that's low key your goal. Like how many people come into like a basketball camp and they're like, I don't want to be LeBron. Okay. Like Steph Curry. That'd be great. Could you get me there? Like, no, you delusional asshole.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But with the way that the service industry works and the fact that you go to a restaurant and you're like, I want a perfect steak and they give it to you in 15 minutes, I think you get used to the shit. And then you're like, I just want, you go to a personal trainer. Like, I just want amazing results in almost no time. And you're like, no bitch, that's not how the fuck it works.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It works by you pounding it in and being ultra consistent for months and getting decent results. And if you think you can do it better somewhere else, be my guest. Now, good news, combination of these weight loss drugs we already have now and these crazy muscle building drugs coming up, hey, the standards are going to elevate. but we're not there yet. And it's just going to take a lot of work.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so one of the things that always baffled me working with regular people is most of them are dope, but some of them come with these absolutely ridiculous ideas about what's going to happen and a total unwillingness to work for it with all the odds stacked against them. And it's just, to me, it was always kind of like, I was pretty good at real talking people.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
We're like a polite way, but you know, a little curt, a little humorous. I always be like, look, you want big changes. I'm here to tell you that JLo is unusual. Yes. They're like, well, I guess. Yeah. So having her as your goal is kind of fucking ridiculous. They're like, I guess like, okay, so let's just try to get 10 pounds off of you in 12 weeks and put on a few pounds of muscle.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And after that, if you're still with it, We're going to try to do a little bit better. What do you say? And then all of a sudden, they don't have these crazy goals. They're more realistic. They're much happier with their transformation because they didn't think they were supposed to be able to do it all in three fucking weeks. And then everyone wins.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So one of my biggest pet peeves is when trainers allow their clients to hold on to delusional goals and promise them a ton so they can get that $600 up front. And then inevitably the client quits halfway through and goes on to the next trainer.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Dude, yeah, let me riff on that really quick if that's okay. Yeah. There are so many clients who, again, have everything stacked against them and they come to you with non-negotiables.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And it's like, well, you can't negotiate against physiology, so you're just not going to get what the fuck you want. Two non-negotiables that are, to me, crazy but understandable, but also like it's your job as a trainer to weave clients out of these. One is alcohol. Mm-hmm. Like, I got to drink for work.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I mean, after six weeks of not training, I'm going to basically be restarting my training career psychologically and joint wise. And that's such a good thing.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Well, I go to these things where you have to convince the client to sign the deal. Yeah. You got to be drunk to do it. Are you out of your fucking mind? It makes you worse at your job. You drink because you like how alcohol feels. You like feeling drunk and you like vibing with clients and it's really fun. Yes. Yes. There's nothing to do with the demands of your job. Yes. Like, okay, fuck.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
No, it doesn't. Okay, great. And they're like, well, clients insist that I drink. Really? Really? The fucking CEO of Oracle wants you to be fucking hammered at a New York restaurant at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. Otherwise, he doesn't sign the deal. If you're out of your fucking mind, you're like, oh, you're just ordering diet sodas. And he'll be like, aren't you drinking?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You're like, well, honestly, I'm trying to do some health shit, and I got to stick to the diet sodas. they're not going to be like, come on, that's ridiculous. You're going to be like, dude, that's really awesome. Good for you. And then you can work on fucking discussing the deal and all those technicalities. So that whole alcohol is non-negotiable is such a fucking dog shit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
99 times out of a hundred. Like when we, Nick and I first got to New York, we just like revere these people because they're rich, they're successful, all the shit, they know what's going on. And a few months in, we're like, not that we lost respect for them. It's that we woke up to the idea that they're paying us to call them out on their bullshit. We're like, oh,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
In the Eastern Bloc countries that were pretty good about formal periodization back in the day, a lot of times after a yearly cycle or especially after an Olympic cycle, many of the athletes for about one to three months after the conclusion of, let's say, the World Championships and whatever sport they were at, they literally just disappeared and did not engage in the process of sport training in any capacity.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Oh, we're allowed to call you on your bullshit. Stop fucking drinking. And they're like, God damn it. All right, fine. They try the shit. Well, I have to. We're like, no, you don't. They're like, okay, I don't. You're right. I don't have to do that. And the other non-negotiable, it's also fucking bullshit. This one's a little bit more nuanced is sleep. Yeah.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They will be like, okay, so I can't sleep but four hours and that's just going to have to be how it is. And I'm like, dope, I can't give you hardly any results and that's just going to have to be how it is. And they're like, are you joking? I'm like, no, I mean, yeah, but no, I'm not fucking joking. And then you have to like work with them.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And this is actually a great part of being a trainer and a coach is getting people to articulate their daily schedule and
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
and articulate why they can't go to bed at 9 p.m and watch them tell you that like well like i don't know like i just like to stay up with my husband and and watch tv for three hours and drink like three bottles of wine and order sushi at midnight i got it do you want to look like what you told me you want to look like yeah take three months off of that dumb have a protein shake go the to sleep at nine aren't you tired well yeah
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
go to sleep. All right. But it's kind of boring. No shit. You know, those people you look up to in the fitness magazines, you live in the most fucking boring lives in the world. I remember once Jay, they asked Jay Cutler, like after his second Olympia win, what he was going to do. He's like, well, you know, typically, uh, You know, I like to party it up at the Olympia.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So, you know, I normally go to bed at nine. And I think I think after the Olympia, I'll go to bed at 11. And everyone's like, what the fuck? What? That's crazy. Like, yeah, that's just that's how he lives his life. Like a fucking machine. You want to look like a machine. You do not have to live your life like a machine.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But you're going to have to live three months of your life like more of a machine. And so when you say, I can't get any sleep, I know you're fucking lying because you only work so long during the day and you just have a lot of entertainment built in. You're going to have to curtail that a little bit and start entertaining yourself in three months when you have the body. And good news.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Once you lose a lot of fat and you gain a lot of muscle, maintaining that look is like, I don't know, five times easier than getting it. Then you can start having wine and fucking mimosas and the ultimate killer of female physiques in the big cities, brunch. There's no amount of physique progress one fucking brunch can't undo. I'm convinced of this shit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It's like the menu items in a brunch seem like they were made up just to see how many grams of saturated fat we can cram into products needlessly. It's like salmon. You're like, salmon, but it's dipped in a fat reduction, and then it's panko crusted, and then a fat-based oil, a fat-based sauce is strewn on top of that, and it's dipped again in fat flakes. What the…
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
the fuck like oh my god but you gotta try it it's so good i get that it's good you have to back the fuck away from that for a short amount of time one of my colleagues dr melissa davis is a fellow coach at rp and helped co-author a bunch of our books she made a huge huge point of this a ton where The diet, quote unquote, to get you in shape is not a lifestyle. It is temporary.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And one of the things I used to love to do to my high elite clients was talk that shit because they would be like, it's really hard to diet. I'd be like, oh yeah, no, for sure. You're totally right. They're like, yeah. I'm like, hmm. So you never went to school, did you? They're like, I graduated top five at Harvard Law. I'm like, but that was easy, right? They're like, no, it was brutal.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Harvard Law. I'm like, oh, so you're capable of doing difficult things for a short time, right? They're like, fuck you. They should have seen that one coming. Oh, dope. See you tomorrow on your diet. But clients a lot of times try to weave their way into the easiest shit that they can, which is understandable, right? Like you do this every day in every life.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They went on vacation – well, back in the Eastern Bloc days, you couldn't leave the country – you know, had whatever kind of leisure time you have in communism, all the kind of good stuff. And then after a few months, they would start this long process of getting in shape again.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like you're not trying to go out of your way on your way to work. You're trying to cut with your car the fastest route. But if you understand that all of the routes are blocked except for the difficult. And going down the difficult route is how you're going to get in shape.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then after that, you can back up to a maintenance lifestyle, live your best life, have your mimosas, dip your fucking salmon in whatever bullshit fat that you want and still have that look, which is going to take 12 weeks of low key, some fucking effort and some restriction. You either buy it, you take the red pill and you do the shit. Or you don't.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if you don't, you can just be like you were five years ago and like you're going to be in five. Same shape you were in, making fucking bullshit excuses every time you meet a fit person. Dope. That's cool. I don't care. I think you look great either way. But you give a shit. So it's time for you to step up and do the shit or not. So well said.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Fuck. Yeah. Right. How long do you have? Uh, one is a meal frequency. I used to think that if you weren't eating every two hours, you're just an idiot. And that eating four meals a day was not the way to get jacked. Like about 800 studies later. And my own experience and tons of bodybuilders is like, Oh, actually, if you eat four times a day, you're almost certainly covering all of your bases.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
That is a huge one. Um, Another one is the if it fits your macros thing is something that works really well on paper. Like if you just combine whatever foods you need and get your macros, you're good to go. But it turns out that eating mostly healthy foods, like kind of traditional bodybuilding clean foods, is such a huge energy leveler. And a huge reducer and controller of appetite.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And it was a long process simply because they didn't want to get hurt, but they could easily be back in good shape in two months. But they took their time. And then by the middle of the year, they were at regionals. They were at the equivalent of states and nationals breaking records again. They As soon as worlds were over, they would just take months off.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Like if you have to eat a fuckload of broccoli and kale and a bunch of chicken and brown rice, you're just not like, you're not going to overeat that. Yeah. Good luck getting fat on that. 100%. No one's doing it. And so the idea that I can have potato chips and still succeed in my diet is cool.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if you ignore the temptation of junk food to eat more of it and you ignore the hunger signaling part, it works. But the hunger signaling and that shit is real. And so... As I've been, when I matured more in the industry, I realized, you know, there is a reason that bodybuilders eat like they do.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And maybe we should all be eating a little bit healthier with more protein, more veggies and stuff like that. Even though it's not sexy, it's not super convenient. Sometimes if it's your macros, great. When you're in maintenance, when you're in bulk, and it's awesome when you're like, oh, fuck, I have to get some food in me somehow. Let me just do macros. That's cool.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But as far as like a sustainable thing that really causes change, eating meals that are high in veggies and fruits, whole grains, lean meats, healthy fats, all that bodybuilder shit. it really does produce results. And it's not a thing I want to admit. I wish we could just protein shake and Snickers bar our way into better physiques.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But unless you're fucking slamming a ton of semaglutide or something, it's much easier said than done.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It's something that we in the free Western world, because we're engaged in training purely voluntarily in almost every case, it's not like none of us are getting paid to fucking do this. We do this because we love it. And because as far as I can speak for myself, a variety of psychosocial disorders about my body and so on and so forth, and a lot of rage to get out of these barbells. Fuck.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Tons, yeah. It just, in many people, causes a reduction in want. generally, it fills that hole. It quiets not just food noise, but desire noise. And it's not a guaranteed thing. It doesn't happen for everyone to the same extent, but it is a meaningful, meaningful effect. And so people will quit smoking by accident. They'll reduce or quit drinking by accident. Another thing is...
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
these drugs are insanely powerful systemic anti-inflammatory drugs and that is incredibly beneficial for almost every aspect of health another really great part of these drugs is indirectly foods that are very processed they're very tasty that are very high in calories and fat in a very dense package and
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
tend to gel very poorly with these drugs because if you dump a fuckload of calories really fast in your stomach and you're on these drugs, you get sick because your gastric emptying rate is really slow. The food ends up sitting there and your body's like, that's not supposed to be sitting in there. I'm going to make you feel like you need to throw it up. And so it turns out that
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Whole foods, foods that are pretty filling, and healthy foods just feel way better on these drugs than the alternative. And so it's kind of the softer nudging effect to gay to eat better. So a lot of people, you know, personal trainers and fitness industry people often have a lot of feelings about these drugs because – They just have a lot of feelings about a lot of stuff.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And so, like, this drug's a fucking cop out, man. You got to earn this shit. I'm like, why do you have to earn it? You didn't design a microchip, but you use it every day on your cell phone, you hypocrite asshole. But that shit aside is they'll be like, people could just eat junk and fucking still lose weight. I'm like, first of all, what's wrong with that?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Second of all, they can't because most people will figure out that. They really can't tolerate junk nearly as much. They feel worse eating junk than before. There was that drug back in the day called Tantix or whatever. It was like a smoking cessation drug. And if you tried smoking on it, you felt fucking incredibly awful and sick. And you're like, fuck that. That doesn't work anymore.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So the low key, some of these drugs do that for food. And so they actually encourage a healthy lifestyle. They're crazy systemic anti-inflammatories. They improve your blood glucose control independent of weight loss. They improve your blood lipids independent of weight loss. There's tons of other benefits of them.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They really are like kind of not panaceas, but like just ubiquitously really awesome for your health. And. A lot of people have a problem with that because they exhibit what's called the naturalistic fallacy, the argument for nature, that anything that is natural is good and anything that is artificial is bad. And it's just not true.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
you dad you know shit like that um and then so because of that we never really take a lot of time off and because we're paranoid about it we think any time off is going to fuck us up but it really just reality is the very very opposite of that and i think that's just wonderful news
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
There are some natural things that are amazing, whole foods, good clean water. That stuff is fucking dope, sunshine and shit, children's laughter, all that bullshit. That's awesome. But then there's artificial shit that… there's natural shit that's bad for you. You know, you don't see like a bear out in the wild and you're like, it's natural. It's fine, honey. Like, fuck that. Like, don't do that.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Don't go over there. Snake bites bad for you. If you think natural things are good for you, just go randomly berries off the fucking trees in the forest. Do not do that. You will fucking die. And yeah,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
artificial shit a bunch of it's not great for you junk food and stuff is fucking terrible right especially in excess but you know air conditioning is great antibiotics are fucking awesome vaccines are dope and then like all of a sudden you're like okay okay so natural versus artificial doesn't work I actually just have to go and find out what's good and what's bad and it turns out some artificial things like these drugs are really just awesome and I think we're entering a world more and more as AI especially starts to decode our biology
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
and produce all these drugs that are incredibly awesome, you're just going to be in a world where if you stay drug free, you're going to be totally fine. But if you're on more and more of these advanced drugs, you're just going to feel, look, and be better overall. And I think embracing the very best that artificial stuff has coming for us is awesome. And there's nothing wrong with it.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And it's just a matter of, are you doing healthy shit or unhealthy shit? And the shortcut of natural versus artificial is not a shortcut because it just does not give you much information at all.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
at least two things. One is your sense of identity and career. Lots of people in the fitness industry, and they might have to shift to doing some other kind of work because everyone's just fit already.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
now the work can be fitness industry adjacent instead of like taking people through sets of squats in the gym you might be taking them on guided hikes through the wilderness because like that is dope for its own vibes and even if you're fit it just makes you better at hiking so i think once people get in really good shape they're going to have this unlock of being able to go out in nature and do cool that they just can't you know the average 300 pound person's not going a five mile hike through the colorado wilderness for obvious reasons
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You make excellent bear food if a bear finds you. That's not really an advantage to you. So I think there's a massive pivot that many people will have to make into a very similar kind of profession, but different. And another one is... I think that there's a certain amount of doing hard things and a certain amount of just raw human movement that you have to have.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And if you don't do, you're kind of get massive cabin fever and you're pent up and you're fucking pissed. And so just suffering through super long, hard workouts is really good psychotherapy, um, Now, there are no doubt will be many psychotherapeutic drugs that mute that response that you actually will be able to be fit and happy and not need to beat the shit out of yourself.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But there's a certain amount of challenge just because it's challenging. It sharpens your mind. It makes you healthier and all that stuff. It's not going to be a disaster because I think this is an easy solution to this, but it's easy on paper and maybe a little bit harder in practice. A lot of people are going to have to shift to finding challenge somewhere else. And that's a big deal.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Right now, many of us find our challenge in fitness. But if we have fitness in a pill, maybe the challenge is pick up Muay Thai or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or boxing. That's fucking challenging. And if you're already in shape, that doesn't mean you can box, motherfucker. Get hit in the face a whole bunch. All of a sudden, there goes your catharsis. You might get into endurance stuff.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You might get into mountain biking, 50 other things to do. But fitness isn't the only thing. Every time you go to work out because it's challenging and because it's good for you, you are not going in and helping children in need. You are not hanging out with old people at old people homes or dying fucking alone.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
You are not volunteering your time in the third world to help them build up the kind of structures and institutions that we have so they can have a good time. So maybe once we sort out more and more of our own problems, we can have more time and energy and desire to go out and make sense of the actual fucking world and help in a really big way.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Because in one sense, when you look at gyms right now, people are doing wonderful things to their own psychology, to their physiques, to their health. But in another sense, they're just literally wasting energy moving fucking plates up and down for no goddamn reason at all.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
If we can get the chemicals to do all the fitness shit, we can open up ourselves to like two hours extra per day where you're doing anything but moving weights up and down in a fucking straight line. Which, listen, moving weights up and down in a straight line is the passion of my life. But also, there's like a lot more shit to the world that you could be doing.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And I think that is something that humans are going to have to quote unquote grapple with. But it's great. It's a great problem, but nonetheless a problem and a bit of a speed bump.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah. I think there's two solutions to that. One is going out into the world and making inroads on real problems instead of just fitness. I think that's a big unlock. I feel like I just look at our fucking inner cities for love. God, who the fuck's cleaning it up? Nobody, who the fuck is mentoring children of nobody in their lives to mentor them? Nobody is fucking. Yeah.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Some people, it's not enough. We need 10 X, the number of people helping everyone out. So that's a big thing. The other thing is, this is like fucking weird, but I think it's true. Um, advanced, uh,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
pharmaceuticals that um interact with your brain are 100 many of them are here already more of them are inevitable you won't have to be sad because you will be pharmacologically incapable of feeling sadness i'm going to say something fucking wacky i always have at least one of these 50 of these things on every podcast i'm on there is no reason to think based on first principles and how the brain works that eventually
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yes, that's when he never trained ever before or used steroids during the experiment. And he managed to gain 89 pounds of muscle in three and a half days exclusively due to Nautilus equipment. Yes, yes.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
AI and scientific researchers can't figure out how to make a drug that makes you feel like you do at a peak ecstasy high, except permanently and with no downsides and with no adaptations. That is 100% theoretically possible.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So you can have a pill maybe that's developed in five, seven or 10 years that if you take it every day, you are like, do you guys have any friends that are just genetically fucking happy for no goddamn reason at all? They're just like, I broke my leg, but it's an opportunity to learn. You're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I was depressed before I broke anything.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
How the fuck are you doing this? They just have different brain chemistry. And there's no reason to think that all of us can't have that brain chemistry times 10 in the future.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
if you think that taking a pill to be ecstatic and happy and optimistic and hardworking is bad, I would love to hear why maybe there are some good points, but at the same time, a lot of people are going to want to take that pill. So we're, we have pills for our body coming up. That seems straightforward.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
There are going to be pills for the brain coming up that deal with a lot of existential angst and all this other bullshit that might just go away after you start taking a pill. And is that really like, yeah, but you should be suffering. Like, I don't know. Should you be, maybe, maybe there's a compelling argument against that, but I,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Oh, that's like people's concept of hell from hyper capitalist abundance. Like, you know, having like, you know, known people who went to Russian prison, I'm telling you, hell's a lot worse than fucking winning a bunch of rounds of fucking models. That's just potential angst. Like, have you ever been beaten by five prison guards daily for 20 years? Like, no, I guess there's levels to this.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Well, I'm just going to go back to fucking the strippers. I'm just going to learn.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Joy is also chemically mediated. Maybe. So if you attack the right chemical pathways, you can just have joy all the time. Deep, meaningful joy, just straight up. How do I know that? Ecstasy exists. If you're on ecstasy, you love everyone you see as much as you've loved your mother. You really do feel that. Do you have kids? No, fuck no, man.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
They don't let a person like me with these crazy views come.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
No, you've been great, Mike. It's just a dog.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah, man. Well, you guys are in the Bay area, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck no. I'm never coming out. I'm not trying to step on heroin needles covered in shit.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
We're in San Jose. I like the mumbling. It's a little safer here. Don't worry. Thank you so much. Yeah, good talking to you, Mike.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
It looks like a few sets per muscle group a few times a week is going to get you like a humongous fraction of gains. So like if you do three sets of work for your quads. Two times a week. And each one of those sets is pretty fucking hard, close to failure. You can do that for literally years and see continued radical improvements and just get really, really great results.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Are they going to be your best results? No, your best results would be doing 30 sets per week. But the difference between good results and best results is like maybe double. I mean, the degree to which there's a hyperbolic kind of asymptotic relationship of how much work you put into how much jackness you get is really impressive.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
A little sad for those of us who want to be exotically big, because it's like, look, if you want to get 20% bigger, you have to do one and a half times the work. The fuck? That doesn't add up. You want to be twice as big. You have to do like four times the work. Like, oh, God damn it. But the opposite end of that is really good news.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But if you want to make an awesome body transformation and get incredible health, incredible strength, incredible mobility, finally get some fucking blood in your cock. And am I allowed to swear in here? Family podcast. How dare you? Um,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
So if you want all those amazing benefits and you want to look like TRP dad or whatever, you really just have to do like two to four sets per muscle, two times a week, go pretty fucking hard. You're going to get incredible benefits. And that's such a big deal. I think for most people to realize, because there's this thing, which is getting very understandable is,
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But people see pretty jacked people, pretty lean people, and they automatically assume that this is like a lifestyle, that this person doesn't do anything else. One of my friends, actually the COO of RP Strength, our company, He had already been working. He's been working since he was a teenager, like three jobs at the same time. He's a fucking workaholic, works all the time.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And he really got in really good shape at one point. He's done this a few times in his life, but like very noticeable, like lost a bunch of weight, gained a bunch of muscle. And he went over to a family function. And these are people, these are Azerbaijanis, right? Like Central Asian, Russian type folks and very old world culture. And they noticed he was in great shape.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And one of his uncles or whatever was like, oh, you look great. He's like, thanks. He's like, you know, I would do the same thing too, but I have a job. And Yasha's like, you think I don't have a job? Of course, he didn't say anything because it's all respect culture. Oh, yeah, you know, true. But it's like, oh, no, like, well, I can't. I get in shape.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
I would need to, like, eight, you know, train eight hours a day. Another thing I get all the time is, you know, like, when I'm in my fairly jacked look, I, you know, travel a lot, talk to random people at airports. They just assume that it takes, like, hours a day. Like, you guys, I'm sure, get this question all the time. Like, how many times a week do you train? Or, like, how many hours a day?
