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Dr. Michael Israetel: How one hour weekly reshapes muscle

Israetel says specificity and challenging sets beat gym hours: roughly one hour of weekly training, twice per muscle, reshapes the body without endless cardio.

Dr. Michael IsraetelguestSteven Bartletthost
Sep 12, 20241h 59mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:27

    Intro

    1. MI

      Doing this at home will give you phenomenal overall results with not so much time investment. It's not so difficult. We're talking about a sum total of-

    2. SB

      Really?

    3. MI

      Yeah. Oh, yeah. Doing that per week will radically transform your body.

    4. SB

      Dr. Michael Israetel is a leading sports scientist who provides no-nonsense, science-based strategies...

    5. MI

      ... on muscle building, fat loss, and helping people maximize their fitness potential. My mission is to get everyone in as good of shape as possible with minimum time investment.

    6. SB

      So where do we start?

    7. MI

      So it's the consistency that matters. It doesn't matter if it's two hours a week or if it's 18 hours a week. If you're consistent, you can get amazing benefits. And then there's specificity, which is the most important principle in all of exercise science. That's telling yourself, "Okay, I want bigger biceps," and then focus on that, and also every real working set should be challenging.

    8. SB

      Is there a perfect amount of repetitions to do?

    9. MI

      There is. It's a trade secret, but it's... (explosion)

    10. SB

      How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I've gained if I don't go back to the gym?

    11. MI

      After about two weeks of not lifting, you start to lose muscle, but most people think, "Oh, my God. Another eight months just to get back to where I started?" But when you gain an initial amount of muscle, it never goes back to the same size as when you started. It's just always gonna be bigger.

    12. SB

      And then I've got a couple of hours a week, I just wanna get a bit leaner and I wanna gain some muscle.

    13. MI

      Okay. The first thing we do is- (explosion)

    14. SB

      Dr. Michael, are there any supplements you suggest I take?

    15. MI

      Whey protein, casein protein.

    16. SB

      What about steroids?

    17. MI

      Jesus Christ, I'm really gonna say this. I was recently on, like, a boatload of steroids. There are a few downsides.

    18. SB

      What are the downsides that no one's talking about?

    19. MI

      They're unspeakable. You really wanna know? (music fades out)

    20. SB

      This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube, and I wanna say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations, um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet. There's almost 50 people now behind the Diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month, and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until seven million subscribers, and you guys loved that raffle so much that we're gonna continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and £1,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the Diary of a CEO. There's now more than seven million of you, so if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation.

  2. 2:27 – 3:28

    What Is Michael's Mission?

    1. SB

      (music) Dr. Michael, what is the mission that you find yourself on in this phase of your life?

    2. MI

      For those who would like, to get everyone who would like in as good of shape as possible with as minimum of a time investment, injury probability, and inconvenience, uh, in general, as possible, and the highest likelihood of best results, while trying to completely excise doing anything that is pointless, and also, I'm gonna say this politely, telling people things that aren't true. We're trying to get as many people fit, leaner, more muscular, more flexible, healthier, et cetera, as humanly possible, to the extent that they are interested in that sort of thing, 'cause not everyone's into fitness, and I understand that. I mean, I think I look kind of, you know, freaky and it scares certain people, so I have a lot of time for that, but if you wanna get fit, uh, we're trying our best.

  3. 3:28 – 8:00

    Biggest Myths And Rebuttals Why People Can't Get Into Shape

    1. MI

    2. SB

      What are the, the big myths that end up standing in the way of most people? When they, when they hear this conversation now, what are the most frequent rebuttals that you'll get when you say that someone can get in shape and be, uh, be lean with limited time?

    3. MI

      Two super common ones are, "I don't have the time to work out," and into that time to work out is included, "I don't have regular gym access," or, "I technically do, but I'd have to drive to the gym. I just don't have the time or the bandwidth for it. I don't have the scheduling positioning in, in my life to do this sort of thing." And baked into that is the assumption that getting much healthier and much leaner and much more muscular takes, like, an inordinate amount of time. One of the most common questions I get out in the real world when people happen to look in my general direction, 'cause usually people just kind of go like, "What the hell's wrong with that guy's head?" But, uh, one of the most common questions I get is, "How many, uh, hours a day do you work out?" Or, "How many days a week do you work out?" And every single person is expecting an answer that is kind of like asking the tallest basketball player you've ever met how tall they are. You want an answer that's, like, two and a half meters. You want something meaty. And if they tell you, like, "Well, I'm a meter 90," you're kind of like, "Ugh, it's not that cool." And every time I tell them how much I work out, which is really, like, at, at my real, like, trying to be as good at bodybuilding as possible, it is really eight hours a week. And this is to do this insane thing. For people just trying to be fit and healthy, et cetera, we're talking about a sum total of one hour per week split into two or three 20-ish minute sessions, something we'll be trying later on, is such a huge stimulus and can radically transform your body, especially if you have attention to nutrition, and that's the second thing that's a big dogma, big myth, is people have ideas about what comes into nutrition and nutrition for being more lean, more muscular and healthier. They have all these kind of a constellation of ideas, um, uh, economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell calls them notions. So if you have a hierarchy of understanding, you have theory at the top, which is like gravitation, evolution, things super, super confirmed. Just beneath that, you have model, like, uh, the standard model in physics. It's not quite good enough, quite good enough support to be a theory, but it's very well understood space with a few mysteries. Under that, you have a hypothesis, which is, you know, you have a real good idea formally phrased. And underneath that, you have a notion. And a notion's just things people say.... and people are like, "Uh-huh," and no one even asks or answers about, "Is this really true?" And so, when you talk to people about nutrition or they talk to you about why they're not in such great shape. Another thing I get is, when you're pretty jacked and lean and you sit next to someone on a plane, they treat you almost like a religious figure, like a priest or an imam. And they're like, apologize, they're like, "Oh, you look like you're in good shape. I just haven't been to the gym." And I'm like, "I love you as a human being-

