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 should take a few days off. You're big. You did it, buddy. The people who really need to be in the gym are the ones who aren't in the gym. So the gym is an infinitely welcoming place. Almost all the Jack people are super nice in real life. And they're not judging you. They're just staring off into space. They're ultra selfish. They don't care about you.
And if you don't know what you're doing, you can always ask them. And it almost certainly will give you free advice until you're blue in the face. So after a few weeks of being in the gym with a trainer, you're like, this is my place. I belong here. And I'm starting to push a little hard. And then over time, you just increase the load on the bar a little bit.
And if you're no longer getting sore or really tired and sore and tired in such a way that you need until next Thursday to get sore and tired, you start increasing the number of working sets that you're doing. Because working sets wise up until this point was just one working set, really, if you think about it. In the first week or two, zero working sets.
They're all practice sets because you're so untrained. They're work sets for you, but they're not to anyone else that's watching. A few weeks in, one work set. A few weeks after, two work sets. And so on and so on and so on, until you're doing anywhere between three and six working sets per exercise.
There's another twist here for the person that wants to save a lot of time and actually get some cardiovascular benefits as well. You take exercises... that are responsible for training muscles that can be paired with other exercises, which train muscles that are totally or mostly unrelated.
If I do a seated dumbbell shoulder press, I rack those dumbbells, I can walk over and do some goblet squats, And essentially, there's almost no muscle overlap. Or I can do some deadlifts and there's just no muscle overlap whatsoever. And so I could do some seated dumbbell shoulder presses, put it down, nice hard set, good job, two sets left.
And I could sit for the average of one or two minutes and scroll on my phone. But if you're really time conscious and you want extra cardiovascular benefit, what you can do is as soon as you've finished with one group of muscles, you take five or 10 seconds, shake it out, breathe it out, hit the next working set for that paired exercise.
While you're doing that exercise, the muscles for the first exercise are actually recovering locally. And so when you're done with that exercise, five or 10 seconds later, it's set two for the first exercise.
So you pair these unrelated work sets together, unrelated exercise, such that when you've done four sets of one exercise, let's say a close grip bench press that trains the pushing muscles of your body. If you've paired that with a row or a lat pulldown,
then really you've done eight total working sets and you've just knocked off 80% of your entire upper body in an amount of time that the dumbbell press by itself guy has just finished only his front delts and triceps.
So rest times in the gym, outside of getting a drink or just trying not to faint, are probably not your best friend if you're just going for general health, general aesthetics, this kind of stuff, especially beginning.
So you're either working one muscle group or several with one exercise, or you're transitioning between exercises, or you're working the other one, or you're setting up your weights for your next machine that you're going to be doing. Which means as soon as you get in and warm up, it's go, go, go, go, back to back to back to back to five or ten seconds for transition to catch your breath barely.
You're not going to be talking to a lot of people at the gym other than, how many sets do you have left in that machine? That kind of stuff. And so that allows us to condense a lot of work. Most people will need something like 15 to 30 total working sets for their whole body per session. You can condense that into 30 minutes, but you're working almost the entire time.
And it's generally a good idea to do sets of 10 to 30 repetitions because those kinds of loads, you don't need a ton of time to have your best performance. You can get good enough performances with a short time for recovery. And because it's a lot of reps, not only does it get you very meaningful strength increases, Because the absolute load is lower, much lower injury risks.
Look, you do one rep maxes all the time, you're going to have it coming one way or another. You'd never touch any weight that's heavier than a 10 rep max. The probability of injuring anyone given set is much, much smaller. And because it's a higher volume of work, you get a great hypertrophy stimulus and you get great cardiometabolic benefits.
If you're breathing insanely heavy the entire time and sweating like a, insert favorite analogy here, then you will be kind of one and twoing that session for a resistance training check mark. and a pretty decent cardiovascular training checkmark, especially if these are compound multi-joint exercises that require you supporting your body in space.
You do a set of 15 barbell squats followed by a set of 15 push-ups. Your cardio is working. I mean, that's what they torture boxers with. Their cardio is outlandish. Back to back to back to back. It's resistance training. It's cardio. It's both. You have two sessions like that per week, each one lasting 30 minutes.
You have two sessions of zone two, zone three cardio where you're really trying and four sessions total like that per week with good sleep and good body weight, good nutrition. You're well on your way. to when you see your healthcare provider every year and he asks you, are you trying to die sooner or later?
And you tell them what you do, most would be like, well, that's way more than most of my patients do. And if you look at the American College of Sports Medicine requirements, various requirements of what constitutes rigorous physical activity, you're getting well into the mix with a sum total, if we think about it, of two to three hours of difficult physical activity of any kind in a week.
So when people say I don't have time for exercise, I get it. I get it. I don't have children. I've heard that when you have children, time dilates like black hole type of stuff. But you can probably make time, at least for that resistance training session. Will it be ultra easy? No way. It's going to be really tough. I don't train like that. I need my break, damn it.
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