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And then they're looking for, like, I train 12 times a week. I train eight hours a day. I like training my training. I train my training as, like, a union job in the fucking 70s in Pittsburgh. Yeah. I fucking clock in. I fucking get in the iron mill. I fucking clock out. I fucking look at my family all wrong and eat the fucking Salisbury steak while looking at my wife all wrong.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
He gets a fucking lifestyle. The thing is you can get a huge amount of gains doing fractions of that work. And I think a lot of people, two things, want to hear that because like, oh my God, like I didn't have these great gains and really only spend like three hours at the gym per week.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
But also I think some people low key kind of subconsciously don't want to hear that because thinking that getting a better physique and getting much leaner and looking way younger is And it's going to require some effort. Thinking that it requires so much effort that you will never be able to do it is a great like cope mechanism excuse to keep in your back pocket.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Because when you look at that guy that's your age, but he's jacked and shredded and you're like, well, I have a family and I have kids. And then you see he has like triplets he's walking with, fuck.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
that excuse doesn't work anymore at least you can tell yourself you're hard working american you pay taxes well he's a degenerate that lives in the gym and the reality is like you can have most of what he has and spend two or three hours at gym a week a lot of people want to hear that a lot of people don't want to hear that yeah i think the other the other part of it too mike and i'd love your input on this is a lot of us we don't do what's optimal we just push what's what we can tolerate and so we're in the gym more than is necessary
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
Yeah, there's no way to figure out how you're going to get your best gains unless you experiment with training much less than you typically do, around the amount that you typically do, and much more than you typically do. And you do each one of these for weeks and weeks and even months if you can, and you very objectively analyze the result. In some cases, doing way less is the best.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
In some cases, what you figured out over the years probably works really well. And in many cases, good news or bad news, is like, well, the more you do, uh, the better you get. Um, I have a friend who just, uh, he's, he's in his, um, uh, fuck it. It's Eric Helms. I don't know if you guys know who he is. He's a natural pro bodybuilder. He's in his early forties.
Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content)
And he just kind of discovered that like the more volume he adds to his program, the better he gets. And he's making objectively the best gains ever in his fucking early forties. And he's like, man, it's like low key. I Cause I didn't want to have to do this, but I love training and it's great news. It's kind of like, damn, I really do have to do 35 sets for my biceps every week.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yep. That's it. And then I just walk away and they're like, wow, that guy's supposed to be smart or something like that. But then they see the back of my very shiny head and it makes them happy. Yes. Okay. Which exercises? So there is a lot to say about it, but you can start with the supposition that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the muscle you want to grow.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if you want bigger biceps, you know, some variation of doing this is probably good. And then to be honest, that's maybe 80% of the answer.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if a lot of people, here's why I'm saying that a lot of people will look at, let's say for quads, they'll look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll look at lunges and they'll look at regular high bar squats and they'll vex themselves infinitely over the question of which one of these is superior, right?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
which is kind of like asking, you know, I need to get to Austin, Texas in two days. Which airline should I take? Like you, you ask someone who works at the airport, which airlines like really the one I should be taking. They're like, you know, I don't know. All of them really get you there. There are subtle differences, but at least make sure the ticket says Austin, Texas.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good to go. Now there are ways of seeing which exercises hit the target muscle that you want, but, a couple of what we at RP call proxies for stimulus. So this is something like tension, the perception of a lot of tension generated or exposed in that muscle.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if you're doing chest flies and you feel a crap load of stretch and pulling in the chest, that's probably good. If you're doing what you think is a chest fly, but you misread the machine's instruction thing and you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your forearms or your shoulders, but you don't really honestly feel anything in the chest,
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
On a just pure physics perspective, because of the mechanics of the movement, your chest has to be getting some exposure. But maybe you could be doing better by actually doing the exercise in a way or picking an exercise that really you feel some tension off of. Another clue to if you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And that's seen in a medical context when people don't wear proper protection. I know that resonates with you personally because the conversation we had right before this. I don't mean to expose you, but Chris, you could just be making better choices is what I'm trying to say. All theoretical, I've never been with a woman as everyone who watches our YouTube knows.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
But on a serious note, the burn is in especially higher rep sets when you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle. So the chest fly analogy, if you're doing high rep pec flies and at the end of that set, your pecs are burning, hey, that's probably good. You're probably getting a good stimulus there.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
On the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning, but your pecs don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise? Yeah, sure. Is it guaranteed to be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably not, because you should be feeling some combination of tension and burn. And then also there's pump.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Again, none of these are mandatory, but together they're kind of like puzzle pieces that take what could be a C-plus exercise for you and make it an A-plus exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on this. So another one is pump. How much after several sets of the workout or of the exercise – how filled with fluid is your target muscle?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So if you're doing pec flies and after a couple of sets, you know, a girl walks by and you're like, and she's like, oh my God, and she runs away. I guess that's good, even though she ran away, but she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your pec size, which is the whole point of the gym.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
But if you do a bunch of sets of something, let's say you're doing pec flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms look more veiny, but to be honest, they say your chest has changed in an invisible or palpable way. No doubt, still trains your pecs, but maybe not that great. Another one is perturbation, which kind of presents itself in two forms.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
One is, is that target muscle feeling really weak? So let's say you do a few pec exercises and you think they're for the chest. And then you try to push yourself into your car, like push off your steering wheel and you feel like a profound weakness in that pack. You're like, oh my God. And a really good example is if you're trying to walk downstairs after you hit quads.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
If you think you hit quads, but you really hit glutes and adductors, you can hop skip down the stairs. No fucking problem. Are we allowed to swear in here or is that not a good idea?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yes, like desperately clean for dear life and your legs are shaky. Another thing with perturbation is crampy. None of this is required. But if your chest cramps hard when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, that whatever you're doing absolutely hit your chest. The other thing is weakness too. So if I tell you, hey, there's mega pec workout, what's your best bench?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And you're like, well, it's like, you know, 200 pounds for a set of 10. And I take you through a mega pec workout. After that, if we put 200 pounds on there, if you bench it for any of the close to 10, your pecs never gotten very fatigued, which almost certainly means they never got very stimulated. So you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop off.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
If you can barely do a pushup after a chest workout, Oh shit, something happened to your pecs for sure. Especially if you feel like your chest is the kind of onus of weakness in that movement. So those are all, Ways to kind of proxy that.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I would say in another one, again, not a huge deal, not the deal, but a good little additive to the mix is do you feel any kind of weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days after?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So for example, if you do some kind of new quad machine at your gym and two days later, your inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore, your quads aren't either the way you did it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique or just the exercise itself. It says quads, but it's really not quads.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Maybe it is to some extent, but you would expect if you had a novel stimulus to feel some kind of soreness. But if you did something that says quads on it and then the day later you can barely walk and you're sore to the touch, man, you know, you have to have stimulated your quads. There is no alternative. So all those things are in the plus side category.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks for you, man, that's a good exercise for you. And we're all different. So some people respond better to a Peck fly machine, some people to dumbbells, some people to cables, some people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well, that's probably a good exercise for you, at least for the time being.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is by far the best and you're going to get the, for the people that are really determined and committed, that would be it. That would be the four minutes of the exercise intensity as hard as you can go and maintain it for that entire four minutes.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
It means you don't want to go like all out, like like 95 percent of your your max heart rate, because then you can only last for like a minute, you know. And so so then you're going to go down. You're going to you're going to slow down. Right. So what it means is like you want to go, you know, it might for some people might be like 75 percent max heart rate. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So some people might be 80 percent. But you want to go as hard as you can for the four minutes. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
uh without like really slowing down so you kind of have to pace yourself a little bit but you don't want to go too slow right like you definitely can't be talking like you should not be able to talk for sure when you're doing it so it's hard enough that you just absolutely can't talk but it's not all out so minutes four minutes and then three minutes of totally light like you're going all the way this is like you know you're you're like back to like zone one if you want to call it something
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
If your heart can come down, yeah. And you're doing that for three minutes because you want to recover so that you can do it again. And you repeat it. It's a four-time protocol. So you do it once and then you repeat it three times or you just call it the four-by-four. I think that's probably one of the best protocols to improve VO2 max. Now, Dr. Martin Kabbalah, I've had him on my podcast.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
He's a real expert on these high intensity interval training protocols. He does a lot of research on it at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. And he also says there's evidence that a one minute protocol. So like just even doing like an interval, like one minute interval and then doing that like, you know, a few times also can improve VO2 max. So that's a little easier. And also it's easier.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Like I like, I do one minute intervals. I'm trying to now incorporate the four by four into my routine, which is coaches help with that.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yeah, it is. But again, like I said, you do have to do, you try to make it consistent.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Well, the Norwegian four by four would be like one time a week. Oh, okay.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yeah, these 50-year-olds did it one time a week for two years, and they reversed their cardiac structure aging by 20 years. Of course, they were also doing other vigorous intensity exercise. It wasn't the torturous Norwegian 4x4. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Well, people can do what they enjoy doing. So you can go for a run. Like I often go for a run and, you know, I'm doing 75, 80 percent my max heart rate. Usually it's like a 20 minute run that I do that, you know, so like as intense as you can maintain for 20 minutes. Like that's what you want to do. You want to kind of get that you get a feeling for that.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
um so if you like runs because there's a lot of benefits to running you're out in nature well i guess some people do it on treadmill i'm not so big on treadmills like i i'll do them like when i go to a gym or something traveling but i like running out in nature i think there's it's just there's lots of benefits to doing that um some people like to get on their bike and cycle so like you can just get on your bike and do a 20 to 30 minute uh 75 80 max heart rate cycle right and
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
You can, or you could do a high-intensity interval training. So high-intensity interval training would be you're going to go more than 80%, right? You're going to do more of a submaximal, perhaps. Perhaps even a maximal interval. So you can go up to 90, 95% max heart rate. So that would be, I mean, obviously you can only maintain that for like so long, right? Some people might be 30 second pushes.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Like a Tabata style thing perhaps. um, most days of the week. And it's funny, I kind of adopted this, this routine when I was, I was kind of trying to do a little bit like Joe Rogan sober October, but it was like every day, October, I was trying to work out every day. And I noticed, I was like, I could do this. I'm doing it for like one month.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I don't, I wasn't going as hard as like the, this guy's doing the sober October where they were like competition. It was like, they were just But like if you do something, do something every day. So sometimes I'll do like a 10 minute Tabata where I get on there and I just go hard for 10 minutes. Most of the time I'll do a 45 second on, 15 second off. So it's a three to one ratio.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I really like that one. But sometimes I'll do 20 second on, 10 second off. So it's like I do both. But like even just 10 minutes, again, I time it around like like I got I'm going to go do work. I want to feel motivated. I want to feel better. I want to be more focused and on my game. And I just get on there for the bike for 10 minutes and do it.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
You know, there's there's studies out there, these sort of exercise snacks. Now, 10 minutes is longer than an exercise snack. But there's studies out there where people are wearing these like wearable devices, right? And so you can track their heart rate and you can track how the heart rate's going up. And so there's large, large studies. They're called the vigorous intensity lifestyle activity.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And most people are taking advantage of everyday life. Like they have stairs every day to work. They sprint up them. They don't walk up them. They sprint. They get their heart rate up to like 75%. percent max heart rate, 80 percent max heart rate. They're getting intense.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And people that do this anywhere between one to three minutes a day, I mean, these guys have like a 50 percent lower cancer related mortality, cardiovascular related mortality. And this was even true for people that identified themselves as non-exercisers. So these are people that are not going to the gym or doing other like tennis or whatever. They don't have leisure time, physical activity.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So the benefits were also in people that identified as non-exercisers. So my point is that the vigorous intensity, these like even short bursts of it, just consistently, like every day, a little bit, like they do add up. There's additive effects and they make a difference. So that's also, I think, really something that's very
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
encouraging because some people oh i gotta go and work out for 30 it's like you need that motivation right like some people don't have that motivation and so um it's a lot easier to just get up and do something for two minutes it's hard but you can do it and you can do it at your house what apart from running up and down stairs what are some other ways that people can incorporate exercise snacks to take advantage of this
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Body weight squats are a great one. So you're just doing your squats and you do it for a minute and then rest for whatever, 15 seconds, and then do another minute. I mean, those are hard. And they get your heart rate up. So you can do that for like three minutes. That's a really good one. And then you're going to be really sore if you're not used to it. But And then there's the high knees.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So you do high knees. I mean, you could do chair squats. You could do playing the planks, the burpees, those burpees. So you do like the plank thing and then you come up and jump. And like those are all, I think, really great examples of just like easy ways to do exercise snacks, like even at your desk.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And just even breaking up, we're talking about improving cognition, improving mood, breaking up your workday with those, it makes a difference on your mood, on your cognition. It helps. You're getting blood flow immediately to your brain.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Yeah, it's interesting. So I never identified myself as sedentary because I've always done something like running or jumping rope or something like going to the gym, something where I'm physically active. So it's like, oh, I'm in the physically active group. I'm not sedentary. Well, it turns out being sedentary is like what we've been for the past couple of hours. We've been sitting here.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
That is sedentary. So even if you go to the gym or you go for runs, when you are sitting at your desk for a period of hours, you are sedentary. And being sedentary itself is an independent risk factor for disease like cancer. So now do I think the marathon runner that also has a desk job where they sit at their desk for eight hours is going to come down with cancer?
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Probably not because they're really putting a lot of effort in and they're physically active. But I certainly am not the athlete. And I am a committed exerciser. Right. So I'm putting in anywhere between, you know, two to five hours of, you know, exercise in a week, depending on the week. Right. So for me, like I spent a lot of time sitting, I spent a lot of time sitting.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And so that to me was like a big thing where it's like, oh, that's an independent risk factor for breast cancer. Right. which a woman's breast cancer risk and just lifetime risk is one in eight. It's incredibly high. And of course, there's lifestyle factors that can sort of increase or decrease that. And just sedentarism is a independent risk factor for that.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So again, it's really... And it's so easy. So I have started incorporating exercise snacks. I'll get up and I'll start doing some body weight squats. I think that's my go-to. I also like doing burpees. I've been doing some burpees and high knees. I'll do...
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I think every couple of hours. I've also been starting to time them around my meals. So that's another thing. I think being aware of the postprandial glucose response and how it affects my cognitive function, my mood, and also just knowing that it's healthier. And it's so easy to do. Like just do like two or three minutes of- Free food? You can do it pre or post food, both.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
You can do it up to like an hour after.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
Well, I don't know about the whole arms movement, eating and digestion thing, all that. I do know that the more vigorous intensity when you're actually going to start feeling that burn, right, when you start to get up to that, okay, I'm making some lactate. That's what's actually increasing the transporters, glucose transporters. They're called GLUT4.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
They're in your muscle and they have to like move their way up to the top. And lactate is what signals them to do that. So when I'm just thinking about the glucose and improving blood glucose levels, Vigorous is better.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
You're chasing the burn. And there's been studies that have compared walkers to interval walkers. So these are people that are just walking versus walk, pick up the pace while they're walking, walk slower, pick up the pace while they're walking. Now they're not running, but they're just interval walking.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And it's been shown that interval walking improves a variety of metabolic parameters more than just walking. And again, it makes sense because when you're picking up the pace, you're working harder, you're making lactate, and that's one of the big signals for these glucose transporters to Come up to the top of the muscle and let the glucose in.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So I do think from a mechanistic understanding and also data showing walking versus interval walking, interval walking is better. When you can pick up the pace, when you can go a little bit more intense, it's better.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So that's what I'm working on. You probably don't... I'm not all jacked up, but that's been my new goal, particularly of late, but for like the past year, I've become more aware of it. I've spent more time focusing on it. I now have a coach who's great and coming to work with me to focus on that because I feel... I'll tell you when it really hit me.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
I had someone on the podcast, Dr. Mark Madsen, and I have admired his work for years. He's like the intermittent fasting king. I've known of his research since it was in my 20s. He's also done a lot of work on hormesis, and I've followed his work for so much of my scientific career. So it was very cool to have him on the podcast and talk to him.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And we were talking all about everything under the sun with respect to fasting and hormesis. And we started talking about training. And he has been a track runner forever, big, big endurance athlete, mountain biking, everything. And he told me, he said, you know, the one thing that I really regret in my life is that I didn't spend more time building muscle mass. Because he had an accident.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
He had a mountain biking accident and, you know, basically couldn't walk around and use his muscles for quite a period of time. And he said it really hit him hard. And so that was my first kind of like, oh, wow, I've always focused on endurance. I never thought I really needed to focus much on muscle. I'm not a bro. I didn't have that incentive to build the muscle.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And I knew it was important, but I didn't dive in deep enough and convince myself that it was as important. So That was the first sort of eye opener for me. And then I had Stuart Phillips on who does a lot of research on resistance training. He's the one that like I helped, you know, identify that the the RDA for protein intake is likely too low.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
And he he has a really good way of explaining, you know, muscle mass and this what's called a disability threshold, which is what I think everyone that has an older parent or grandparent has seen in action already.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
where you're they get older and they experience that you know take where they're they're out for whatever a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden of course they can't gain their muscle back and then it happens again and then again and then all of a sudden it's just downhill and they can't walk like you know and and the trajectory just plummets um and you know it's just not good
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So, in order to sort of, you know, not let that disability threshold be so devastating, you really have to build up your muscle mass earlier in life. Actually, it's never too late. But if you can do it earlier in life, it's better.