    4. SB

      Really? People?

    5. MI

      ... no matter ... All the time.

    6. SB

      Really?

    7. MI

      All the time.

    8. SB

      They apologize for the state they're in?

    9. MI

      More or less, yeah. Or they'll see me eat a protein bar and they're getting, like, the food on the plane and they're like, "This is bad for me, huh?" And I'm like, "No, it's actually quite fine." And they're always, like, a little bit confused. So all these ideas people have about nutrition, organic, artificial sweeteners are bad, gluten-free, GMOs, um, you have to have very m- meticulously well-prepared meals. There is a ton of food that's huge, laundry lists of food that's unhealthy and bad for you, makes you fat. There are other foods that are a little bit more nuanced and difficult to find that are super health foods and will radically transform you. I can go on for hours about these myths, but people come in with these myths as notions, as things they believe that they're like, "This is how it is, right?" And when you tell them, like, th- that actually, that's not true, a lot of them are like, "H- r- ... No way." 'Cause maybe that's the first time they've heard about it. So you tell people, "Working out doesn't have to last forever if you do it intelligently," which is what we specialize at RP about teaching people how to do and demonstrating in digital products. You can get into really, really good shape with not so much time investment and it's not so difficult. Well, it's difficult in the moment as far as you gotta try hard, but, uh, you know, an hour of trying hard a week is not the end of the world. And then a nutritional front, they come in and they think it takes all these crazy special things, like, s- people will watch me eat regular food and they'll be like, "You eat that?" I'm like, "Yes." Like, "But I thought that, you know, but do you need the super special food?" I'm thinking, "That's never been true." But, um, people come in with their s- stack of ideas and these, there's just dozens and dozens of myths on

  4. 8:00 – 11:37

    Why Does It Matter To Be In Good Shape?

    1. MI

      both ends.

    2. SB

      We'll go through all of those myths, but, but my last question before we get into it is, why does it matter to be in good shape? And this is, uh, r- uh, y- uh, I'm asking you here to really draw on some of the case studies that you've probably been exposed to where people have turned their lives around. What is the net benefit of someone who's listening right now, who's maybe heard about fitness stuff before and has heard from personal trainers and bodybuilders and whoever else, but for whatever reason, they just haven't been able to get up off the sofa and get into action. It's-

    3. MI

      Difficult.

    4. SB

      ... you know. What is, wh- why should they? Why should they care?

    5. MI

      I love that question. The first thing I'll say is, um, uh, is maybe not a surprise to many of the people that know me, politically, I'm, like, super pro-freedom, freedom of all kinds, inclusion. And that means to me also that if someone doesn't wanna pursue fitness, as a human being you have the same love and respect, at least from me, that anyone who's fit would have. And so as far as, like, "It'll just make you a better person, you- you gotta get fit," people will see, uh, people who are obese and they're, like, like, "Lazy," and "Ugh, how do they live with themselves?" I don't ever think things like that, not 'cause I'm a good person, I'm not a good person at all, but what fitness won't give you is it won't elevate your status as a better person in some way. However, the other benefits of fitness, we could have a 10-hour podcast where I just go through them one- one at a time and we would never get through all of them. I'll give you a couple of samplings of kind of the big hitters. One is health, straight up. So if you reduce your body fat substantially and you increase your muscularity substantially and you adopt a lifestyle of moderate to moderately high physical activity quite regularly, this is about as close in real life as we have so far to a panacea, a cure-all. It isn't cure-all, but the degree of preventative, uh, you won't get really sick very soon effect that has is just radical. I, uh, just coming off of them, but if it's okay to say, it was recently on, like, a boatload of steroids, like the worst ones. Got blood work right in the middle of that. Because I was very lean and very physically active and very muscular, my blood work's stellar. Just being leaner and more muscular and more active just cleans your blood work up like crazy and makes your long-term... It increases your longevity considerably, but it does something I think is pretty close to equally important. It increases the kind of time you're having in your life while you're alive. Uh, it makes it way better. It reduces the morbidity. And so, 'cause you can be around a long time living in an assisted care facility and, like, on machines to keep you, uh, uh, uh, yeah. That's, you're alive, sure, but, uh, there's nothing missing there. But if you have more muscle, less fat, and more physical activity, you ever see, like, an 80-year-old that's, like, cardio walking down the street and you're like, "My man."

