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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It wouldn't be the most correct way to think about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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