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
We'll say they're training hard, which is good. That's another thing to ask if someone is getting great results.
Yeah, 100%. Like, am I really pushing hard? How hard? If I think I'm pushing hard enough, I should push a little harder and see what happens.
Yeah, that's largely true. So every now and again, you have to test the waters. There's actually a really good system of doing that. And it's incorporated into our hypertrophy app. The app will ask you to put in your weights, roughly 10 to 20 remaxes. And you'll do as many reps as you think is three reps or four reps to failure, depending on what it's wanting you to do.
And you'll write your repetitions in for every single set. I got 16 reps at 90 pounds on this exercise. The next week, the app auto-programs a progression for you. So it'll either ask you to do 17 reps at 90 pounds, something like that, Or it'll ask you to do 95 pounds again, or 95 pounds anew for the 16 reps you did last time. It does that every single session. It pushes you a little bit ahead.
Your only job is to do what is written. If you consistently do what is written, and at the end of your cycle, before you have one week of easy training called a deload, and you start a new cycle, At the end of your cycle, you never actually failed at a weight. Like you tried to get 17, but you got 16. The 17 wouldn't move when you put the bar down. You're like, oh crap, hopefully nobody saw that.
That never happens to you. You've never trained close to failure, but that's okay. The next time you program in your weights and you do three reps in reserve for that first week, go a little harder than you think you should be or you typically did. And then at some point during the middle or end of that cycle, you will actually hit failure trying to get to those objective targets.
Because here's a big problem with trying to estimate failure. If you go based on how hard something feels, it's kind of different like you said. You had a tough day at work versus easy day at work. You ate well versus you didn't. Slept well versus you didn't. And it's all perceptual, which is nuts.
It's kind of like not having a mirror, but asking someone to stand in front of you and help you put on makeup. Thanks for your input, but I need a friggin' mirror because I don't know if you're just messing with me. I look like a clown. I put lipstick over here instead of on my lips. Who knows?
But if you have objective criteria of this is what I did last week and I just want to go a little bit beyond, it is inevitable that one of two things happen over the long term. One, you will reach muscular failure and you will be unable to do a repetition. Or the other is you'll get infinitely strong forever and now you're Superman. One of those is more realistic than the other.
So when people say, I don't know what's close to failure or not, my answer is very easy. Download the RPI, no, sorry, wrong, sales pitch, oops. Put some numbers on the board and just by a little, two and a half or five pounds or one rep each week, beat those numbers week upon week. Commit yourself. I must hit 18 reps. That's the goal. If you can't do it, success, you went to failure.
Now you know where the limit is. Now you're building an intuition. But if you did get those numbers, next week you go higher and you go higher and you go higher. Versus if just like, oh, I think I went hard. I don't know what that means. You could be very wrong and oftentimes are.
Below five or 10 sets per week is not a sufficient effort to expect your best results. between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine. But for many people, you have to use a second qualifier, which is what's actually happening to you.
If you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training, if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session, And you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week.
I take that offensively, by the way. So then if all of the signs show that you're not actually excessively fatigued, your volume is either okay or less than it could be.
If you're not getting great results visually, but you're always running into strength plateaus, if you're always tired and sore, and if you're north of 20 sets per muscle per week, on average, hard sets, then probably doing less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much. And so you'll be able to intuit rather quickly if it's too little or too much.
Those are most of the variables involved in the gym part except for one. And that is, when is the last time you took a break? Because there is a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue. your muscles and the rest of your body recover very well between sessions, but not 100%, maybe 90 or 95.
And if you're a mathematics fan, if you multiply 0.95 by 0.95 by 0.92 by 0.9 by 0.95 enough, you're down to 50% recovery within like six or eight weeks. And then how could you possibly be making gains? So, Every, for the average person cranking away, probably the person listening to this podcast, one week out of every eight, one week every two months, don't go to the gym. Stay active.
Maybe do a bodyweight squat or a pushup or two in your hotel room or something. Ideally, try going on vacation.
If not, try to not exercise and be a little easier at work, be a little easier on family stuff, have some fun cheat foods, eat a little more than usual, be a little less active so that your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions, but it gets a whole week to do this. And once a year, at least, take two whole weeks like that. We call that active rest.
So that first thing, one week off is called a deload. The second thing off where you take two weeks in a row of basically just not even coming to the gym. And if you do, you just do the lightest, easiest stuff ever. It takes 10 minutes. That reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero. Some people will say, look, 16 weeks I've been cranking.
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