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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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