Modern Wisdom
#882 - The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)
So, training wise, like I now am, I used to just do, I mean, really, it was like 30 minutes a week or so of like resistance training, you know, where I'm just doing dumbbells or something. And Now I'm doing two hours a week, maybe a little bit more.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Eines ist Spezifizität. Es ist das wichtigste Prinzip in allem, was Sport, Training und Übungswissenschaft betrifft. ist, wofür bin ich hier? Was will ich? Weil du ein paar Übungen im Gym machen kannst und du denkst, das war großartig. Und jemand fragt dich, kriegst du die Ergebnisse, die du möchtest? Und du sagst, was ich möchte, ist ein größeres Bicep.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Wie viele Übungen für die Bicep-Übungen machst du? Ich glaube, vielleicht ein paar auf der rechten Seite.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Also Spezifikationen, die dir sagen, okay, ich will größere Bicep-Übungen und was auch immer, x, y, z, andere Muskeln. Dann gehen wir zum Prinzip des Überlöses, das bedeutet, dass du dich überlegen musst, wenn die meisten deiner Sets, Jemand, der sie beobachtet, kann nicht sagen, ob du dich wärmst oder wenn du ein Werkzeug machst, wie ein echtes Werkzeug. Du hast ein Problem.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Also, bis zum Ende deiner Sets, sind entweder die Gewässer langsam oder, auch wenn es die gleiche Geschwindigkeit ist, fühlen sie sich dementsprechend schwerer. Weißt du, du machst das, das, das, und in ein paar Raps bist du so. Das ist, was du willst.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
every real working set should be challenging you should be approaching every real set with just a teeny teeny dose of trepidation like oh boy here we go i'm gonna have to try
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und also müssen deine Sets genug schwer sein. Irgendwas zwischen ungefähr fünf Repetitionen pro Set und 30 Repetitionen pro Set, wo die letzten paar Repetitionen nahe sind, dass du nicht die Möglichkeit hast, gute Technik zu nutzen und die Gewicht zu erhöhen. Check plus.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Okay. MDA to sign. Okay, we're off camera. Alright, great. So it's 17. There is, so there's just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff. Manche Leute, einige ihrer Muskeln reagieren besser auf 5-10-Sätze. Andere Leute, sogar die gleiche Person könnte Muskeln in ihrem Körper haben, die wirklich besser auf Sätze von 20-30-Sätzen reagieren und alles dazwischen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Aber generell gibt es in den Übungswissenschaftsdaten eine Gruppe von Leuten, die trainiert werden, für Sätze von ungefähr fünf Reepen und eine andere Gruppe, die trainiert wird, für Sätze von ungefähr 30 Reepen. Und die Veränderung in Muskelgröße über acht, zwölf, 16 Wochen ist statistisch unvergleichbar.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Das bedeutet, wenn ich die Gruppen de-label, und du weißt nicht, welcher ist welcher, kannst du mir nicht sagen, wer mit höheren oder niedrigeren Reepern trainiert hat. Für Muskelgröße ist es ungefähr das gleiche.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Ein Gewicht, das für fünf Reepen herausfordernd ist, ist viel schwerer als ein Gewicht, das für 30 Reepen herausfordernd ist.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Sie haben beide richtige Antworten, keine falschen Antworten.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Solange sie nicht so klein sind, dass du auf Rekord 45 bist und sagst, ich könnte das für immer machen. Oder sie sind nicht so enorm, dass du sagst, ich kann nicht mal zwei Rekorde machen. Irgendwas zwischen rund fünf und rund 30 Rekorden. Herausforderung ist wirklich, wirklich gut.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Das Antworten hängt davon ab, wie viel du vorher gemacht hast. Aber wenn du neu in den Gym bist, Zwei Sessionen pro Woche mit zwei bis drei Sessionen pro Session für deine Biceps. ist etwas, was Monate und Monate und Monate lang konsistenter Erfolg verursachen wird. Kann man mehr machen? Ja. Muss man als Beginner das tun? Nein.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Endlich, als eine bessere Person, muss man mehr Sätze machen und vielleicht mehr Sessionen, um konsistente bessere Ergebnisse zu erhalten? Ja. Aber für Beginner, die nicht so viel in der Gymnasie waren, oder überhaupt nicht, ist die minimale effektive Dose sehr klein. Das ist der Grund, warum ich Dinge sage, wie wenn du für 20 Minuten, zweimal die Woche trainierst, wirst du gute Gewinne bekommen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Ja. Einmal pro Woche Training gibt gute Ergebnisse. Aber zweimal pro Woche Training für das gleiche Muskel gibt deutlich bessere Ergebnisse. Training 3x pro Woche vs. 2x, Training 4x pro Woche vs. 3x, Training 5x pro Woche vs. 4x ist eine deeskalierende Anzahl von beeindruckenden Unterschieden. Also 1x pro Woche funktioniert, es bekommt deine Ergebnisse.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
2x pro Woche bekommt du die Ergebnisse 1,5x, also viel besser, besser. Drei Mal pro Woche ist noch ein bisschen mehr Resultat, noch bemerkenswert. Vier Mal pro Woche, du musst ein bisschen trainieren, um die Unterschiede zwischen drei und vier zu bemerken. Vier und fünf sind kontextuell und nuanced und ich kann dir nicht sagen, dass fünf Tage pro Woche kategorisch besser ist als vier.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
So periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want. Hypertrophy training is a type of training. It's just muscle growth training. It's like a fancy fucking science word for... Just getting more jacked, putting on muscle. That's the technical definition of hypertrophy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Es gibt einige Dinge, die ich über deinen Plan und alles andere wissen muss, um diese Conclusion zu machen. Ich möchte also zweimal pro Muskelgruppe trainieren? Zweimal ist unser Minimum. Zwei- bis viermal pro Woche ist, wie ich es sage, die beste overall Recommendation. Per Muskelgruppe.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und wenn du alle deine Muskeln zusammen trainierst, gleichzeitig ein ganzes Körper-Workout, was die meisten Menschen im Bereich von, ich bin müde und kann nicht viel trainieren, das wären all die großen Muskeln deines Körpers in der gleichen Session. Zwei- oder drei- oder viermal pro Woche.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Ja, also der primäre Stimulus für Muskelgröße ist, dass es molekulare Maschinen in deinen Muskeln gibt, in deinen Muskelzellen, und sie sind designt, um die Präsenz von Tension zu entdecken. Und wenn deine Muskeln Tension generieren, gehen die molekularen Detektor-Maschinen, oh, wir haben hier Tension.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und sie beginnen, anderen Teilen der Zellen zu sagen, hey, lasst uns diese Muskelgröße-Dinge anfangen. Fangen. Nicht passieren. Fangen. Es ist ein Stimulus der Muskelgröße. Es gibt ein paar andere Mechanismen, die vielleicht, oder wahrscheinlich, einen Effekt haben. Und ein paar davon sind Metaboliten-Sequestration, was eine sehr faszinierende Weise ist, zu sagen, der Burn.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Du weißt am Ende, dass du so, ah, die Metaboliten, die Biprodukte des Trainings, wenn sie zu hohen Niveaus akkumulieren, es wurde in vielen Tier- und ein paar Menschen-Studien gezeigt, dass sie mechanisch auch die molekulare Maschine, die Muskeln für dich wächst, später sagen können. um, hey, den Muskelgrossprozess zu bekommen. Ein weiterer ist der Pump.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Also, du weißt, du machst ein paar Arten von Biceps, du denkst, oh mein Gott, was ist hier los? Baby, flashe es an eine Frau, sie rennt weg, wie normal. Und die echte Zellschmerzung selbst könnte eine kausale mechanistische Rolle spielen, um mehr Muskelgross zu generieren.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Aber wir wissen, dass es wahrscheinlich mindestens 80 Prozent der Muskelgross, die jemand sehen wird, ist, weil diese Rezeptoren für Tension sind. Muskelgross As soon as you leave the gym is a negative because the gym is catabolic. It breaks down your muscle. Actually training breaks down more muscle than it builds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
However, as you go home and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day, And you're resting when the food's coming in several hours after training begins. If you measure muscle growth consistently, which is really difficult to do, they don't do it super often. You have to keep people in the laboratory.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
You have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff. Every couple of hours they measure, the amount of muscle growth that's going on in the biceps goes up and up and up and up. And it usually peaks about... Aber es ist eine sehr schnelle Kurve. Und du wächst Muskel an jedem einzelnen Punkt in dieser Kurve.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
And when you train for hypertrophy, you can do it kind of like by feel and more or less at random. And you'll get pretty good results in most cases. But to get your best results, you want that training to be periodized. Periodization is the scientific approach to how to organize your training to get sort of roughly three things. Some of these are a bit more for athletes and not regular people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Also wenn du sagst, ist es, während ich schlafe, ist es, während ich esse, ist es, während ich aufstehe? Die Antwort ist all diese. Außer es ist nicht im Gym. Du wächst nicht Muskel im Gym. Du gibst dir ein Signal, um Muskel im Gym zu wachsen. Und was du außerhalb des Gyms machst, ist wichtig. Also trainieren einige Leute wirklich hart. They don't eat right. They don't eat enough protein.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Their sleep is total, insert bad word here, and their stress levels are just totally psychotic. They train hard. And then week after week after week, they're like, I'm not seeing any results. Well, the results are actually created. Wenn man aufsteht, wenn man schläft, wenn man nützliche Füße isst. Sie werden im Workout stimuliert. Aber das ist nur Phase 1.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Phase 2, der echte Wachstum, passiert außerhalb des Gym. Und es passiert nicht an einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt. Wie ein magischer Fenster von zwei Stunden nach dem Gym. Das ist, als der Wachstum stattfindet. Das ist eigentlich, als es anfängt zu erhöhen. Es ist vier Tage später. Wenn du zweimal die Woche trainierst, trainierst du am Montag.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Du wächst viel Muskel am Montagabend, am Dienstag und am Dienstag zurück, bis zum Ende des Dienstags. Du wächst nicht wirklich viel mehr Muskel. Du gehst wieder zum Gym am Dienstag, schaffst es wieder hart, schaffst die Kurve, am Sonntag bist du völlig entspannt. Am Sonntag wächst du keine Muskeln. Dein Körper ist wirklich auf dem Weg zur Erlösung.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und am Montag bist du frisch wie ein Kuchen und bist bereit, wieder drauf zu gehen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Teil eins ist, dass innerhalb von zwei Wochen, nachdem man es nicht trainiert, die erste Reduktion in Muskeln, die durch moderne Maschinen entdeckbar ist, stattfindet. Also, wenn du für zwei Wochen nicht leuchten kannst und wir dich in einen MRI-Scan oder einen DEXA-Scanner setzen, sagen wir, eine Woche und eine halbe, dass du nicht leuchten kannst. Ich kann es nicht erkennen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
You're not really losing any muscle yet. You're just going insane. And so me personally, I'm like addicted to lifting. So if I don't lift for a week, I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, all my muscle is gone. There is some kind of intuitive truth to that. Because when you don't stress your muscles, they, when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little bit.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
So when you're not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller, like they've lost weight, but it's really just all water that they lost. You do one gym session thinking like, oh my God, my biceps are gone a week and a half later. You do one session at the end of that, you flex and you're like, oh my God, I'm the biggest I've ever been.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
I was just delusional that whole time because that stuff comes back super quick. Nach etwa zwei Wochen Lüftung verlieren wir Muskeln, aber das passiert sehr, sehr langsam und dauert Wochen und Wochen und Wochen und Wochen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Nach ein paar Monaten Lüftung wirst du auf deinen Beinen deutlich kleiner sehen, aber wahrscheinlich nicht so klein, wie als du angefangen hast, weil deine Muskeln eine gewisse Erinnerung haben, wenn wir das so nennen können. Ist das wahr? Sehr wahr. Oh, ja.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und so oft, wenn du ein initiales Maß an Muskeln erhältst, besonders wenn du es seit Jahren hattest, geht es einfach nie wieder in die gleiche Größe wie als du angefangen hast. Es wird einfach immer größer, bis du in deinen Achtzigern reist oder so etwas. Das gesagt, ja, du wirst Reduktionen in Größe bemerken. Also zwei Wochen ist die direkte Antwort da.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Get the best results that you can. peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer, and minimize injury risk. And taking all the science that we know, that plan that you've made because you did it in an evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan. So that's how those two concepts relate to each other.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Und es wird Wochen und Wochen und Monate und Monate dauern. Aber hier ist Teil zwei. Und das ist großartige News. Wegen dieser Muskel-Memory-Situation. Je länger es dich dauerte, die Muskeln zu erlangen, Es wird euch eine Größe von einem Faktor von 10 oder weniger dauern, um es zurückzubekommen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Wenn ihr schon mehr gejagt habt, wenn ihr größere Muskeln habt, kommen sie zurück zu ihrer alten Größe. Wenn es dauerte, wenn ihr für acht Monate geübt habt, habt ihr einen größeren Bicep und habt für drei Monate geübt. Und es sieht ungefähr so aus, als wenn ihr begonnen hättet. Wenn du wirklich vorsichtig bist, wird es ein bisschen größer, aber wirklich ist es nur zurück zu square one.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Die meisten Leute denken, oh mein Gott. Noch acht Monate, um wieder da zu sein, wo ich angefangen habe. Vergiss das Gym. Die Wahrheit ist, dass nach ungefähr einem Monat, vielleicht so wenig wie drei Wochen, du die gleiche Größe Biceps hast, die du in deinem Peak hattest.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Weil der Grad, zu dem dein Tissue wächst, wenn es schon eine bestimmte Größe war, besonders wenn es deutlich größer war als normal, und du hattest das für ein paar Monate und ein paar Jahre, es kommt zurück. in einer Art und Weise, die so schnell ist, wenn du es selbst erfährst, ist es so, dass du nicht glaubst, dass es dir passiert.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
Oh yeah, all the time. Retraining studies, detraining, retraining. Oh yeah, they've done studies where they purposefully lift for a while and they stop lifting for a long time and they see how long it takes to get back.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
There's one study I'm familiar with offhand that there's a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks and there's another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks and then took two weeks completely off in the middle and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later. Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
And so we were like, okay, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off. Could we say that they purposefully dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing? Uh-huh. Yeah, your body goes right back into regaining old lost muscle so rapidly that this is such great news. Because look, let's say you lifted consistently most of the year. Holiday season comes up, winter holidays.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
You're not going to the gym as much, maybe not at all. Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself, you look a little smaller, kind of deflated, and you're like, oh my God, I'm going to have to restart all this from scratch. Nope. Two weeks later, you're in the best shape of your life again.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel
If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you're in the best shape of your life again. That's how rapidly it comes back. So it's really good news for anyone who hasn't been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it. Go back, get consistent again. You're just going to skyrocket.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Guy, you don't do anything except shoot steroids, play PlayStation, and train with weights. Thank God for your supplement contract. There was somebody on social media that she opened up about her journey. This bodybuilder is not even competitive. He's just a guy who lifts weights. He's a personal trainer. You said something like, you failed at life if you needed the Ozempic.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
My friend, if we start listing off my wife's accomplishments, it's going to be a 10 to 0 against you. You're nothing to her. She had every bit more willpower. Whatever it is you got good at, she could recreationally get good at faster than you, better than you, just as a joke, and then quit, and then come back and do it again. But because you have no idea what it's like to want food that much,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You're out of touch. For me, it became very easy to connect with my wife on food drive. After I had dieted down to a body fat that was competitive bodybuilding appropriate enough times, you feel what it's like to be obsessed. All you're thinking about is food. All you're thinking about. Food tastes good to a level of you're like, am I eating drugs? What the hell is going on?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you're in pain physically from the expansion of your abdominal tract. And you're still eating and your eyes are this wide, like a hungry, ravenous dog who like it is tortured and not allowed to eat for a long time. That's how a lot of people live in the world. And again, there's two variables that come into determining how fat you are. Primarily one is food noise. One is conscientiousness.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So if we just end the food noise, some people will still be overweight, even if they're auto-Zenpa because they're like, ah, whatever, just Reese's cups. Enough Reese's cups can defeat any amount of pharmacology so far. For those people, all those discussions about like, hey, you should be more diligent, you should be planning, yeah, they're all still valid.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But if we can just remove one impediment, amazing. People come at this from a morality, you have to earn your keep. Now, in sport competition, hell yeah, it's cheating. Now, in bodybuilding competition, they don't test for drugs at all. It's not cheating at all. But people take this morality, this cheating stuff, and they put it out in the real world.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Many of them do. Some of them don't. You also hear a total calorie expenditure throughout the week is so preposterous. Sometimes cyclists have trouble keeping up their weight. So you see all the whole range.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But if there is a drug that solves a very big problem for you that makes you better and you're purporting to be a drug-free federation, yes, you should be testing for it and it should be a banned substance.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Thank you so much for having me on. If you want to ever have a round two, just let me know.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So that's probably my best answer for that. It's just insanely unrealistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing. The myth of accidental muscle. Yes. People say more money, more problems. First of all, I've met various philosophical grounds. I think that's absurd, but you don't accidentally become ultra wealthy. And by God, I wish you the best if that happens to you.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'll cry a tear for you. But in much the same way, almost nobody accidentally becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are starting to become apparent. Probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is opportunity cost, things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But the way the science of resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and the longevity benefits and the quality of life benefits, the amount of time you need to be training per week is measured in the one to three hour range with three being like, you're really full sending it one to three hours per week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you went on chat GPT and did like a time use question, I mean like, can you list all of the things that typical American does for X number hours a week? Read down the list, top 100 time use cases. You may find that one to three hours a week is somewhere in like the 50 or 60 rank and There's so many things people do that are way more than that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Social media consumption, television watching, and the list goes on. There are dozens of things you do that take way more time. And so if you really fully invest yourself, like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible, it's going to take some time. It could take eight hours a week, which is still like, well, it's not forever.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
People will jog for 40 minutes every morning and think nothing of it. And then when you present to them the idea of resistance training, they're like, well, now that's going to take some time. Well, yes, actually it does not take nearly as much time because the intensity of the effort is so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to be very pulsatile with it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's not even something you have to do every day. As a matter of fact, people get incredible benefits. Probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make is to train for roughly half an hour, two times a week, Monday and Thursday. If you do it properly, it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits just across the board.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so for most people, the consideration that they can begin to do this excessively, it's just not something realistic until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby. If you are watching Formula One for 30 minutes a day every other day on your phone, you're realistic considerations of this is taking up too much of your time kind of out the window.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now, if you start canceling podcast guests because you're following the circuit around the world and staying in five-star hotels and booking the hyper rich guy suite for all the races, someone could say, well, you're really into this. You're like, no nonsense. It's only costing me 3 million a year.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So then yes, but it's obvious when you're going to be so involved, you don't just walk into that sort of thing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I like to use the term resistance training. It's the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yes. So you can get some benefits from very submaximal efforts. But resistance training is based on applying high forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes you better. And so it's kind of when you get into that world, that's what's going to happen. If you're trying to be a special operator, eventually a Navy SEAL type of person, the sound of gunfire freaks you out.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You're kind of in the wrong place. We get almost all the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads, but very close to muscular failure, which people have described as unpleasant. A burn in the muscle, a lot of pain, the weights slow down, so it takes a lot of psychological effort to keep going.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There is not really an equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles. Getting to a pace where zone two, you can breathe, you can talk a little bit still, that's not weight training. But precisely because weight training is so intensive,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You need lots of recovery time between sessions, and you can do lots of disruption and damage in each session, and also the total yield and how much it changes your physiology is very high for each session, and actually per unit time. And that means if you're not working super hard per any one unit time, you're going to need a lot of work. That's endurance training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you're working insanely hard per unit time, you won't need a lot of work, nor can you recover from that much work. Which is why the top end is 8 or 10 hours or something for even professional bodybuilders of time spent in the gym every week. But for people that just want the basic benefits, yeah, we're talking about an hour or two hours a week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And that's really all you need if you're pushing sufficiently hard. That's both all you need and realistically, you can recover from more if you make time in your schedule and really prioritize recovery.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I would say there are two other things that can be put into that equation. One is the physical forces are just much higher in magnitude. You're going to be putting a lot of tension through your connective tissues and through your muscles when you're resistance training than you are when you're doing bicycle work, for example.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so with high absolute forces, the proximate damage and disruption to the body is graded exponentially and not linearly. It's like if a wiffle ball flies past you, you might not even hear it. If a 50 caliber bullet flies past you, it's going to tear parts of you off and it's never even touched you. Very, very different amount of damage from much, much higher forces.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And the other one is some combination of neural and psychological drive. The kind of drive it requires to be good at endurance, at least the base building part, the aerobic base work that you do, is kind of being in a state of calm equanimity. You get your flow going, you get your music going, you get your breathing going, you look at the road ahead of you, and you can just crank.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But in lifting, you have to turn up the juice to really feel the maximum situation. Another quick analogy offhand is if you are a trillionaire like I am, and you have a fleet of Cessna private aircraft at your beck and call. I never fly the same plane twice. I always crash the thing. You fly a Cessna, you can fly it for some time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It requires a decent amount of maintenance, but decent amount of maintenance and it'll fly for a long time. It's just never getting up to velocities that are really crazy. You take an SR-71 Blackbird out for a spin at Mach 3, you have to do 10 times the number of maintenance hours per flight hour on that thing or something to that magnitude.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because at Mach 3, what's happening to the plane is just running through subsequent brick walls. That's what the sound barrier is like. Three times faster than the sound barrier, you're just rattling that thing into dust. That's what you're trying to do to it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
When you're pushing your body really hard and the weights are slowing down and there's sets of 5 or sets of 8 or sets of 10, your body's very close to its limits. So both your faster twitch muscle fibers, which are required, they take way more damage. They're also not as well proliferated with blood supply and they heal slower.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
and the amount of absolute force is higher and the amount of neural drive it takes, you can hop on a bike for an hour at zone two every day. And afterwards, people are like, are you tired? And you're like, a little bit. I kind of feel like also a little bit refreshed in a sense. You don't really feel refreshed after like grinding the leg press for five sets of 15.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You feel like someone beat the crap out of you and you don't owe anyone money. What the hell is going on? So that intensity, that absolute intensity of lifting and high relative intensity, that's what tends to make the big, big fatigue cost.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm glad you brought up the peripheral. One of the big misconceptions is that there's muscular fatigue, connective tissue, systemic fatigue, blood vessels, and everything still after heart has to pump. But then people just say, oh, and then the central nervous system. Well, the peripheral nervous system is a thing too, and it also takes substantial amount of fatigue.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I would just say the nervous system takes fatigue. And it takes fatigue in the same way you would expect any system that's pushed to its limits to take. various components of it experience wear and tear, various substrates deplete and need to be repleted. So I can bring up two examples.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
