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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One of my absolute grotesque pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities training their regular clients, a housewife who's 55, and having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time. I'm like, oh my God, is that one made of time? And also, is there some kind of physique show, which the judges said she needs bigger rear delts, but nothing else?
That's the only reason you should be doing that nine times out of 10. So compound movements, close grip bench presses, pushups, overhead presses, upright row, squats, deadlifts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are the kind of movements that train multiple muscles at the same time.
Thus, they are insanely time efficient because you do a few exercises and you're like, holy crap, that's all of my upper body. If you do some kind of rowing machine,
you do some kind of machine or barbell or dumbbell that's a close grip press, you do some kind of upright row situation, then you've technically trained every single muscle in your upper body to a substantial extent because every single exercise trains three or four muscles at a time. So those are the kind of movements we're going to be leaning into the most. What about for the lower body?
Besides a deadlift and a squat? Various stiff like a deadlift or good morning, RDL is the same category of movement. That trains your entire back, specifically your spinal erector musculature, which is insanely important for healthy aging. I could talk about that ad nauseum. And... Then it trains your glutes and it trains your hamstrings and it trains your sartorius and parts of your adductors.
And it actually trains your calves too. Holy crap, that's one exercise. You integrate some kind of lunging pattern into that or some kind of squatting pattern, be it a hack squat, leg press, barbell squat, you name it. And all of a sudden you've run out of muscles to train in your lower body because everything has been done to a high degree of diligence. Again, compound movements.
Again, I see 45-year-old financial advisors who don't have a lot of time. They have family obligations. They have work obligations. They have other hobbies. And they're doing like leg extensions in the gym. I'm always like, man, I hope that guy's hurt and has a good reason to be doing those.
Because if he's not squatting or lunging or doing leg presses or something, he's just using up time in the gym, training one thing at a time for no good reason at all.
Starting out with low weight. There is no movement the human body can do which unloaded and not pushing the muscles and tendons to their extreme has any higher risk probability than any other movement. So you can start with a deadlift or a squat that's body weight or less. You can brace your arms on a Smith machine and unload yourself while you squat. That may be where you have to start.
You take multiple sets like that that are very submaximal. Ideally, you're there with a personal trainer. If not, you can just go to YouTube and type in the name of your exercise and it'll pop up. We have a huge library for free on YouTube. Actually, the RP hypertrophy app, which is one of our apps in our app suite, every exercise you'll ever see in there has a video demonstration one click away.
So you look at that. Ideally, you would have a personal trainer because live communication about how to exercise is irreplaceable. Because on a video, we're assuming that your assessment of what that is is your assessment of what you're doing, which is very difficult. Oh my God, you walk into a gym and they're like, I'm squatting. You're like, that's not a squat.
I don't know what the hell someone told you or what video you're looking at. That ain't it. If you have a personal trainer, they can be like, ooh, that's really good, but I want you to move your hips back more. I want you to move down more, so on and so forth. But basically, the first time you're ever with someone in a session,
All you do is you take them through those movement patterns, fine-tune their technique with lots of encouragement, and you're not seeking perfection, you're just seeking basic competency. Get your heels on the ground, get you squatting all the way down, get your back nice and straight. Listen, that's all we want.
And you'll do three or four of those, what are really warm-up sets, and you'll just kick them out of the gym. Three or four warm-up sets per exercise. It's a teaching session. They never even lifted heavy. They never pushed to failure. But because they're so unaccustomed to lifting, they'll get sore. And it's enough tension and disruption that they will grow muscle.
The next time they come in, you work them through a different series of movements. Let's call it Monday-Thursday movements. The next week, they come in, and you do the same workout, except maybe that last set of every movement, after a few technique-oriented sets. Ask them to go for slightly more repetitions, maybe not five, but now ten.
Or you put a little bit of weight on the bar, something that gets them like, ooh, okay, I feel it, this is a challenge. And then over time, slowly every week, you increase the weight a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more until several weeks later, their technique looks real good, which most people can learn really good techniques. It's not that complicated in a few weeks.
And now they're like kind of struggling with their weights. We're finally up to a weight and rep combination that's challenging them physiologically every set, not just neurologically for how to do the technique.
That three or four week sort of entry period is amazing because it takes the probability of injury and just almost completely eliminates it because you're not just going in there and seeing how strong you are on the first day, which believe it or not, a lot of people are inclined to do profoundly stupid as reserved for like high school or junior high kids.
Whatever, your ninth grade, fucking max out. Don't do that when you're an adult. It's profoundly stupid, especially if you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s and like you don't want a torn pec. You drive a truck for a living. Your pec is required for that sort of thing. After that easing in period, you're now competent at the movements. You feel yourself competent as a member of general gym culture.
You don't feel lost. A big part of a problem of getting people to go to gyms and actually stick with it is there's this understanding that people have, which is itself relatable, but inaccurate, that the gym is for people that know things. It's their place. It's for that jacked guy. It's not for me. The thing is that Jack guy, to paraphrase another comedian, like he's been in the gym enough.
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