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
However, eight-point list. You're like, that guy's an idiot. This is all wrong. So luckily, GPT-4-0, if it was embodied in a robot currently, would probably make a great trainer. And so how your trainer and various claims of their scores against GPT is probably one of the better ways to do it. And also say this.
There's a big factor of how you get along with the trainer because you're going to want to find the training at least as not unpleasant as possible and ideally as pleasant as possible. If the trainer is someone that you just kind of vibe with, they can dig into you and really get you going, but they're also super fun to talk to outside of when you're not dying and during training.
If they can get you to become responsible for showing up on time in a sense of, you know, the trainer and I are on the same team. He's on my team. And when he says, are you going to make it Monday? I just don't want to let him down because he's my buddy. And we're in this process together. I don't want to give up on myself.
If you have a trainer where you connect with like that, you got yourself a great trainer, even if they're not super evidence-based, they just get you in and get you moving. That's like half the battle right there. So let's say those things are things to consider.
And the last thing I'll say is have a trainer for a few weeks, few months, and maybe learn up about what's going on and then see like, oh, does my trainer know things or not? I mean, I had a person I was doing just nutrition for while my colleague Nick Shaw was doing training and not for her. I was in my PhD program in Tennessee.
I was training her or nutrition coaching via distance over the internet. And Nick was training other clients in New York and she was in New York at the time. And she told the trainer kind of the diet that I had written her. And he was like, oh, that's stupid. That's wrong. And she was like, why? And the answer he gave her was so bereft of a systematic approach to knowledge that she texted me.
She's like, do you have any trainers you can recommend to me? I think my guy's an idiot. And sure enough, gave her over to a colleague of ours and Nick didn't have any room. And she's like, oh my God, this guy's beating my ass in the best way possible. I love him.
Yeah, some of your trainers will suck and you might need a few weeks, a few months to realize, man, everything I've heard about how this whole process works, my trainer doesn't even agree with me. Yeah, you might have to switch it up. You might not have the perfect car. The first car you buy might just be a thing that has a steering wheel and wheels and goes places.
And after you've kind of appreciated what it is you don't like about your car, your next car can be a bit more of an educated purchase.
It's a very different answer if they're trying or if they're not.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. You would need to go down a checklist, a troubleshooting checklist. And we actually do have on the RP Strength YouTube channel, we have multiple videos of how to troubleshoot your muscle growth, how to troubleshoot your diet, how to troubleshoot your recovery. So if you throw those on in the car during your drive to work, you're going to learn a lot about how to troubleshoot.
You can consider yourself with variables that occur in the gym. You can consider yourself with variables that occur outside of the gym. Both are very important. In the gym variables, starting from the beginning would be exercise selection. Sometimes people say my arms aren't as big as I want them to be. And I look at their plan and it has no isolation work for their arms whatsoever.
And I tell them this is not a surprise. And they say something like, well, I thought underhand pull-ups and close grip bench was good enough to get big arms. And I would say, yes, it is.
Both of those exercises are great to get big arms, but you want bigger arms, which means like every bodybuilder ever, you're going to have to start working a few sets of curls in and a few sets of tricep extensions of some sort regularly and hard. So a lot of times people don't have the specific exercise selection for what it is they want.
They're just doing the kind of general training you and I just described, but they're sometimes not even honest to themselves at a deep introspective level of what it is they want. Like a lot of those people that want better results, you look at them and you're like, you look great. And like, yeah, but I want to look better. And you go, how? I just want fucking gigantic arms.
You go, okay, well, like your workout is absolutely not designed to do that. It's designed to get you arms that look big to someone who like sees you lifting your suitcase into an airplane. But other than that, you don't have big arms. And then you go, okay, exercise selection. Another variable to consider is technique. Some people have just not so great technique.
A good technique involves putting the muscle into high force positions at a very deep stretch, long muscle lengths and high forces. So if you're doing pec flies, for example, but you're only going all the way down to like here, you need to open up like crazy and take a few seconds down there in the deep stretch. That's really going to help you out.
And technique is so exercise specific and so individual that you really should get a on your own analysis to go like, okay, am I really doing this right? Because you think, oh, I'm hack squatting. And then you see an RP strength video about hack squats. And you're like, I have never hack squatted a day in my life. You try it our way and you're like, oh my God, my legs.
For the first time in months or years, they get sore, they get tired. And you're like, oh wow. A couple of weeks later, your quads are visibly bigger. Okay, now finally I fixed my technique. Another question you have to ask is volume-wise. I mean, I suppose you already said they're doing one or two reps in reserve, so we're not going to question that.
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