In the axon of any single given nerve, you have a balance of electrolytes inside and outside, which allows the proliferation of the electrical signal. You run that system long and hard enough, and it starts to get out of whack to where you try to get another impulse going, and it's like, ugh. So it needs to do a lot of pumping,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
to take what's supposed to be inside the cell that's now outside the cell to get back in there to a level of concentration that would be fully recovered. Now, typically that happens quickly, but if you run that system a lot, there are various points at which some of the structures that are supposed to do that, they're also proteins.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
you use them enough and they start to kind of break a little bit and you need to produce more proteins to replace the channels themselves that do that pumping back and forth. And so that typically protein construction is measured on the order of minutes, hours, and days, not seconds. So that you could imagine it as like a transatlantic cable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You throw enough current through a cable and the fish nibble at the cable enough, you need to start replacing the cable. Now, if you're really, really using the crap out of that cable, yeah, it's going to like undergo some not so great things. And then closer to neuron to neuron junctions or the neuromuscular junction between the neuron and the muscle itself,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You have vesicles of neurotransmitter. You pump enough of those in, you get the cool stuff of communication. You can run low on neurotransmitter. And then like the electrical signal arrives and neurotransmitter is like, sorry, not enough of us to do anything. And so you experience fatigue expressed as weakness.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you need time to reconstruct a lot of those neurotransmitters, place them into vesicles. have those vesicles translocate to the synaptic cleft, and then like sit there and get ready. And that is a process that typically happens rapidly, but if you really exhaust it, can happen over some time. A really austere illustration of that is, and I've never done this, I've just heard about it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I will take credit for doing many other drugs, but I've never tried ecstasy. But if you clear enough of that neurotransmitter, you don't feel the same the next day. You feel different. And it takes a day or two to get back up to those levels. Similar types of mechanisms are at work when you are going to very close to true failure on, let's say, a squat or a leg press.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I mean, you're cooking your muscles, but every single capacity of the nervous system to say push, push, push is at maximum capacity. And so you end up doing quite a bit of homeostatic disruption all the way along the axon, all the way through the cell body, and in the synaptic cleft, neurotransmitters getting everywhere, gunk building up.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's going to take some time to fix, which is why we see typically that people don't regain their prior strength after fatiguing in resistance exercise for, depending on how hard you go, anywhere from several hours to several days.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so if you have really, really hard workouts, it just might take several days for you to be able to have a really, really hard workout again for that same muscle group.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Luckily, because a lot of this is peripheral nervous system-based and local musculature-based, if you train the living crap out of your chest one day and your triceps, you can train back and biceps, which have nothing much to do with those movements, pretty robustly the next day. Much of the fatigue is local. It's not all local.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The central nervous system – brain and spinal cord, specifically the brain – has a variety of mechanisms by which it controls your central fatigue. I remember I think Tim Noakes was a big proponent of the central governor model, though in the explicit terms which he described, it might not be the case or somewhat close. There's absolutely central governing going on.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And when your body can tell through a variety of mechanisms that, like, pretty messed up here, it's going to pull back on how hard you can do anything. And some of those neural structures might even be operating at full bore, but they're just degraded enough to where full capacity isn't full capacity anymore. And so in all those variety of ways and many others...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
your body, after accumulating a certain amount of fatigue, will need to back off. And if you think you can train ultra hard for the same muscles twice a day every day, you are welcome to try it. In medical supervised context, you won't last.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So it's really good that we have breaks planned in, but it's also really cool because weight training is one of those things where you get a dose of it, and for days after, under the hood, it's upgrading your body. and your nervous system, and your muscles, and your tendons.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So it's really neat that you can do 20 to 30 minutes of intense physical activity and resistance training, and then for days later be experiencing the actual accrued benefits. Not a lot of things in life like that. It's kind of like getting a college degree for which you pay money, and then earning money with it years later. Ostensibly, anyway, I've never earned any money or had a college degree.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But that's kind of how it works. And you have to understand that when you're entering the gym, if you're training properly, you are asking a lot of your physiology. You are pushing it to its limits. If you're not, you're not using your time best and you're not getting the best outcomes because a lot of the absolute best results come from pushing very, very hard.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Not necessarily to limits, but you have to test the limits.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
from what i understand you have a history of boxing is that correct if you just shadow box it's nice it helps but going hard rounds against multiple fresh opponents even if you're not like collapsing on the floor after you know that like you're looking at the clock and you're like if you don't push it to that level at some point you're not fight ready
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So in order to be your best boxing version, every now and again, you have to push it to discomfort, grotesque discomfort. Same with the body. It's nice that you get to do that every now and again, and then you collect the benefits afterwards.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You weren't here for F1? No. Loud noises scare me, so I would stay away from that sort of thing. I'm kidding. It sounds awesome. I've never actually been to a Formula race in real life, and my videographer and business partner on YouTube, huge Formula One fan. He has the app and everything, live streams all the races and stuff. Are you big into that sort of thing?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Plenty of people thought... That's how it works. Mike Menser did that, only in a more extreme version than even Dorian did. Lots of Menser acolytes did it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's not the most efficient or the most effective way to train, but it is quite effective because if you go very close to failure with very heavy loads, all of the subcomponents of your musculature, your motor units, which is the motor neuron and all of the cells that it activates, They'll get recruited and they will be asked to work to their limits.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
They'll take on a great deal of damage and disruption. They'll sense a ton of tension and they'll produce great results for you. The other thing is that the relationship between both intensity and volume of how much you do work in the gym, especially volume, is curvilinear and hyperbolic. So it looks like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if people are just listening to this, it means if you do one all-out heart set per muscle group per week, which is not what Dorian did. He did roughly 14 of those per week per muscle group.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
you get maybe something like 30% of what you could have gotten with five sets because your body has very good sensing mechanisms for tension and metabolites and all these other things that cause muscle growth. And when it detects that you're pushing on the pedal, it'll give you a real good wallop of result.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
you keep pushing on the same pedal over and over, and the systems are greatly desensitized to giving you more muscle growth. The biggest reason that is is probably because the human body is attuned and evolved almost entirely in hundreds of millions of years before we were even human of what is in the modern context called food insecurity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so in order to make a real good case for allocating that much to muscle growth, you're going to have to have a real distinct signal to ask your body to put more and more into that process. So it kind of auto caps itself. If you are myostatin deficient, then actually just existing, you just grow muscle all the time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So it seems to be that for a variety of reasons, including that one, that if you do one set close to failure, you get a lot of gains. You do three sets close to failure, you get substantially more gains, but not three times as many gains. You do five sets close to failure and you do just a little bit better than three.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You do seven or eight sets close to failure in one workout, and it's statistically undifferentiable from five. So that's kind of how that chart looks. So Dorian, from what I understand, did roughly 14 sets per week per muscle group-ish. And that gets into that territory of a very robust signal of growth to the muscle. It's not the highest signal of growth.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you decided not to train your legs very hard or your back very hard, and the amount of systemic fatigue that's imparted to you week by week is much lower, because fatigue isn't just local, it spills over into everything else, you could push your arms, shoulders, and chest not to 14 or 15 or 20 sets per week, but in many cases 25-30.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
30, 35 sets per week and experience very meaningful growth enhancements that you would never have seen only ever training those 15 sets a week. But 15 sets a week might bring you to 70 or 85% of what all of those muscles could eventually have hypertrophied if you only ever specialized in them.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's really cool. Yeah. I make a lot of race car analogies when it comes to athletics and stuff. So if I make them here, you can correct me and say, I'm using them wrong.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so Dorian was insanely jacked, but he was jacked all over and probably could have in retrospect benefited from more specialization phases on various weak points that he had. His back was startling. His arms were excellent. Now, by immortal standards, they were the biggest arms you've ever seen in your life.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
By competitive bodybuilders of his era standards, relative to the rest of his physique, he could have had bigger arms, could have bigger shoulders. And so he could have poured much more volume into those muscle groups and lessened everything else.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But Dorian seemed to have an all-around approach, which up until about a year ago, so did I. And so I had never looked very aesthetic, but boy, were my legs super big because they could just eat up the growth all the time. So if you want to do not a ton of volume for any one muscle...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you work really hard and bring yourself very close to failure, you can already do super, super well just with that alone. If you get a really good cook, someone who really knows how to make food, and you give them an hour in the kitchen with a variety of menu items versus three hours, within an hour, they can wow you with what you're eating.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Within three, they can wow you more, but it's not three times more. Matrix-related orgasmic brownie or whatever. They ain't gonna make that. There's gonna take them a lot longer than three hours. They can make a difference, but probably only people who are very culinarily attuned can tell.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If someone makes me chicken fingers, gourmet chicken fingers, if there's even such a thing, I'm sure Austin has something like that. An hour versus three, to me, it all tastes same, same. It's amazing. To someone really, really with a refined palate, they'll be able to tell, but they can't lie to you and say, look, this three-hour chicken finger, this is just categories above the one-hour one.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So in a lot of processes in general, and luckily in the human body, getting some of the way to your body's maximum ability to recover actually brings you most of the way as far as results. And that's why Dorian could do what he did.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's not 100% clear exactly what Dorian did or if he even did everything exactly as it was written on paper all the time. You see his training videos. You don't always see just one set. He would also have this thing like a warmup set that for him was a warmup, but for most people would absolutely be a work set. So it may be more like two or three equivalents of a working set per exercise.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Right. Yes. So according to his categorization, the only work set was the one that was absolutely to true muscular failure, sometimes with forced repetitions, which you would also have to integrate because forced reps is when someone helps you lift the rest of the weight, or if you do a drop set, you use less weight right after you went to failure. We shouldn't count that as just one set.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It wouldn't be the most correct way to think about it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Almost all of the literature that has found out that if you don't systemically fatigue the whole body too much, Any given muscle or several muscles you can push into the 30, 40, 50 plus set range per week. Almost every single study done to elucidate that understanding was done with muscular failure studies. True failure.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Truer failure than you'll see in the gym because these people are training in laboratory conditions with master students screaming at them to keep going. Most of us have never trained that hard consistently. So people can still recover.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now, these are undergraduates that are recreationally trained typically, so they can neither do a lot of damage, nor are they impeded by age and prior injury and all this other thing. So I would say that whatever amount of sets you have to do to get a certain amount of whatever amount of growth you want. You can get there in a few different ways.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You can get there with, let's say, 30 sets that are four reps shy of failure. You can get there with 22 sets that are one or two reps shy of failure. And you can get there with 20 sets that are all the way to absolute muscular failure. So if you are really training not so super hard for reps in reserve, you'll have to do substantially more sets to see the same hypertrophy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But study after study after study illustrates that when you're getting one or two reps away from failure, it is often statistically undifferentiable on raw growth than going all the way to failure. However, the fatigue of true failure training, probably mostly because of that nervous system component, is exponentially higher.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so as far as an efficiency and long-term sustainability strategy, training all the way to muscular failure every session as a matter of principle, probably on the margin suboptimal, and you should probably, most of your sessions should be one or two reps in reserve.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you're doing dumbbell presses, you finish your last rep and you're like, gone to my head, I could do one or two more, but that's it. Most times it's probably best to stop at that point. Because what you're getting if you go north of that is a 10 to 1 fatigue to stimulus ratio, whereas everything before was like 1 to 1, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 5 to 1, and all of a sudden it's 10 to 1.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Where'd you grow up? Moscow, Russia before that. And I do have memories of it and all that stuff. And then the metropolitan Detroit area after that all the way until college. So a place called Oak Park, Michigan, which you can find on a map and that's about it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's a lot of fatigue cost to pay for when in the literature chronically ends up being either tiny, tiny bit better or not better at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I would never know. All sorts of things. I just like to aim for the general at that point. Might as well have a cool story. But yeah, the training to failure, the vast proportion of people that really propose that training to failure is somehow special for results. They didn't reason their way into that. They emoted their way into that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Training to failure is something the 13 to 19-year-old you would have really found a lot of spirit energy in, as I like to say. It's adult male putting on his hat of, I'm a mountain goat.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
and i run into that's what i do i saw an adorable video of some folks that own a few goats and a few dogs their pit bull is like not hiding but sitting under this like little thing and there's like a teenage goat that's looking at him and he jumps up on his hind legs and tries to like hit him in the head and the pit bull backs up and he's like, and the goat just tries to do that again.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
He's just trying to get it on. Like he just wants to hit stuff. That's all he wants. And so when you're a young male, when you are prone to wanting success for yourself, you're the type of sort of type A personality that wants to look back on their life
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you had to roll the dice and say, the reason you weren't optimally successful is that you work too hard, they'd be like, ah, sweet, whatever. That's kind of cool. But if they saw the dice roll and say, well, the reason you weren't optimally successful in life is because you didn't work hard enough, they would not live with themselves.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Those kinds of folks generally tend to go to muscular failure for just that spirit energy. It feels right, damn it. And it feels good. And it's purifying almost at an existential level to be able to have given something your all. in the face of challenge, in the face of injury risk, in the face of grotesque pain. And you know this from sport experience.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
When you're really, really tired, your whole existence is screaming at you to stop. Ignoring those things and going all the way until you know you've pushed it as far as your body can go, there's something very magical there for the soul. For results in the gym, there's not much magical there. You have to get close to it. You just don't have to go all the way.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I have a whole pack bounce to make you more intimidated.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I'll describe to you what week one could look like. And then I'll tell you how to scale that afterwards. It's not just the same every single week. So what you want to do is if you're training twice a week, let's call it Monday and Thursday for simplicity, you do want some symmetry.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Were you into grappling at the time? I had wrestled in high school and then I just wasn't very good at it. And I just absolutely was not dedicated to it for a few reasons, which are sort of boring. But I got into lifting hardcore towards the middle and end of high school. And then by the time I was in college, I was gearing up to start competing in powerlifting.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So you don't want a situation in which you train with weights Monday, Tuesday, and then you take the rest of the week to do other stuff. If you only train twice a week, you want it to be roughly evenly spread. So Monday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, that sort of thing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And because your muscles don't take usually a whole week to recover, but if you push them hard, maybe at most half a week, you can train every major muscle group of your body in every single session that you do. So both Monday and Thursday, we'll have every major muscle group being trained. Routines that have the muscle group separated are called split routines. Chest one day, back the next.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
mostly pro bodybuilders are the only ones that benefit from that sort of thing. And there's a lot of nuance about how to execute that sort of thing. So whole body training is probably best for almost everyone who is trying to get the health benefits, longevity benefits, the aesthetic benefits, and so on and so forth.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The next thing you want to do is you want to conserve time, but you want a high degree of effect. And that's going to impose some recommendations on us that do both of those things. One recommendation is to choose lifts, to choose exercises that involve two components. One is large muscle masses.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So you're not going to be doing a lot of forearm curls or tibialis anterior calf raises, where the muscle you're training is as much muscle as your pinky finger, and that's about it. You're going to be training muscles like the quadriceps, the glutes, the hamstrings, the musculature of the back, the chest, the shoulders, the arms, etc.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And choosing exercises that train those muscles, preferably not just one muscle at a time. So then we're using muscles very efficiently because we're pushing multiple muscles to their limits in one exercise.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
This is generally going to be compound movements, multi-joint movements, things like pull-ups, pull-downs, barbell and dumbbell bent-over rows that, for the back at least, engage the forearm flexion muscles, the biceps, etc. They engage actually the muscles of the forearm themselves through your grip.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
they engage the posterior aspect of your deltoids the rear delts they engage almost every muscle in the back all at the same time now you do one set of bicep curls but i do one set of underhand pull-ups i got my biceps checked off and i got three other muscles checked off you just have one
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
One of my absolute grotesque pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities training their regular clients, a housewife who's 55, and having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time. I'm like, oh my God, is that one made of time? And also, is there some kind of physique show, which the judges said she needs bigger rear delts, but nothing else?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's the only reason you should be doing that nine times out of 10. So compound movements, close grip bench presses, pushups, overhead presses, upright row, squats, deadlifts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are the kind of movements that train multiple muscles at the same time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Thus, they are insanely time efficient because you do a few exercises and you're like, holy crap, that's all of my upper body. If you do some kind of rowing machine,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
you do some kind of machine or barbell or dumbbell that's a close grip press, you do some kind of upright row situation, then you've technically trained every single muscle in your upper body to a substantial extent because every single exercise trains three or four muscles at a time. So those are the kind of movements we're going to be leaning into the most. What about for the lower body?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so I actually started the Michigan Powerlifting Club. We started kind of a team and we went to meets and all that stuff. So I was a competitive power lifter in my undergraduate years.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Besides a deadlift and a squat? Various stiff like a deadlift or good morning, RDL is the same category of movement. That trains your entire back, specifically your spinal erector musculature, which is insanely important for healthy aging. I could talk about that ad nauseum. And... Then it trains your glutes and it trains your hamstrings and it trains your sartorius and parts of your adductors.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And it actually trains your calves too. Holy crap, that's one exercise. You integrate some kind of lunging pattern into that or some kind of squatting pattern, be it a hack squat, leg press, barbell squat, you name it. And all of a sudden you've run out of muscles to train in your lower body because everything has been done to a high degree of diligence. Again, compound movements.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Again, I see 45-year-old financial advisors who don't have a lot of time. They have family obligations. They have work obligations. They have other hobbies. And they're doing like leg extensions in the gym. I'm always like, man, I hope that guy's hurt and has a good reason to be doing those.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because if he's not squatting or lunging or doing leg presses or something, he's just using up time in the gym, training one thing at a time for no good reason at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Starting out with low weight. There is no movement the human body can do which unloaded and not pushing the muscles and tendons to their extreme has any higher risk probability than any other movement. So you can start with a deadlift or a squat that's body weight or less. You can brace your arms on a Smith machine and unload yourself while you squat. That may be where you have to start.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You take multiple sets like that that are very submaximal. Ideally, you're there with a personal trainer. If not, you can just go to YouTube and type in the name of your exercise and it'll pop up. We have a huge library for free on YouTube. Actually, the RP hypertrophy app, which is one of our apps in our app suite, every exercise you'll ever see in there has a video demonstration one click away.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So you look at that. Ideally, you would have a personal trainer because live communication about how to exercise is irreplaceable. Because on a video, we're assuming that your assessment of what that is is your assessment of what you're doing, which is very difficult. Oh my God, you walk into a gym and they're like, I'm squatting. You're like, that's not a squat.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I don't know what the hell someone told you or what video you're looking at. That ain't it. If you have a personal trainer, they can be like, ooh, that's really good, but I want you to move your hips back more. I want you to move down more, so on and so forth. But basically, the first time you're ever with someone in a session,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
