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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I have a whole pack bounce to make you more intimidated.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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