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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily to limits, but you have to test the limits.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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