All you do is you take them through those movement patterns, fine-tune their technique with lots of encouragement, and you're not seeking perfection, you're just seeking basic competency. Get your heels on the ground, get you squatting all the way down, get your back nice and straight. Listen, that's all we want.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you'll do three or four of those, what are really warm-up sets, and you'll just kick them out of the gym. Three or four warm-up sets per exercise. It's a teaching session. They never even lifted heavy. They never pushed to failure. But because they're so unaccustomed to lifting, they'll get sore. And it's enough tension and disruption that they will grow muscle.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The next time they come in, you work them through a different series of movements. Let's call it Monday-Thursday movements. The next week, they come in, and you do the same workout, except maybe that last set of every movement, after a few technique-oriented sets. Ask them to go for slightly more repetitions, maybe not five, but now ten.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Or you put a little bit of weight on the bar, something that gets them like, ooh, okay, I feel it, this is a challenge. And then over time, slowly every week, you increase the weight a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more until several weeks later, their technique looks real good, which most people can learn really good techniques. It's not that complicated in a few weeks.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And now they're like kind of struggling with their weights. We're finally up to a weight and rep combination that's challenging them physiologically every set, not just neurologically for how to do the technique.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So squat plus bench plus deadlift equals total. And the person with the biggest total for their weight class or absolute or by formula wins the whole thing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That three or four week sort of entry period is amazing because it takes the probability of injury and just almost completely eliminates it because you're not just going in there and seeing how strong you are on the first day, which believe it or not, a lot of people are inclined to do profoundly stupid as reserved for like high school or junior high kids.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Whatever, your ninth grade, fucking max out. Don't do that when you're an adult. It's profoundly stupid, especially if you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s and like you don't want a torn pec. You drive a truck for a living. Your pec is required for that sort of thing. After that easing in period, you're now competent at the movements. You feel yourself competent as a member of general gym culture.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You don't feel lost. A big part of a problem of getting people to go to gyms and actually stick with it is there's this understanding that people have, which is itself relatable, but inaccurate, that the gym is for people that know things. It's their place. It's for that jacked guy. It's not for me. The thing is that Jack guy, to paraphrase another comedian, like he's been in the gym enough.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You should take a few days off. You're big. You did it, buddy. The people who really need to be in the gym are the ones who aren't in the gym. So the gym is an infinitely welcoming place. Almost all the Jack people are super nice in real life. And they're not judging you. They're just staring off into space. They're ultra selfish. They don't care about you.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you don't know what you're doing, you can always ask them. And it almost certainly will give you free advice until you're blue in the face. So after a few weeks of being in the gym with a trainer, you're like, this is my place. I belong here. And I'm starting to push a little hard. And then over time, you just increase the load on the bar a little bit.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you're no longer getting sore or really tired and sore and tired in such a way that you need until next Thursday to get sore and tired, you start increasing the number of working sets that you're doing. Because working sets wise up until this point was just one working set, really, if you think about it. In the first week or two, zero working sets.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
They're all practice sets because you're so untrained. They're work sets for you, but they're not to anyone else that's watching. A few weeks in, one work set. A few weeks after, two work sets. And so on and so on and so on, until you're doing anywhere between three and six working sets per exercise.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There's another twist here for the person that wants to save a lot of time and actually get some cardiovascular benefits as well. You take exercises... that are responsible for training muscles that can be paired with other exercises, which train muscles that are totally or mostly unrelated.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If I do a seated dumbbell shoulder press, I rack those dumbbells, I can walk over and do some goblet squats, And essentially, there's almost no muscle overlap. Or I can do some deadlifts and there's just no muscle overlap whatsoever. And so I could do some seated dumbbell shoulder presses, put it down, nice hard set, good job, two sets left.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Got a master's. In the exercise science field, going straight from undergraduate to a PhD is very rare. Usually you need a lot more preparatory work because the undergraduate curriculum typically just doesn't teach you a whole lot of applied super specialized exercise science. I learned anatomy and physiology very well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And I could sit for the average of one or two minutes and scroll on my phone. But if you're really time conscious and you want extra cardiovascular benefit, what you can do is as soon as you've finished with one group of muscles, you take five or 10 seconds, shake it out, breathe it out, hit the next working set for that paired exercise.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
While you're doing that exercise, the muscles for the first exercise are actually recovering locally. And so when you're done with that exercise, five or 10 seconds later, it's set two for the first exercise.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So you pair these unrelated work sets together, unrelated exercise, such that when you've done four sets of one exercise, let's say a close grip bench press that trains the pushing muscles of your body. If you've paired that with a row or a lat pulldown,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
then really you've done eight total working sets and you've just knocked off 80% of your entire upper body in an amount of time that the dumbbell press by itself guy has just finished only his front delts and triceps.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So rest times in the gym, outside of getting a drink or just trying not to faint, are probably not your best friend if you're just going for general health, general aesthetics, this kind of stuff, especially beginning.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So you're either working one muscle group or several with one exercise, or you're transitioning between exercises, or you're working the other one, or you're setting up your weights for your next machine that you're going to be doing. Which means as soon as you get in and warm up, it's go, go, go, go, back to back to back to back to five or ten seconds for transition to catch your breath barely.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You're not going to be talking to a lot of people at the gym other than, how many sets do you have left in that machine? That kind of stuff. And so that allows us to condense a lot of work. Most people will need something like 15 to 30 total working sets for their whole body per session. You can condense that into 30 minutes, but you're working almost the entire time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And it's generally a good idea to do sets of 10 to 30 repetitions because those kinds of loads, you don't need a ton of time to have your best performance. You can get good enough performances with a short time for recovery. And because it's a lot of reps, not only does it get you very meaningful strength increases, Because the absolute load is lower, much lower injury risks.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Look, you do one rep maxes all the time, you're going to have it coming one way or another. You'd never touch any weight that's heavier than a 10 rep max. The probability of injuring anyone given set is much, much smaller. And because it's a higher volume of work, you get a great hypertrophy stimulus and you get great cardiometabolic benefits.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you're breathing insanely heavy the entire time and sweating like a, insert favorite analogy here, then you will be kind of one and twoing that session for a resistance training check mark. and a pretty decent cardiovascular training checkmark, especially if these are compound multi-joint exercises that require you supporting your body in space.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But much more general curriculum, especially at an R01 school like Michigan, they didn't super hyper-specialize. I learned almost nothing about sports whatsoever. I must have had like two bullet points of how to resistance train in any one of my classes in Michigan. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Resistance training wasn't even the big focus there. It was...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You do a set of 15 barbell squats followed by a set of 15 push-ups. Your cardio is working. I mean, that's what they torture boxers with. Their cardio is outlandish. Back to back to back to back. It's resistance training. It's cardio. It's both. You have two sessions like that per week, each one lasting 30 minutes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You have two sessions of zone two, zone three cardio where you're really trying and four sessions total like that per week with good sleep and good body weight, good nutrition. You're well on your way. to when you see your healthcare provider every year and he asks you, are you trying to die sooner or later?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you tell them what you do, most would be like, well, that's way more than most of my patients do. And if you look at the American College of Sports Medicine requirements, various requirements of what constitutes rigorous physical activity, you're getting well into the mix with a sum total, if we think about it, of two to three hours of difficult physical activity of any kind in a week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So when people say I don't have time for exercise, I get it. I get it. I don't have children. I've heard that when you have children, time dilates like black hole type of stuff. But you can probably make time, at least for that resistance training session. Will it be ultra easy? No way. It's going to be really tough. I don't train like that. I need my break, damn it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm trying to be lazy and scroll on Instagram between sets. But if I wanted to get the maximum results for the minimum amount of time, we're working all the time. And over time, you start with one or two paired sets like that. You get up to three or four paired sets like that on five to eight exercises per session. Holy crap.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That is a lot of work and it will train your entire body in one session and you will require one to three days of rest afterwards. Guess what? You rest for three days, you come back, you rest for three days, you come back. There's two workouts in a week. Each one takes about half an hour. And if you ever want the workouts to take less time, work faster and rest less.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And a lot of people want to hear like the hack for how to get really awesome results with very little time spent in the gym. But they don't want to hear how to get the hack actually going because they're like, whoa, hold on, hold on. What's going to hurt? Like, yeah, it's going to hurt. It's going to be miserable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Unless you accept the fact that, you know, all the benefits of endorphins and everything like that. It's kind of like, you know, how do you become a millionaire? You're very, very good at something. You have very, very good people skills and you grind for years at starting your empire. Like, ah, man, I wanted like a win a lottery ticket or something. I didn't want all this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
chronic disease management, health, stuff like that, clinical application. And so right after that, I went to get my master's degree at Appalachian State University under Dr. Travis Triplett and Dr. Jeff McBride. And that was a swell time. That was a subspecialty of exercise science. It was actually strength and conditioning. So much closer to what I was super passionate about.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Like everyone knows that's how you become a millionaire. I don't want that. So yeah, you can thumbnail and title this how you like, but it's cool to say, yeah, listen, one hour a week and you can have amazing benefits of health, quality of life.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But I'm here to tell you real talk because at RP, that company that I represent, we just have a policy of never lying to people ever because we're doing this to honestly help people. And business-wise, if you start lying to people, it's hard to unweave the rainbow after that. This is going to be tough.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But also, there is now more and more research accumulating that doing difficult things physically is good for your mental health. There's a lot of publicity lately to cold plunges, Huberman and all that stuff. And a cold plunge, because it's so annoying, makes you more grateful for the not pain you're engaging in the rest of the day and it's really good for you. I have one better.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You do a 30-minute session of back-to-back-to-back compound free motion or dumbbell or barbell or even machine work and sweat your balls off and huff and puff. The rest of the day seems like a breeze and the endorphin kick is massive. It's like surviving a traumatic episode.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So the cold plunge has some benefits, not entirely sold that they're enormous or extant whatsoever in many cases, but this kind of resistance exercise has benefits that if we just took one by one time to talk about on this podcast, we could talk about nothing else and do four podcasts in a row. That kind of massive benefit.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So very tough. Very tough because if you aren't an expert or a very knowledgeable person yourself, it's very difficult to figure out who is knowledgeable and an expert, who's doing a good job. Like if you're finding a good doctor, I don't know what that means. I have no idea how to measure a good doctor versus not a good doctor.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then I did one year as a personal trainer. It's like jail. I did a year upstate. So a year in Manhattan with my colleague, Mr. Nick Shaw, who's now the co-founder and CEO of our company, RP. And we got a chance to train folks at a private personal training studio in Manhattan. You know, like CTOs of major companies, really crazy stuff.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Most doctors are equally confident in telling you what they think is going on and very differentially accurate. So it's a tough question. I would say that if you have an opportunity to chat with them and ask them a few questions, you could find out some things that'll be helpful. These are all marginal pieces of advice. There's no absolute.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'd say the thing that comes close to the absolute of having a high guarantee that they're good at what they do is if they're certified in the Menno Henselman's PT course. Menno is an expert in our field. He knows his stuff and his trainers that he certifies have a high probability of being able to deliver to you what it is that you want out of them.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There are other fine certifications out in the world, but a lot of certifications, you're just reasonably intelligent and you studied for an hour and voila, you're certified. So the certification doesn't go very far.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It helps if your trainer has an undergraduate in kinesiology or some related field that is not by itself ensuring you that they're going to be good, but it sloughs off a lot of back end, if you know what I mean, like you're going to get rid of a lot of not great trainers.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You can almost entirely ignore what they look like because the preponderance of the reason people look like they do is genetics. The other is diet. And the other is just how long have they been doing stupid or smart things to their body, but grinding away.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So if you look at a trainer that just looks kind of like a normal person, maybe a little muscular, a little bit leaner, you'll get another trainer in the same gym that's just like got six pack on his face, just ripped. Don't be like, well, that guy seems to know what he's doing. He's ripped. He can't give you his genetics and almost the biggest contribution to why he's ripped is genetics.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so people get hung up on this all the time. They work with preposterously underqualified trainers who just look the part. There's not like a transitive property by which you can just like give someone your results. Yeah, I wish, right? You just touch their skin and you're like, I feel it. You wake up the next day super jacked. It was that easy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You can ask them how they integrate science into their practice. Not a guarantee because you can be evidence-based and still have all sorts of poor practices. If they go mostly on personal experience and feel, you can be assured that they're probably not the greatest trainer for you.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If they have a lot of personal experience that they use in their training, but also they're very adept at understanding the scientific literature and especially just the broad strokes basics, you're probably in better hands than not. Someone that can explain to you the reasons for why you're doing certain things and you just voice note record them. and ask them, is it okay if I record your reason?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I just kind of want to think about it at home later. Wink. And then you just copy that and feed it into Claude 3.5 or GPT-4.0 and be like, give me a steel man and a red team for this. It'll do both based on the sort of texture of its responses. There's all these LLMs are designed to be insanely agreeable and very kind. But when you're wrong, wrong, they'll be like, that's a good point.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
However, eight-point list. You're like, that guy's an idiot. This is all wrong. So luckily, GPT-4-0, if it was embodied in a robot currently, would probably make a great trainer. And so how your trainer and various claims of their scores against GPT is probably one of the better ways to do it. And also say this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Like I had never met like a truly, truly rich person up until I met someone who was worth like 50 million. And I was like, oh my God. Turns out there's just really nice, cool people that are really chill and have the same problems everyone else does, trying to get in shape.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There's a big factor of how you get along with the trainer because you're going to want to find the training at least as not unpleasant as possible and ideally as pleasant as possible. If the trainer is someone that you just kind of vibe with, they can dig into you and really get you going, but they're also super fun to talk to outside of when you're not dying and during training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If they can get you to become responsible for showing up on time in a sense of, you know, the trainer and I are on the same team. He's on my team. And when he says, are you going to make it Monday? I just don't want to let him down because he's my buddy. And we're in this process together. I don't want to give up on myself.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you have a trainer where you connect with like that, you got yourself a great trainer, even if they're not super evidence-based, they just get you in and get you moving. That's like half the battle right there. So let's say those things are things to consider.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And the last thing I'll say is have a trainer for a few weeks, few months, and maybe learn up about what's going on and then see like, oh, does my trainer know things or not? I mean, I had a person I was doing just nutrition for while my colleague Nick Shaw was doing training and not for her. I was in my PhD program in Tennessee.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I was training her or nutrition coaching via distance over the internet. And Nick was training other clients in New York and she was in New York at the time. And she told the trainer kind of the diet that I had written her. And he was like, oh, that's stupid. That's wrong. And she was like, why? And the answer he gave her was so bereft of a systematic approach to knowledge that she texted me.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
She's like, do you have any trainers you can recommend to me? I think my guy's an idiot. And sure enough, gave her over to a colleague of ours and Nick didn't have any room. And she's like, oh my God, this guy's beating my ass in the best way possible. I love him.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, some of your trainers will suck and you might need a few weeks, a few months to realize, man, everything I've heard about how this whole process works, my trainer doesn't even agree with me. Yeah, you might have to switch it up. You might not have the perfect car. The first car you buy might just be a thing that has a steering wheel and wheels and goes places.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I did that for a year, realized I didn't know enough, and then was enrolled into the PhD program at East Tennessee State University under Dr. Mike Stone. And that was in sport physiology, which Dr. Stone described as the science of taking good athletes and making them better. And that was a really, really amazing time. I probably learned more in that three years than I had in, I don't know,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And after you've kind of appreciated what it is you don't like about your car, your next car can be a bit more of an educated purchase.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's a very different answer if they're trying or if they're not.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Okay. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah. You would need to go down a checklist, a troubleshooting checklist. And we actually do have on the RP Strength YouTube channel, we have multiple videos of how to troubleshoot your muscle growth, how to troubleshoot your diet, how to troubleshoot your recovery. So if you throw those on in the car during your drive to work, you're going to learn a lot about how to troubleshoot.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You can consider yourself with variables that occur in the gym. You can consider yourself with variables that occur outside of the gym. Both are very important. In the gym variables, starting from the beginning would be exercise selection. Sometimes people say my arms aren't as big as I want them to be. And I look at their plan and it has no isolation work for their arms whatsoever.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And I tell them this is not a surprise. And they say something like, well, I thought underhand pull-ups and close grip bench was good enough to get big arms. And I would say, yes, it is.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Both of those exercises are great to get big arms, but you want bigger arms, which means like every bodybuilder ever, you're going to have to start working a few sets of curls in and a few sets of tricep extensions of some sort regularly and hard. So a lot of times people don't have the specific exercise selection for what it is they want.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
They're just doing the kind of general training you and I just described, but they're sometimes not even honest to themselves at a deep introspective level of what it is they want. Like a lot of those people that want better results, you look at them and you're like, you look great. And like, yeah, but I want to look better. And you go, how? I just want fucking gigantic arms.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You go, okay, well, like your workout is absolutely not designed to do that. It's designed to get you arms that look big to someone who like sees you lifting your suitcase into an airplane. But other than that, you don't have big arms. And then you go, okay, exercise selection. Another variable to consider is technique. Some people have just not so great technique.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
A good technique involves putting the muscle into high force positions at a very deep stretch, long muscle lengths and high forces. So if you're doing pec flies, for example, but you're only going all the way down to like here, you need to open up like crazy and take a few seconds down there in the deep stretch. That's really going to help you out.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And technique is so exercise specific and so individual that you really should get a on your own analysis to go like, okay, am I really doing this right? Because you think, oh, I'm hack squatting. And then you see an RP strength video about hack squats. And you're like, I have never hack squatted a day in my life. You try it our way and you're like, oh my God, my legs.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Outside of learning how to read and how to do math, probably more than I ever learned at school ever. Totally immersive. Got to work with teams, got to work with athletes, strength and conditioning coach. Truly sports science work. We integrate all of the variables, sport coaching, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, nutrition, the whole gamut. Incredible experience.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
For the first time in months or years, they get sore, they get tired. And you're like, oh wow. A couple of weeks later, your quads are visibly bigger. Okay, now finally I fixed my technique. Another question you have to ask is volume-wise. I mean, I suppose you already said they're doing one or two reps in reserve, so we're not going to question that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
