Mike Israetel

speaker

1,094 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard May 2025

Mike Israetel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth · 2595: Mike Israetel Unplugged (Explicit Content) · 12 May 2025 podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 –

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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