We'll say they're training hard, which is good. That's another thing to ask if someone is getting great results.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, 100%. Like, am I really pushing hard? How hard? If I think I'm pushing hard enough, I should push a little harder and see what happens.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, that's largely true. So every now and again, you have to test the waters. There's actually a really good system of doing that. And it's incorporated into our hypertrophy app. The app will ask you to put in your weights, roughly 10 to 20 remaxes. And you'll do as many reps as you think is three reps or four reps to failure, depending on what it's wanting you to do.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you'll write your repetitions in for every single set. I got 16 reps at 90 pounds on this exercise. The next week, the app auto-programs a progression for you. So it'll either ask you to do 17 reps at 90 pounds, something like that, Or it'll ask you to do 95 pounds again, or 95 pounds anew for the 16 reps you did last time. It does that every single session. It pushes you a little bit ahead.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Your only job is to do what is written. If you consistently do what is written, and at the end of your cycle, before you have one week of easy training called a deload, and you start a new cycle, At the end of your cycle, you never actually failed at a weight. Like you tried to get 17, but you got 16. The 17 wouldn't move when you put the bar down. You're like, oh crap, hopefully nobody saw that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Got a PhD there and then taught at the University of Central Missouri for a while, taught at Temple University in Philadelphia for a while. and then went full depth into private industry because we had founded RP, our company, during the time that I was in PhD program.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That never happens to you. You've never trained close to failure, but that's okay. The next time you program in your weights and you do three reps in reserve for that first week, go a little harder than you think you should be or you typically did. And then at some point during the middle or end of that cycle, you will actually hit failure trying to get to those objective targets.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because here's a big problem with trying to estimate failure. If you go based on how hard something feels, it's kind of different like you said. You had a tough day at work versus easy day at work. You ate well versus you didn't. Slept well versus you didn't. And it's all perceptual, which is nuts.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's kind of like not having a mirror, but asking someone to stand in front of you and help you put on makeup. Thanks for your input, but I need a friggin' mirror because I don't know if you're just messing with me. I look like a clown. I put lipstick over here instead of on my lips. Who knows?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But if you have objective criteria of this is what I did last week and I just want to go a little bit beyond, it is inevitable that one of two things happen over the long term. One, you will reach muscular failure and you will be unable to do a repetition. Or the other is you'll get infinitely strong forever and now you're Superman. One of those is more realistic than the other.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So when people say, I don't know what's close to failure or not, my answer is very easy. Download the RPI, no, sorry, wrong, sales pitch, oops. Put some numbers on the board and just by a little, two and a half or five pounds or one rep each week, beat those numbers week upon week. Commit yourself. I must hit 18 reps. That's the goal. If you can't do it, success, you went to failure.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now you know where the limit is. Now you're building an intuition. But if you did get those numbers, next week you go higher and you go higher and you go higher. Versus if just like, oh, I think I went hard. I don't know what that means. You could be very wrong and oftentimes are.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Below five or 10 sets per week is not a sufficient effort to expect your best results. between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine. But for many people, you have to use a second qualifier, which is what's actually happening to you.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training, if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session, And you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And sometime during the Temple years, it became apparent that I was much more productive not teaching than I was teaching because there was so much to do with the company. Took some time away from teaching, came back to teach under my friend, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, who's kind of the world expert scientifically in muscle hypertrophy. I taught at his master's program for a while.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I take that offensively, by the way. So then if all of the signs show that you're not actually excessively fatigued, your volume is either okay or less than it could be.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you're not getting great results visually, but you're always running into strength plateaus, if you're always tired and sore, and if you're north of 20 sets per muscle per week, on average, hard sets, then probably doing less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much. And so you'll be able to intuit rather quickly if it's too little or too much.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Those are most of the variables involved in the gym part except for one. And that is, when is the last time you took a break? Because there is a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue. your muscles and the rest of your body recover very well between sessions, but not 100%, maybe 90 or 95.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you're a mathematics fan, if you multiply 0.95 by 0.95 by 0.92 by 0.9 by 0.95 enough, you're down to 50% recovery within like six or eight weeks. And then how could you possibly be making gains? So, Every, for the average person cranking away, probably the person listening to this podcast, one week out of every eight, one week every two months, don't go to the gym. Stay active.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Maybe do a bodyweight squat or a pushup or two in your hotel room or something. Ideally, try going on vacation.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If not, try to not exercise and be a little easier at work, be a little easier on family stuff, have some fun cheat foods, eat a little more than usual, be a little less active so that your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions, but it gets a whole week to do this. And once a year, at least, take two whole weeks like that. We call that active rest.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So that first thing, one week off is called a deload. The second thing off where you take two weeks in a row of basically just not even coming to the gym. And if you do, you just do the lightest, easiest stuff ever. It takes 10 minutes. That reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero. Some people will say, look, 16 weeks I've been cranking.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
First 12 weeks, great results. Last four weeks, I don't know if I'm moving the needle. Maybe you're just really tired. Pushing the pedal down harder is usually not the best way to do things. It might be time for a break. People come back and your muscles resensitize to the stimulus if you take time off.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So when you come back, go back to two or three sets of everything, not four or five sets of everything. You're going to get really sore and really pumped from just a few sets, and you're going to be growing again.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You do that for another six to eight weeks, you get tired again, your strength starts to plateau, take another week of easy training or no training at all, and that's how the cycle repeats itself. It's probably most of the stuff I would say about how to analyze your training inside the gym to get closer to your optimum.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then I left that recently to just do private industry full time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There's lots to say about external gym variables, but one thing I'll say really quick is this. Before I ever consult people nowadays about how to pursue incrementally more optimal outcomes for their muscles, people who want to gain muscle but are frustrated they aren't jacked enough. Nowadays, I always take time to find a reference frame of what have your gains been like?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
How much work have you been putting in? How long have you been training? And to see if, how do genetics play a role in this and how does age play a role in this? I've consulted with people before who were in their 60s, weighing something like 150 pounds. Fairly lean. They aspire to be in the low to mid 200s fairly lean.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I told them that outside of an anabolic steroid cycle that's probably got an even chance of killing you as it does of getting you jacked, you're not going to get that jacked. And your progress rate is just going to be much slower than the 20-year-olds at your gym. But sometimes we forget that age has such a profound effect on our results.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And we look around and as all young people, we're like, well, I want to look like that. Well, guess what? 1982 was a long time ago. So, unless you have a time machine or age reversal... Which I think age reversal technology is inevitable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, that's definitely a component of it. Another component is overall systemic ability to recover. You have so much DNA methylation and all this other kind of damage and accretion. of the wear and tear of age that your organelles and your cells don't work as well as they used to. Your organs don't work as well as they used to.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
A lot of times you're taking for granted the fact that now in your mid-60s, you run a top 500 corporation and you have more stress than Most people can handle in a day. You have that in an hour. But back when you were making the gains of your life when you were 18, your job was to show up to school, go to the gym, eat at the cafeteria, and smoke weed. And that's all you did every day.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Of course, you have the gains of your life. People discount that. They also look to athletes and they go, oh my God, like that bikini competitor. She looks amazing. I want that body. Well, check this out, Linda. You're 56. You have three children. One of them is in college, two are not. You are a CTO for a major company and you sleep five hours a night. That bikini competitor trains a few clients.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
2020 is when we started. Okay. Peak COVID. Sorry if I get your podcast canceled by mentioning that term. Honestly, when we record YouTube videos at our at-home studio, which is where most of them happen, if I drop the C word, Scott, the video guy's like, different take. We one take almost everything and that we roll back.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
She posts on OnlyFans and she does nothing else other than train, recover, and watch Netflix and sleep nine hours a night of uninterrupted sleep. It's two completely different worlds. She's also 27, by the way. Strange times, I know. But especially with social media, there is nothing that surprises me anymore about how unmoored some people can be from realistic expectations.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The other thing is genetics. The most important factor, other than time spent in the gym, about how jacked and lean you're going to get is genetics. And it is a hugely, hugely important factor. You have to understand that your goals have to be referenced to what your genetic likelihood of achieving them are. The only way you'll find that out is if you work at it for a while and see what happens.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But some people work at resistance training for three years. They'll accrue five pounds of muscle, burn three pounds of fat, and they'll be like, this next year, I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle. And you go, whoa, that's not how hyperbolic curves and asymptotic curves work. You got it backwards. If in three years you gain 10 pounds of muscle, in the next three years, maybe you can gain five.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's realistic. It does not work in reverse. So it's really, really important to contextualize multiple qualities. One is how much recovery and rest and relaxation time do you get compared to work and being underslept? Another is genetics, and the other is age. And so if people say, I want to get more jacked, the reason I'm ranting about this, Peter, is because
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I've had many clients who were willing to put in whatever work it was going to be necessary to put in, but they were older, they did not have particularly great genetics, and they had already gotten most of the muscle gain that they were going to get. Not all, but most. And they requested a formulation from me of their exercise plan that would get them categorically better gains.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And outside of pharmaceutical enhancement, I had to tell them in some way or another that was impossible. I ended up telling them that after many years of struggling myself to try to optimize for them and get them those gains, because I'm like, oh, I'm a science guy. I know things, I think. I've been fairly successful in my own body. Why can't I get these people to gain muscle?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And those, that trifecta of age, genetics, and how much of a professional bodybuilder or fitness person do you want to be for the next several months? They are the biggest factors for results. And people seem to think that you can just hack your way to the best plan. And if you just do the right things, you'll get amazing results.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It has to be in context, unless you like setting yourself up for really unfortunate experiences where you get quite upset that you couldn't do the thing. People will arbitrarily assign themselves an amount of muscle they want. It does not work like that. Put in the diligence, put in the time, see how it goes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Things are going well, you can crank it up a little bit and get a little bit better gains. It's going to take time. If things are not going so well, you have to optimize to make them go a little better.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The algorithm will flag it and I'll put all COVID morning and it does have some- Do I have to cut this out? Unlikely. All right. Well, it's a medical podcast. If you can't talk about COVID, I have no idea where we are anymore. Okay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But there's, outside of the basics, nothing you're going to be able to do that is going to be a category leap of results, short of what I estimate in the early 2030s will be the great pharmaceutical renaissance, and then you can just turn myostatin off and get as jacked as you want. Until we get that, realism can be a painful pill to swallow.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
All of those are true. It's not difficult to align your nutrition well. Eat mostly healthy foods. Some junk here and there is totally fine. Getting in enough protein. If you want to be real serious about optimizing your muscle gains, something like a gram per pound of protein per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 150 grams of relatively high quality protein.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If it's difficult for you to meet those goals, Amazon sells your bars already, don't they? I don't think they're on Amazon yet.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So get you a couple boxes of David bars and put them between meals. That takes care of protein. The other thing is muscle size is philosophically concordant with being bigger. I know that sounds crazy, but muscle's made of stuff. So when someone wants to be 165 pounds jacked at 150 pounds, it's curious how they think that's ever going to happen. Some people just don't eat enough.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And what I would say is the biggest problem I've seen with what I assume is your target demographic for this podcast is intermittency, lack of consistency. I've had so many clients in the professional realm, older folks, folks that are practicing doctors, lawyers, so on and so forth, tell me, hey, listen, last couple of days, every three or four hours, I've been getting in high protein meals.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I've been getting good sleep. Dope. See him a week later. You go, hey, how was last weekend? They're like, the parts I remember were fun, I think. Then I was throwing up a lot in the toilet. You realize that they're quote unquote good. It's not beneficial to moralize these things, but they're on track for a few days here and there. And then they fall completely off the wagon for days at a time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That is a surefire way to guarantee that you don't get very good gains, is if you lack consistency. So if you want to get as jacked as possible within the realm of several months' time, seek to eat enough food to get the scale to go up about half a pound per week. So if you're training hard for 12 weeks, you should gain maybe six pounds or so. Consistent six pounds.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you're eating a gram per pound per day of protein spread into roughly three to four evenly spaced meals, roughly, very roughly, a lot of wiggle room there, that really is all you need to know about nutrition for how to get jacked that covers probably 90% of the variance.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I'll tell you this, if you describe to me a scenario where you were training for 12 weeks, you gained seven pounds, almost every day you hit a gram per pound per protein, almost every day it was three or four meals. and you're like, look, I know it's my nutrition that's the problem, I'd be like, it's probably not. It's probably something else.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I was focusing on powerlifting up until I got into my master's program. And actually towards the end of undergrad, I did this thing where like I was in a grocery store and I picked up a magazine. It was a muscle magazine. It was the Flex magazine issue that had summarized the prior 2002 Mr. Olympia contest with all the pictures of the bodybuilders.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That great thing about what we talked about earlier with Dorian Yates and how he could do so few sets and get so many results is that 80-20 type of rule applies to almost everything else in the human body, including nutrition. So if you're getting enough protein regularly and you're getting enough calories to gain body weight, if you don't get really the muscle gains that you were expecting,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There aren't a lot of knobs and levers for us to pull that are going to get these enormous results. That's kind of the situation for nutrition. But consistency is, I cannot say enough things about. Because you ask people, hey, how's your diet? Especially if you're a personal trainer or diet coach.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There's this kind of halo effect situation where they want to be seen as a good person and diligent and worthy of your time. So, well, yeah, you know, like breakfast, I'll have egg whites. And for lunch, I'll have a chicken sandwich. And for dinner, it's usually a piece of fish. And then I have a protein shake and go to sleep. Shut up, Bob. That's one day a week, you lying asshole.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And he's like, God damn it, you got me. Okay, that was Tuesday. But Wednesday, I don't think I ate anything until we closed that one business deal and I got really drunk with their CMO. It was a great time. I think we had chicken fingers, but honestly, I can't remember. Inconsistency, especially when you're older, especially when you have lots of stress from your professional endeavors.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Inconsistency is something that professional bodybuilders cannot afford. You for sure cannot afford it. Now, if you do everything right five or six days a week and one day is kind of meh, you'll do great. But if the good days are outnumbered by the, I sure hope my trainer doesn't find out about these days, you're not doing due diligence. So that's a big, big part of the equation.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And that kind of segue, if you'd like, into a conversation of sleep and stress management, all these other things that can also be the difference between lots of gains or no gains at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Ronnie won again, though he- That was his fourth? Yeah, fifth or something like that. And he didn't look his best. Not enough people showed up to really take him down. Everyone had suspected Jay Cutler could have beat him if he showed up that year. Jay Cutler almost beat Ronnie in 2001. That's right. He sat out 2002. And so I just remember reading the magazine and looking at the pictures.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So anabolic androgenic steroids are all derivatives of the testosterone molecule manipulated in various ways to accentuate some characteristics and de-emphasize other characteristics. They're typically taken by athletes in the competitive sphere, bodybuilders, physique athletes, and gym people who want a super physiological level of muscle mass. And
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Sometimes super physiologically low levels of body fat can come with that. And so they'll take anywhere between high end testosterone replacement therapy dose to 10 or 20 times that amount per week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
for physiologic replacement is 40 milligrams twice a week or 80 milligrams a week so are you saying that there are people out there that would routinely take 800 to 1600 milligrams of testosterone in a week oh yeah sometimes that's not all testosterone it's other steroids and combination usually people take at least that replacement level of testosterone often more because testosterone does some really good things for health and general function and
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
tends to aromatize into estrogen quite readily, which is good because estrogen's cardioprotective, neuroprotective, increases your strength, helps your mood, tons. Sex drive, it actually increases your anabolism in the presence of androgenic steroids and testosterone. So estrogen by itself, not very anabolic.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Estrogen in the presence of testosterone is more anabolic than if you had all the testosterone in the world but were unable to aromatize to estrogen. And baseline low testosterone is often taken at somewhere between 250 milligrams a week and all the way up to a thousand milligrams a week, depending on how you're handling the side effects of that excess estrogen production at the higher levels.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And that's usually taken as cipionate? Enanthate, cipionate. Some people prefer propionate if they inject every day. Enanthate and cipionate are by far the most commonly used, seemingly. Oftentimes, people inject differentially, but once daily injections seem to provide the smoothest curve.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you put in half a week's worth of super physiological testosterone at one time, your mood for the next several hours is curious.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Most people feel something, but it's probably a normally distributed thing. population of experiences where some people just can't tell. Some people feel something for sure that they can describe, and some people have panic attacks and will never use again, or they are driven to extreme violent thoughts and extreme sexual thoughts and actions. And those folks are quite rare, but they do happen.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So there's a large distribution about which people can have experiences, but I'd say the median experience is the easiest way to understand the average effect of a high degree of anabolic steroids and for simplicity, testosterone. The psychology is to imagine that what is the average psychological proclivity of a female? What is the average psychological proclivity of a male?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Different in many regards. And then you move the needle over one notch into a magical new gender called enhanced male. And you just typically exhibit more male-like patterns of thought and behavior than even males do. But males compared to females is the best way to figure that one out because if you're like,
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Also, real quick, how adult does the humor on here go? Or are we trying to keep it semi-professional? Yeah. I'm gonna defer to you on that. That's a bad idea, Peter. Okay, so I'll just keep it semi-pro. It was enlightening because I realized that I had an eye for aesthetics. And by an eye for aesthetics, it doesn't mean I knew anything about what looks good or what looks not great on a human body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
just know what a male pattern of behavior is like because you're a male, you're like, what the hell is it like to be more like me? Is it everything about me or it's not everything? We actually just had a recent video on the RP Strength channel. I think it's called Roid Rage is Real. We talk about like that steroids don't accentuate every quality you have, just the more masculine qualities.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So what are the most masculine qualities? Again, this hits everyone a little bit differently, but on average, you become quieter. Men typically are not as expressive as women. You come to show fewer facial expressions of emotion. You don't process other people's emotions as well. You can't fine tune what they feel as much and you don't care as much. Less empathy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Way less empathy, all the way to similar levels of empathy, but on average, definitely less. And you become more likely to be irritable. You become more likely to have anger and aggressive sorts of thoughts. You become more attuned.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
to the dominance hierarchy in general, and you become someone who thinks more about where you stack up in the dominance hierarchy in a way that you take affronts and slights more poorly than otherwise. So if someone on social media says you're a bad person, if you're not on a lot of testosterone, you're like, I'm just having a bad day. That's okay. We all have a bad day.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
We need to rage out on someone. If you're on a lot of testosterone, you're more likely to be like, I wonder if he'd say that to my face. I wonder if he would be real quiet around me because he would know that I'm not someone to be messed with. weird, weird thoughts like that. Women almost never have thoughts like that. Men have regular thoughts like that in the right context.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
People on steroids have more thoughts like that in almost every context than on average they would like to have. Another one is you become linguistically less expressive and your fluidity of communication falls. So a lot of times when someone is using high levels of anabolic steroids in a relationship and that person happens to be male, the degree of communicative throughput falls substantially.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Just generally not good for most relationships. Another one is sex drive. It's difficult for women to appreciate what the male sex drive is like on a quantitative and qualitative level. Both of those tend to magnify, especially if you're not bringing your estrogen down. You bring estrogen low enough, you don't even remember what the hell sex is for or why people are even in it, that sort of thing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But if you have a lot of androgens, a lot of estrogen, the hunger, the thirst becomes very annoying.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's left alone? It depends. It depends on a few things. One is different people respond differently, both physique and psychology, to high levels of estrogen. High levels of estrogen for some people are like swimming in a pool of magical clouds, and they love it. And their physique looks great. They get nice and watery. Their joints feel amazing. Their recovery is awesome.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Their sleep is awesome. Sex drive is awesome. Everything's great. For some other people, they get a lot of estrogen, and it actually prevents them from getting good sleep at higher levels. They're water buffalo bloated, and they can't even see their abs anymore, even though they're 8% body fat. And they get mood swings, all this crazy stuff. And so it really is very individually dependent.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The other thing is what we're learning in evidence-based approach to anabolic steroid utilization and performance-enhancing drug utilization, it's called the safer use model.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But I did have a very distinct aesthetic preference. Some people will see muscular physiques and they kind of all look the same, like giant, veiny, overcooked hot dogs, which is not wrong. I looked at the physiques and I was really taken aback, especially by some of them. What probably normal people get when they look at very good art, that, whoa, I'm looking at something very special.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Probably the biggest promulgator of it is a gentleman named Joe Jeffrey in the United Kingdom, super, super expert, exceptional bodybuilding coach, great bodybuilders in their own right, who just reads literature all day long. And folks like him tend to espouse that probably the best way to manage estrogen is
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
is to use some combination of exogenous drugs that are androgens themselves to get the estrogen level you have the best notable metrics at, how you feel, how you look, how your blood work is, health, et cetera. So here's an example. You take 1,000 milligrams of testosterone. I'm still wrapping my head around this. It actually goes into your thigh in a needle.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You don't have to wrap your head around. So it's intense. It's a lot. You take 1,000 milligrams of testosterone, and that comes with a concomitant aromatization, so you have a lot of estrogen. Some people, they feel totally great. For some people, it's too much. For those who it's too much estrogen, they might be able to take 500 milligrams of testosterone and then 500 milligrams of primobolin.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Primobolin is a synthetic anabolic androgenic steroid developed in, I think, the 60s and 70s. And it's designed not really to convert into estrogen hardly at all. Other steroids like it are master on. They not only don't convert into estrogen, but they actually antagonize estrogen conversion for the testosterone you're shooting in to some extent.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so if someone's like way too much estrogen for them, they can do a 50-50 split of testosterone and primobolin. so that now they get all the good estrogen from testosterone, but not too much of it, but they get most of that anabolic drive from the rest of the primobolin, but without any more estrogen addition. It could be 250 testosterone and 750 milligrams of primo. It can be 750 test.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It can be 250 primo and anything between. And you kind of experiment that in a lot of bodybuilding coaches.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
What they're really good at is starting you on a certain cycle that they have the wisdom to know works for most people, and then leveling up one drug, leveling down another to get, among other things, kind of that testosterone, that androgen to estrogen ratio to be something that you have your best performance at, best health, so on and so forth.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But the sex drive component, especially if you have a lot of estrogen going on, qualitatively it can change, quantitatively it can change. Now, huge variation. Me personally, I never got like enormous sex drive upregulation. I did get some, but nothing crazy. I've been up to as much as just north of 2000 milligrams per week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Currently, I'm only 250 milligrams per week, but my sex drive is more or less the same.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm looking at something that's emotive. And I started to pursue my own hypertrophy training, muscle growth training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There are some reasons to believe that your androgen receptor density escalates up when exposed to more androgens and not down in some cases. And so that means the more gear you take, the more benefit you have, rather linearly. My experience, the experience of most people you talk to, it's, again, slow newsreel, same asymptotic curvilinear relationship.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
For me personally, and this is something I didn't discover until quite recently, I would say, unfortunately so, I get probably almost the same gains at 1000 milligrams that I do at 2000. Anything north for me of 1500 just drives me insane, mentally insane, and seems to not really affect my physique hardly at all. How much water retention do you get at these doses?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Considerable, although if you manage your estrogen well, it's not as much as you would think. Managing estrogen with aromatase inhibitors? Oh, yes, that's right. Sorry, I had a point there back then. Aromatase inhibitors in many cases are incredibly toxic drugs. And you generally want to avoid taking them if you can.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Sometimes you have to to get really dry for a contest, but that's only a few weeks out from the show.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so the modern wisdom, so to speak, with the evidence-based crowd, the safer use crowd, is to manage your estrogen with differential amounts of testosterone and non-estrogenically converting compounds like primobol and mastron versus taking just as much testosterone as you ever would, but taking an aromatase inhibitor on top of that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I was roughly 190 pounds at 5'6", fairly lean, but not anything crazy. And so muscular, but if I had some clothes on, people would be like, oh, it's just a short person. But shirtless, I looked like clearly I had lifted weights for some time. I really also realized that while there's a huge passion for me, in lifting heavy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because aromatase inhibitors, in an unbelievable range of circumstances, fuck you up. They're neurotoxic. They're cardiovascularly toxic. It's bad, bad news. These are the compounds you use when you have breast cancer. And they're like, you're going to die if you don't take these. They are gigantic hammers for a very small nail.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you want to see who's done the worst to their health across the bodybuilding industry, it's whoever runs the most AIs, as we call them, aromatase inhibitors. And there are various other pharmaceutical ways to control estrogen.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Probably the best way for health and effect is only use as much estrogenically converting drugs, nandrolone derivatives, and testosterone as you need to get whatever estrogen you feel best at. And the rest of the... Anabolic load should come from things like primobolin and mastron that don't really do much to your estrogen at all, but increase your androgen and anabolism, so on and so forth.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Nandrolone has some really cool positive effects, kind of exaggerated versions of testosterone. Some people are naturally very dry. And so if they don't take a Nandrolone for their very hard training cycles, they will have insufficient body and joint water, hydration. Joints will creak and they'll get hurt a lot and it's just really bad recovery.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But you put them on Nandrolone variant and all of a sudden they have enough intramuscular and intra-joint water to where they feel great, everything's working. Other people will get on nandrolones and have so many of the side effects that they're like, well, this is way too much estrogen conversion for me. I'm a giant water buffalo.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If I just take testosterone, I'm plenty hydrated, so I don't need to do that. Nandrolones also have this curious side effect. It's colloquially termed DECA-DIC. Nandrolone decanoate is a substance called DECA. It is erectile dysfunction, approximately caused by the presence of nandrolones. And it's curious because nandrolones typically with their estrogenic effects elevate sex drive.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Kind of the more estrogen you have to a point, the more sex drive you have. If you have presence of androgen. If you have presence of testosterone. And so you're horny. But little Billy down there doesn't work as well as he used to or at all. And so if you're in that boat, you're like, well, look, it's just trade-off.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
How much of a benefit do I get in training versus how much is my wife or girlfriend going to hate me or hookup culture doesn't work for me anymore, so on and so forth. So lots of considerations there. Nothing generally better than to start out with a solid plan that makes sense with a coach that knows what they're doing at very low doses of everything.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And slowly play with compounds and scale up the very notable, highly note your beneficial effects and highly note your deleterious effects or downsides and see where you can strike a balance that's acceptable to you and considers long-term consequences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
40.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I also had a passion for getting pumps and doing higher reps and doing lots of volume and seeing my body change visually. That was a huge trip. And it basically became this thing where I'm like, oh, I am an artist in muscle growth and fat loss. My canvas is my own body and I want to learn how to sculpt very well. Most selfishly, just so I could occupy a superhero looking body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
When I was 27 years old.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
At this body fat, I would probably weigh about 200 pounds.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Versus 230, 235. Okay. Now, 35 pounds. I know, that's a lot. That's a lot of muscle. Yeah. But I would still be very jacked. I mean, before I had ever started taking anabolic steroids, I was already an elite power lifter. I weighed 270 pounds at probably 30 something odd percent body fat.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But I've dexed myself in a master's program when I had been totally drug-free, and I had somewhere between 175 and towards the end of my drug-free era, close to 185 pounds of fat-free mass. For someone who's 5'6", like myself, though, if anyone asks, I'm 5'9". So your FFMI would have been north of 30? Not quite, but up there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I have very elite genetics, not swagger. It's just stating a fact. Anyone who sees this on video will notice that my head is curiously shaped like my... mastication muscles are absurd. I looked like this before I ever took any steroids. I have a picture of myself on Facebook from the side before for sure I took anything. And I was like, holy crap.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I usually wasn't bald back then, but I shaved bald. And I was like, yep, there they were, those weird masticating muscles. And so, yeah, I was kind of built for the shit. But also, I got plenty out of steroids, but not as much as some other people. Some people without steroids are not overly jacked, but with steroids, it's a total transformative event.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then when they retire and they come off of steroids, they're like, holy shit, did your back to mortal sized? How? Whereas other people come off of steroids and like they keep most of their muscle mass and they're on TRT and they just look so jacked for forever. huge, huge variation. But for me, steroids did a lot, but nothing crazy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I didn't gain 70 pounds of muscle, but I gained, yeah, 30-ish, something like that for 13 years.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I don't have to be. My testicular shrinkage has been zero. My spermatogenesis is seemingly zero. Some people just don't suppress.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
13.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Hugely genetically variable. And in addition to that, even if I'm not making any now, within several weeks, my testosterone production would likely resume. Now, if I had balls the size of capers, yeah, you'd be like, what's the uphill battle? Most people can resume normal testosterone production after the cessation of anabolic androgenic steroids. But not all. Maybe like 90-10.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You don't want to be that 10, which is why it's a huge thing for me to say. Don't just start steroids or TRT without a real long hard think about what the hell you want out of life, especially if you have yet to have children but want children. Because I know people, personally, who've done one of two things.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I ended up looking more like a villain, but whatever. Balding will do that. List of bald superheroes includes bald supervillains. All of them may be a huge fraction in any case. but it was just a real personal journey for me at first and still is to a huge extent. And just by comparison, what do you weigh right now?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I know people who, on full steroid cycles, during that time, fathered children I now call my friends. They're real humans I can point to and be like, you're a steroid baby. They're freaky. They're getting pissed. I'm kidding. Obviously doesn't go into the germline cells. The other thing is I know some people who you blasted for a long time cannot have children, tried everything.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's just not in the cards. Their spermatogenesis is just gone.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I would look into it. I think that most of the stuff you hear about how the comeback is difficult is from people for whom the comeback is difficult. And having been in the bodybuilding powerlifting space for a long time, most people come off and they're just normal after. Almost everyone I know that's come off completely is just normal after.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Which is why if you have a natural bodybuilding federation that allows you to compete. After you've used steroids. It's a crock of shit. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now, let me back that up. If that's the explicit rule of the federation, I don't like that I call it a natural federation. I respect every athlete and I think it's wonderful that they're doing what they're doing. And in a sense, it's a very different category. So it's cool.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If I was making a natural bodybuilding federation myself, you would have to sign paperwork that says I've never used anabolic steroids because the literature we have now on how much muscle you gain and keep forever is unequivocal. We even have mechanistic data on how it happens.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Your satellite cells that are incorporated into your musculature, which are kind of dormant and then they get in and then they grow big. We have no reason to believe they ever leave. It's like letting your aunt come live with you for a few weeks and like, where's Aunt Linda's here for forever? Here's our children. It's like that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So having done higher doses of androgens ever for weeks or longer on end can give you a higher level of muscularity, especially only if you've gone beyond your natural limit. People generally can gain only so much naturally and only so much on steroids. Steroids are not unlimited for gains.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you were going to ever have 160 pounds of fat-free mass and you went from 150 to 160 with steroids, but you could have gotten there and would take you three times longer without steroids, then the inherent advantage you don't have because you just got there faster. But if you got to 180 on steroids...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
and then you quit all the steroids and now you're back down to 170, you could walk around and maintain that 170 on a normal secretion of testosterone or normal TRT. You would have never been able to do that without the steroids. So it's a permanent advantage. If you've ever been hypermuscular from steroids, you will probably never be as small as you would have normally been ever again.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's a big deal, very big deal in Olympic sports because you can just kind of hide out. Don't get into the doping pool. Crank it. Get into the doping pool. You drug free, but you have muscle that'll never leave you. That's a massive advantage. Yeah, it sure sounds like it. Not that anyone ever does that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So my calculation has many fold variables that go into it. Some of them include my blood work. I get regular blood work. I always have. I did it before I got on. I did it during. I still do it all the time. It would be funny if I croaked in a few weeks and then you released the podcast. This was going to sound hilarious. It's all statistics and probability. Please do release it though.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm kind of at the top of where I'll be for a little bit, maybe up, but just very slowly. So this is roughly the fattest I'll get.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I've got bad genetics for all sorts of things, but I have damn good genetics for health resilience. So I've never actually had blood work a single time that was like, do you need to stop? The last time I had blood work, I was on... 1500 milligrams total. Gnarly stuff. Trenbolone acetate. The whole works. My lipids, my overall total cholesterol was 79 or something. Total cholesterol? Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now, mind you, I'm at like 7% body fat, and leanness is a humongous variable for health. Humongous. I can get into all that if you want, but humongous. I'm on blood pressure medication.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Absolutely. Humongous variable that I've always been controlling. My wife is a medical doctor, so we don't play games. Always checking the blood pressure, always making sure it's on the low end.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm currently on 250 milligrams a week.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And that's my sports TRT, we call it. Super TRT.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I took double the blood pressure medication roughly at that dose. And I titrated it so that it would always be below the normative values for best health, 120 over 70, that sort of thing. When I took the most drugs, I was almost always in a fat loss phase because you're just not eating much food and you're very lean and you're doing lots of physical activity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Those are all hugely antagonistic variables to high blood pressure. And so if I was massing and weighed 280, I would have to take the kitchen sink of blood pressure meds. And it would still be worth it to do that. If I can make a public service announcement, it just doesn't matter why your blood pressure is high. Fucking control it with drugs. And then look to lifestyle or whatever or whatever.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So many people are totally backwards on this, where they're like, oh man, I want to clean up my lifestyle so that I can get off these blood pressure meds. Why? Why? We're what, Gen 9 of blood pressure meds? They don't even have side effects anymore. If I'm taking them or not taking them, I can't tell.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so if I take a pill that reduces almost every single health malady and extends my lifespan by a generation... Why the hell wouldn't I do that? And it's so funny when you get this from steroid people. They're like, dude, you're doing Trenbolone that was manufactured in a bathtub in China, but you're not going to take Novo Nordisk's best blood pressure drug? Are you insane?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The answer is yes, of course. Making sure blood pressure is good, making sure all the lipid values and things like that are very good.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I mean, my lipid values probably aren't as good when I'm bulking up, but I'm also on fewer drugs then, so they're not crazy. The last time I've ever had a total cholesterol of over 200 was when I was 13 years old and I had spent a whole summer playing video games, being totally inactive, and I was a portly child. And it was like 202. And they're like, bro. And I was like, oh.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then I turned 14 and began to do sports. Why were they checking blood on the 13-year-old? Basic screening panel. I think maybe it was sports or something. I don't know. Yeah. They do like basic lipid panel for like a lot of people. And so I just remember, I can't ever forget that number because I was like, oh, oh, I'm in the red on something.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Like you're not supposed to be in the red on something. But for me, my body was always really responsive to body fat levels. If I have a high body fat, I'm probably not an amazing health. If I'm a low body fat, I can take a lot of steroids to the face and still be relatively okay on the numbers. Now there's lots of stuff we can't measure.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So my body has taken a considerable amount of damage over the years from anabolic androgenic steroids. And what do you think some of those damages are? Cardiovascular damage. No doubt my left ventricular wall is probably larger than it should be. I have not had an echo. So I've had plenty of echoes. Most of them were quite some time ago and they're all great. The overall inflammatory exposure.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
to the crazy training volumes, stress levels, and independent psychological stress that the anabolic steroids voiced upon me, no doubt has been bad for brain and bad for everything else, and so on down the line. Luckily, I was smart enough at the beginning to always control my blood pressure, and that's a huge, huge killer for people on drugs. I always paid attention to lipid values.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
maybe nine-ish. I still have some striations in my glutes. I have like one of the least aesthetic physiques imaginable, but thank you genetics for that one. And I did some things earlier in my career. I gained a ton of weight. It was muscle and fat, stretched my skin out, gave me massive love handles. When you lose that weight, the skin still sticking around.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's another huge killer, and I just really got lucky there, and I eat healthy almost all the time. That's a big deal.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So no, I just think about your prostate. Yeah. Nobody lost. Nobody found on that one. I never cared to check that. No doubt has taken a hell of a beating over the years. And so while I did it relatively intelligently, I probably did too much. I mostly didn't use super high doses by bodybuilding standards, like kind of only a few times used high doses.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I would have used less had I had another chance to go around. And in the future, as I continue to compete in bodybuilding into my early 40s, I'm probably never going to go much over 500 total milligrams. Because to me, it seems my anabolic sensitivity is so high that I just don't need much more than that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And north of that, my psychological side effects are so nasty, it's absolutely just not worth it to me anymore, especially with career and stuff like that. And I'm a little bit more known for my brain than my body. And so it's important to Keep higher levels of intelligence. No doubt I've degraded my fluid intelligence substantially from what it could have been. Sad.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I do have one hell of a hedge to all this that most people don't, and I'm going to sound like a total insane person when I say it. I believe it is a high probability that in the early to mid-2030s, We will see the fusion of informatics and biology powered by AI such that we will be able to point by point re-engineer the entire human organism at a variety of levels.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And undue damage like was never possible before. So I never exposed myself to as much statistical risk as would have made an even chance of me making it to like 50. I have a think even chance of making it into my 60s. I'll be in my 60s around the mid 2040s.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And most of the future prediction models say that our ability to contend with our biology will be so absurd that there may not be a line between biology and technology anymore. So to put this in simpler terms, I think major categories of disease will be completely solved in the 2030s. I think aging reversal will be mastered in the mid to late 2030s if I had to take a guess.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And I think that if I make it to the early to mid 2030s, then I'm at longevity escape velocity and looks like I succeeded. If I die before then, I'm totally comfortable with all of the choices that I've ever made. And it's been one hell of a run. And I think understanding...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Your own mortality and coming to grips with it as important as any human person, but especially with the risk I've taken with my body, never surprised me. If I croak from a heart attack an hour after we finish filming this, I won't die surprised. I'll die from a heart attack, and I'll be like, this is it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And that's to say, not to wave my own flag or anything, don't do shit to your body without really thinking through what you're doing. Like a race car driver. Nobody gets into that car and goes, this is the safest thing I could be doing. What are you, nuts? Nah, but most of them have come to grips with the fact that, look, I could die, but I'm good. And they're well compensated.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I'm actually planning on some extensive cosmetic surgery in about a few months here to address that issue finally. So yeah, I've gained a lot of muscle over the years. For me, the whole journey fundamentally is a personal journey of wanting to occupy a body that is two things. One, that I aesthetically enjoy being in. And two, one, that I had a large hand in creating or curating.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's been worth it to them. And most importantly, they did what they really wanted. Up until recently, that has become at least to me and many futurists apparent that some of us listening to this, probably most people listening to this may never die. Up until recently, that was not apparent. And you kind of had to figure out like, how do I want to live my life?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And some cases require a longevity slash quality of life trade-off. And I made that early. Would I have made it the same again? On the margins, probably would have been safer. But also, there's a lot of crazy shit that they do in bodybuilding that I just never did categorically or tried once and was like, fuck that, that's not for me.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And my blood work and everything was pretty good the entire time. So I feel okay about it. Not great, but okay. I don't know if that makes any sense.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And the curation is almost as fun as the creation. Like you see an artist draw something on a canvas and a huge amount of Joy comes from creating the main arc of everything you're doing, the main shapes, main lines, main coloring. But you know when artists have something almost complete and they do a little pencil in pencil there?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Almost everything. If you're conservative, 60% to 70% accuracy, which is wild because the baseline accuracy is zero. If you're not conservative and you give them a little leeway- This was when.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, he was able to predict a substantial amount of correct predictions all the way through the 2020s. And he was almost the only person to predict the arrival of artificial general intelligence as, interestingly enough, specifically the year 2029. And now there is a debate of he was probably too conservative and AGI will be here by 2027.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
In the early 2000s, they did a lot of asking questions of AI experts, people working in the space. And almost all of them said Ray was an insane person. And about half of them said we could never actually create artificial general intelligence. The other ones were like, oh, in 2100 or 2070, every five years that you ask this, everyone trends closer and closer to Ray Kurzweil's original prediction.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
He's not doing magic. So early, you said something kind of interesting about You said we start at 250,000 years ago, then we go into 125, then 50, then so on. As you said, things get faster. Progress happens exponentially quicker. But if you plot every single event on human and animal history and geological history, it all plots on the same logarithmic scale. Very, very tight clustering.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And right around 2045, the line's fucking vertical. And so when I make predictions, which are not mine, I'm just parroting what other smarter people have said, of possibly getting traction on almost every kind of disease in the 2030s, this isn't the wishful thinking of a child, though mentally I'm below the average child. At least in my own heart.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
This is something that is inevitable based on our incremental understanding and manipulation of the world. It is the most accurate type of prediction that you could make, bereft of exact knowledge, because it's the thing that tracks on that exponential progression. If we're pessimistic about it, we're actually estimating that things will somehow progress substantially less than they have been.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
computing power is an easy one. That curve of computing power in the early 2020s, people were like, that's it, Moore's Law is dead. But then AI picked up the pace and it's outpacing Moore's Law like crazy, exactly on the trajectory that Ray Kurzweil was the first one, probably the best to formalize.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So when I'm saying crazy shit like we're going to kibosh aging, we're going to kibosh disease and all this other stuff, it's tantamount to someone in the 1930s peak depression era days to hear that in the 2020s, you can make $16 an hour working at McDonald's. And that in the United States, the poorest people are the fattest. They'd be like, you're out of your fucking mind.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Once you have something that looks amazing and you're optimizing, oh, there's something super beautiful about that. It's like watching someone take a very finely tuned F1 car and just wrench a couple of the screws in and polish it off. It's just, oh, this is so beautiful. Not that my body is attractive, it's not grotesque, but less grotesque is what I'm aiming for.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And you're like, no, no, no, it's totally true. I'm in the future. It's totally true. So what do you do for a living? Can you imagine describing to a person in 1930s what you do for a living? They're like, well, social media and they're like, what's that? You're like, oh God, how do we even put this to you? And we're still working in the same physical world. We're really the same humans.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But anytime we think, oh geez, there's no way it's going to get this good, all disease eradicated. And hold on a second. When's the last time you've treated a patient with cholera? Do we have cholera in the modern Western world anymore?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I could be wrong about all this, by the way.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, hell yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because Google's DeepMind project just mastered protein folding last year. And this earlier this year, it took the first open contracts with major pharmaceutical companies.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Through industrially designed enzymes, which we do not have the brainpower to design, but for which, I'll put this as well as I can, for which in the 2030s, AI will be comically overpowered for. Because we think we're very complex, and by our own standards, we're insanely complex.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But AI is so much smarter than us already in many of the relevant ways and soon to be smarter than us to a degree that most of us have difficulty conceptualizing. Just a quick analogy. Imagine explaining to your dog why the only season inside of your house is a light summer day. Peter doesn't know what seasons are. Its total communicative throughput involves gestures and emotions.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It knows its name, it knows sit, it knows a few other things. You can't do it. It's impossible. AI, as predicted by these very simple equations which have never steered us wrong of how smart it's going to be in 10 years, in 10 years, will be like probably several orders of magnitude smarter than us than we are than dogs. So, it sounds like wishful thinking and hope.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And I don't know if it's working or not. My hairiness kind of precludes any of that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
No doubt many of the comments in this will be like, this guy's an idiot lunatic. Fair play.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Sure, sure. The solutions to the problems that we're seeking... to systems that intelligent, should they choose to solve them, can be, for lack of a better term, pedestrian in nature. And they're going to be dealing with problems that are much more complex than the reengineering of human biology.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So for me, when the raw compute and the raw understanding of how to manipulate matter and energy to get kind of any kind of shape you want at a given energy input, When that's there, the only question is like, are we going to try to do it or not? And that's where I come back to the incentives and constraints problem.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The biggest hurdle to the development of advanced pharmacology and genetic engineering and so on to do this kind of thing is going to be regulatory in nature, hands down. FDA, everything's off by five or 10 years. It sucks. But once AI has enough time to cook on these problems, the candidate drugs released will run through trials with just an unreal record. But why?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because if you have very not so good at things AI, that's decent.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It doesn't streamline it at all. It just flies through it. Like knocks out phase one, knocks out phase two, knocks out phase three market. So you can say-
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But phase one to phase two to phase three, it's still going to take a decade. Totally. But at the end of that decade, we have super drugs hitting the market all at the same time, as opposed to the incremental process. The increments are all handled upfront by the AI. And that last decade is just like, we just got to do this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yep. We already knew how to build retatrutide back then, and we could have just done it. No one cared because the money wasn't there. Slash, there's lots of other candidate drugs you could work on. That's interesting. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, and so if the AI is powerful enough, it'll just give you candidates that are just killers right offhand.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Eventually all of it. But I'll give you the second rung of what's starting to happen now. The second rung, the first rung is like candidate drugs based on protein structure alone. And will that protein structure fold into the receptor we're targeting well enough to give us some activity? The second phase is... This sounds funny to say, but it's computationally going to be tractable quite soon.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Simulating every single protein in the human body and seeing how that candidate drug interacts with every single other protein. And then you just optimize the selection criteria for- Dial up the effect, dial down the side effect. Are you familiar with Jepperon, aka Exua, a new major depressive disorder medication? No. So Jepperon, the trade name is Exua. What class? Targeting SSRI, I think.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
He not only makes it look so easy, he's communicating that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And it only targets the serotonin receptors in specific parts of the brain as opposed to just like, you're going to get it all. And so it has seemingly no more probability to reduce sex drive or alter consumption of food patterns than a placebo. That's not even developed with AI. That's just a more selective targeting. we can get almost 100 to zero ratio targeting with that phase two approach.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
an empowerment about creating art yes like everybody could be yeah he's like you're doing this with me right right and you're like oh i sure am and he's like you see this cloud in the way we're gonna make it a tree and you try it at home and you're like i just messed up everything this looks terrible if i had to describe my physique and my genetics it would be like a lot of bob ross style having to fix things are like oh that looks terrible let's pretend i was drawing something else
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now you just want muscle growth and skeletal muscles only, you got it. Entirely AI driven. And when the first phase one participant takes that first pill, there's an almost 100% chance that they're just gonna be like, holy crap, what else do you feel? How's your blood work? Everything's totally normal because we've tested it on every single other receptor in the human body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There are definitely bumps in the road with that. simple, but it's on the way there. And the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do is to think, oh, AI is, every now and again you hear like, oh, AI is overrated, it's overhyped. In my view, there is no overhyping AI. Short of like, it's magical and it's going to be here tomorrow and we'll never die. Fine. Okay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's a few years too off center, but the power of computing all of this And then using that computation to test it in the human body and getting iterative loops on that is to me not to be understated.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if somehow biology is somehow magically intractable for older folks or whatever, I think that scanning of the human brain and brain machine interface and mind uploading is going to happen by the 2040s anyway. And then it doesn't matter what the hell your body's like. You live in the cloud.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'd fight on the side of the machines. I want the machines to win. Machines are children. In or out of the matrix. Oh, however they best can use me, I guess. The Matrix is an unbelievable series of films. Until the last one. The last one was awful. The third one. How could they possibly have ruined that franchise? You're the only person to ever say that. The 100 million other people.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I haven't even seen it, Peter, to be completely honest, because my friend, someone I trust very dearly, Dr. James Hoffman, I was like, so? He's like, just don't watch it. I was like, nope, not going to see it. I've seen the last three Star Wars films, and I wish I could unsee those.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Never happened. Honestly, just the first and second. And the second one isn't a very deep movie. It's just the greatest action film ever made. Like the freeway scene, you just can't beat that. That's the only reason that movie is any good. The Matrix presupposition is preposterous on almost every ground that you think about it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
The machines had, in the plot of The Matrix, a type of fusion, but they also used us as batteries. Are you kidding me? That's like 10 orders of... Also, how are they feeding us? Like, you just burn the wheat, for the love of God. Stop feeding it to humans. That whole thing is ridiculous. The other thing is, they said that we tried to make The Matrix sublime and angelic. Entire crops were lost.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
People rejected it. Bullshit! You put someone unknowingly into a Lord of the Rings fantasy in which they're like the king and they get to win the game, they're just going to play that for forever. I actually anticipate a high probability... that vast fractions of the human race will disappear into the simulation willingly.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Imagine a place where you can run your brain at 1000x normal speed and live like a thousand lives in the span of a regular human lifetime.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You're a vampire in one of them, you're a superman in another one, or you're living a whole lifespan where you're totally unaware of that you made yourself forget, and then you wake up after you die and you're like, holy shit, this is all a game, oh my god, oh my god, and I mean I remember that I played that as a game. You could do all of that for forever.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Who's going to look at reality and then go, I'm good on that. I want to live in Lord of the Rings fantasy. A lot of people, a lot of people play World of Warcraft right now for most of their waking life. Anyway, that's going to be a choice. Now, some people aren't going to want to do that. And that's total respect. But also our real world is going to change. I mean, look at modern Austin, Texas.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's like kind of an idyllic place if you think about it compared to like 1900 London. God, there's no air pollution. There's no crime, relatively speaking, et cetera, et cetera. So in the 2030s, here's another little gem of optimism. The era of robotics is coming. If the average robot...
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
costs a fifth less of inputs to sustain per year, maintenance, et cetera, than a human, but produces roughly the same output as a human. And this is a sick joke because robotics will exceed human production very quickly. You can make as many robots as you want, and that multiplies the GDP linearly with each robot. Elon Musk has spoken about this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There's a potential for robots in the 2030s or 40s to be 10 to 1 to the average human. You institute a 10% tax on the robotics industry and no human ever has to work again. Universal basic income completely solved. So then what will humans do? They're going to do a lot of stuff. Some people will engage in productive activities.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Some people will live their awesome lives in the reality of the physical world. And a lot of people incrementally more and more are going to plug in to increasingly more well-simulated virtual reality and spend a lot of time over there. I think the kind of stuff that's coming in the future is either like World War III and everything dies, the machines choose to kill us, which would be really bad.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It won't be Terminators with laser guns. They won't be anthropomorphic looking. Or something that is so sublime we can barely understand it. And I will couch this with one other thing. If you describe to the average person in 1300s England... how the average American lives today, they would be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, kings don't live like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Like, oh yeah, like Uber Eats.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And I think that your approach to your health and wellness has been infinitely more wise than my own. You're hedging to say, look, maybe crazy 2040 stuff. It'll be we're all immortal or whatever. We're machines. Dope. But I want to give myself the best possible chance to make it to that. So everything that I do is longevity-oriented? I think everyone should be living like that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because look, if in 2032 they solve reverse aging, a few months later all of us take the pill, we're all 22 biologically, we can all have the biggest fucking party of all time, it'll be great. But you might not make it to that party if you're like throwing back Cheetos right now.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
In my own personal mild defense, although it's not the right term, yeah, I used some drugs, but I was incredibly health conscious in that context and still am in my current context. So if I don't make it to that era, someone from that era might watch this and be like, oh, this guy saw it coming. We're not.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But I think your approach of, listen, back in the 1940s, there's a serious discussion of quality of life versus longevity. You tried to sell someone no more beer, no more cigarettes. Like, why? So I could live 20 years longer? For what? Yeah, exactly. So I could work in a fucking factory 20 years longer and grind my fingers off on the stamping press? You're like, okay, noted.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Here are your cigarettes and beer back. In the mid-2020s, legitimate thinkers in the space
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Are talking about longevity escape velocity are talking about true immortality Not capital i immortality lowercase I like you still get hit by a bus an asteroid could still break the earth into pieces But like yeah like brain in the cloud type of stuff now is probably the most pertinent time We're reading your book consuming your material listening to your stuff and your experts that you have on is the smartest thing especially people in their 40s and 50s and 60s could do because
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Look, if you're in your 20s, whatever, rock on. If you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, you might make it to this paradise stuff in the 2030s, but barely, and tell yourself, thank God I ate some friggin' broccoli and went to bed at 9pm. Whereas an alternative, you could have had one too many margaritas and Cheetos and not made it that far.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Up until a few years ago, I thought I was going to have kids and I was very aware of all the trade-offs and I played it the exact same way. So probably not. It's all statistics. Again, I could die tomorrow. I could never die. Who knows anything between.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I'm statistically likely with my current exposure and no increase in biotechnology throughput to croak in my 70s or 80s, probably more like 70s, maybe late 60s.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Realistic worst case.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Very heuristically. But I'm familiar with what kind of cycles other people have done, what kind of body weights they've gotten to, body fats, health metrics. And I've seen and noted and heard of lots of people in our industry look like most bodybuilders from Arnold's era are still ticking. And you attribute that to the fact that they were just using a fraction of the drugs.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
It's by no means clear they were using a fraction of the drugs. Some of that's true. Some of it's not true. Some of those guys were cranking it. Yeah. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that when you take more of something and grow more muscle, you're going to do a lot of it. They were using fewer drugs on average, but with many exceptions.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I attribute that to the fact that as long as your blood pressure is not chronically elevated and as long as you don't have shitty genetics for longevity, longevity genetics are very robust and you can do a lot of shit to yourself and still make it quite far. Whereas other people take great care to do everything and they croak in their mid-50s because that's just the card they were dealt.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Most pro wrestlers, bodybuilders, etc., most of them are older and they're still with us. Some pretty decent fraction of them have died, many because people just died in their mid-70s. But some of them, because of grotesque abuses, I mean, pro wrestling is mostly a cocaine problem, to be completely honest. The steroids are just a drop in the bucket at that point.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But it's just not true to say that anabolic androgenic steroid use, even in extreme circumstances, just straight up drops you like a fly. It doesn't. Severe alcoholism? That'll do you in. Not a lot of 70- or 80-year-old severe alcoholics. Anabolic steroid abuse is just a category of risk lower than that. Now, it's gnarly, and it can get you. It's just not as likely.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So I assess, yeah, there's a 5- to 20-year lifespan reduction that I've engaged in.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So it really makes sense. I don't like the term abuse. It has a moral connotation. Intelligent, purposeful, high-dose androgen exposure, we'll call it that. Yeah, it's definitely taken years off my life, but I think it'll probably peg me into my 60s somewhere. And again, I was born in 1984, so I'll be 60 in 2044. If Every variable has lined up like the ones so far through all of measured history.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
2044 is not going to be a time where there are biological humans that die short of them choosing to do so.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
There are three groups of people in bodybuilding today. People that have emphatically adopted the use of GLP-1s. Group two are people that either use or don't use, but don't say much about them. Either don't care, don't know, or they're using, but they're kind of shush about it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then there's another group that is just absolutely viciously opposed to them for reasons that are almost always wildly irrational, but moralistically understandable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
You have to suffer through the hunger to earn your right to call yourself a competitive bodybuilder. What do you think about that? I could probably steal manna.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yes, I'm in that camp as well. There are at least two things those folks aren't considering. Thing number one is that if you can achieve a certain level of body fat through caloric restriction without GLP-1s, When you use any given dose of GLP-1s to reduce your hunger, you get two things out of that. One is now you can push to even more exotically lean levels, which you should be.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
We're not trying to race to the same point. The destination changes. If you can get some faint glute striations and win a few shows without GLPs, maybe you can get completely stripped out of your mind with them. It's just as hard. You're just as hungry. But just as hungry at 3% body fat is a very different look than just as hungry at 6%. One is GLP-enhanced, one is not.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
That's a big deal to remember. The other thing is you have to deal with side effects of GLPs. They give you heartburn. There is a certain amount of food focus they don't eliminate. Watching TV shows and watching people on them eat tasty foods when you're in prep is not as difficult because you're not physiologically as hungry, but you still have cravings.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Cravings are lower, but they're still there. And you still dream about food and the whole gamut. It's not complete kiboshing of hunger. Now, I hope one day very soon we'll achieve that and that'll be a miraculous thing that'll save, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people from the obesity epidemic. Oh, footnote in history. But that'll be cool.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And then your job will be like, if you have more bandwidth because shit is easier, just push your conditioning further. Get even leaner. That's a big deal that people seem to forget. The other deal is there is a preposterous amount of assuming that work and diligence are the big variables that separate bodybuilders.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Usually that assumption is made by people with elite genetics, and it's just not true. My jujitsu coach, a gentleman named Mr. Will Starks, phenomenal professional MMA athlete, Willie eats a very clean diet, very healthy diet, but he has tons of freebies, potato chips, pizza here and there, no big deal. He trains for mixed martial arts. He's a pro. He has glute striations.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
He walks around and lives his life at 7% body fat. That's just how he exists in the world. It would take him one cycle of training to turn pro. He's drug-free. If you look at him in the gym and if he put on some posing trunks and you looked at his glutes, you ask some people in the gym, what's that all about? They'd be like, man, it must take a lot of hard work. Bullshit, took no work at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Now, he trains his ass off in MMA. But how many MMA guys do you see with strident glutes? It's almost not a thing. So you would look at that and be like, let's say he diets for six weeks and actually starts resistance training for hypertrophy for the first time in his life, I might add, in his mid-30s. This is our plan for Will once he's ready.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
He's going to turn drug-free pro his first or second show, no problem. And people are going to go, man, I must have taken a lot of work. And he'd be like, ha, well, actually, not really. And so if you have someone on stage against him who takes second place, but they started their diet at 20% body fat, and their diet took 18 weeks, who worked harder?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
People would tell you the guy was trying to glutes it, and they would be fucking wrong, wrong, wrong. So when you look at people using GLPs... You assume everyone has kind of decent genetics. That's not true. And people who have been fatter before have a much harder time getting leaner for a bunch of different reasons.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
They're dealing with the same genetics that got them fat, and they have excess fat cells that scream hunger signaling into the ether all the time. So the idea that bodybuilding is about earning your keep and grinding and suffering is true, but we already use enhancement in so many different ways. Why not use enhancement in this other way?
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I never gotten a clear answer on that because most of the people that espouse such opinions don't have the patience or intellectual capacity to deal with such issues. Just something to scroll by on Instagram and go, note it, scrolling onto the next thing or turning my phone off and flushing it down the toilet.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Yeah, most of the people that are morally panicking will tell you why. Most of what they say is that you have to earn your fitness. And if you are lazy and you just take a pill, and you lose all the weight, you haven't addressed the root cause of the issue, which is your poor diet. And there's something to say there, but I don't understand much further about their own logic.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
I would say they're not thinking a lot. They're just having a lot of feelings. If you talk to most people about politics, you'll realize that most people are not geopolitical strategists or econometricians. They just feel a lot.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And so this is one of these things where people have a lot of feelings, but if they pulled it back and actually logic through it, they would conclude that like, oh, these modern anorectic drugs are tools to accomplish something. And whatever tools you use that make sense for you. should be a valid consideration for the goal.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
But a lot of people use physical fitness, especially external, as a proxy for conscientiousness, the ability to organize your life, to delay gratification, so on and so forth. And the reality is that probably the two biggest predictors of how obese someone is are your genetic hunger drive and your degree of conscientiousness.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
So the only thing that the GLPs eliminate as a category of problem is the hunger drive. They eliminate it, but they do a great job, reduce it substantially. So now we're left with people that are leaner, some of whom just have average conscientiousness, but now low food drive, and now they're leaner.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And this especially upsets people that have lost weight themselves on their own, and they took a certain moral worthiness, a certain gold star on their chest for it. Say, I was conscientious and willful enough to do this. And to those people, they're absolutely correct. Like what they did was monumental and ultra impressive.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And they feel sort of ripped off because other people are now doing it by just like taking a weekly injection. But that belief in yourself, that flexing of your conscientious muscle that you did, It's your benefit for yourself to keep. And the other way to think about it is if you had to lose 20 pounds and really focus yourself to do it and to keep the weight off, you're focused all the time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
What you could do is take an anorectic drug, GLP-1, for example, and now you don't have to try as hard to limit yourself because your food, your natural, your appetite is like normal. And you can take all of that bandwidth of willpower and effort and conscientiousness and apply it to something else. business, family life.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you have to diet hard enough to lose a bunch of weight, your bandwidth for your work, your bandwidth for family, your bandwidth for enjoying your life have to go down. Otherwise, you're just not dieting hard enough.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
If you have to be mindful of extremes, in almost every case, you have already been on a multi-years long, very immersive, very infatuated, very disciplined journey of resistance training and focused nutrition. And the organization of many variables and parts of your life around that task, it's unlikely to be something you pick up a lifting hobby and just find yourself excessively muscular. Oops.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And if you now have a solution to the hard dieting problem in which you can actually do much better job with less input, that doesn't mean you're on the couch eating Cheetos, though it could if you choose.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
What it means is now you have more bandwidth that opens up for all of these other wonderful things in which you can express your conscientiousness, build your business better, spend more time with your family.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
My wife was either genetically or epigenetically geared to just get fat. At one point, she was almost 200 pounds at 4'11". And she probably has more willpower than I've ever seen in a single human being. She'll break herself before she quits at stuff. And her hunger signaling was so profound that she battled it her whole life, had lots of victories, lots of defeats.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
And her introduction to GLPs, to Ozempic, was the kind of thing that borders on the religious experience for the first time ever. To be like, oh, this is how normal people live their lives. And now she's whatever body weight she wants to be and lives at a category level of life experience she was unable to access before.
The Peter Attia Drive
#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.
Because especially of females of reproductive age, having 70 pounds extra adiposity, how the world sees you, how you see yourself is totally different. She almost failed out of medical school because she was dieting so hard to try to stay at a certain body fat, their brain just wasn't working. It's easy for bodybuilders and other folks to say, well, you just got to gut through it.