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MI

      It'll give you that.

    8. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    9. MI

      So that's a big deal, so health. It'll give you... Uh, usually people experience a perception of wellness that's psychological. They just feel better. They feel cleaner. They feel more energy. The cognitive benefits of health and fitness are now being addressed seriously in the literature, and they have been for a little while, but it's kind of swelling. Uh, it is unequivocally true now to say that regularly engaging in fitness makes you literally smarter, just straight up, and it conserves your brain's cognitive health for decades into the future as you do it consistently.

  5. 11:37 – 13:31

    What Is Your Background?

    1. MI

      It's just win all the way across.

    2. SB

      What is your background in terms of your academic qualifications and experiences that you've had that feed into everything that you know?

    3. MI

      This sounds so pretentious, I can't believe I'm using this nomenclature, but I did my undergraduate work (laughs) at, uh, the University of Michigan, where I met, uh, my fellow co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw, and, um-That was in kinesiology, uh, specifically a subset of something called movement science. I then went on to do a master's in, uh, technically strength and conditioning but exercise science at Appalachian State University. Then I went for one year to go work in New York City with Nick as a personal trainer. At the end of that process, I realized that for my own personal, like, vibe, I just didn't know enough, and I wanted to know more. And so I got accepted to a PhD program at East Tennessee State University under the great, uh, Mike Stone, who is probably one of the most well-published sports scientists of all time, uh, maybe, uh, definitely in the conversation for the greatest American sports scientist of all time. And I went to that PhD program, and that was in sport physiology. And the best way we had of summarizing what it is we were learning is, "The thing we're learning best here is how to take good athletes and make them better." And so I did three years of that. It sounds like a, it's like a prison time. "I did three years in ETSU."

    4. SB

      (laughs)

    5. MI

      And, uh, that was the conclusion. It was a terminal degree. I got a PhD in sport physiology, and then I spent, uh, oh, geez, ten years in various, uh, professorships, uh, teaching and doing some research and all this other stuff. I'm no longer a college professor, mostly because, like, there's only so many things you can do at the same time well.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MI

      And it was kinda like, this is, this YouTube thing is getting kind of insane, so it was time to pivot to that. But, uh, I'm still actively involved in research. Our company funds research. I still look at manuscripts. I still coauthor. So I'm still involved in that capacity as well.

    8. SB

      So

  6. 13:31 – 17:46

    Where Do People Start With Their Body Journey?

    1. SB

      I wanna start with the start. If someone's listening to this right now, and they have walked into your... this is your, uh, this is your practice, your, this is your hypertrophy practice, let's say, this table. And they sit there, and they say, "I would like to gain more lean muscle mass, and I'd like to lose some weight. Um, I live a busy life." Where do we start? What's step one? And you know, like, I'm actually gonna hazard a guess at step one and to see if I'm correct. But for me, step one is quite psychological because it's all well and good, me having the tactics and strategies and the information, but if I don't have the motivation, none of it's gonna matter anyway. So is step one psychological in some way?

    2. MI

      Absolutely. My God. You should just be taking my job at this point because-

    3. SB

      No, but I... Okay, I thought so. I thought that was... So what, what would you do for me to get me in the right psychological mindset?

    4. MI

      I would even take a step back before that.

    5. SB

      Okay.

    6. MI

      The first thing we do is called a needs analysis in formal sport science. A needs analysis is, what do you want, specifically? Do you want bigger arms? How much muscle are you trying to gain? It's a very different conversation if someone weighs 150 pounds, and they're like, "I wanna be 155 but leaner," versus, "I weigh 150 pounds, and I wanna be 200, ripped." Different timelines, different approaches, different trade-offs.

    7. SB

      Okay, give me the typical answer to that question.

    8. MI

      Most people are just open-ended, to be completely honest.

    9. SB

      Right.

    10. MI

      They're like, "I just wanna get much leaner," and, uh, some of them will say, "I also wanna put on a lot of muscle." The muscle thing is... A lot of times with females that just want the leaner part, but they understand in many cases that if they just jettison their muscle entirely, they'd, uh, end up looking more sick than healthy. Uh, but a lot of the males, uh, leaner is important, but also getting super jacked is important. But how jacked and how lean, that's the conversation, is if they come in with totally open-ended concerns, it's kind of like walking into a car dealership and being like, "I want a car." Like, "You're gonna have to be a little... Uh, we'll sell you whatever, but you're gonna have to tell me a little bit more about what your use cases are, about what your budget is." So that's another big thing in a needs analysis is, how much time can you give to this? Because if someone says, "I want to eventually be a professional bodybuilder, and I've got nothing but time in my week to do the thing," they're getting a very different plan than someone that's like, "I just want to be able to see my man down there again, and, like, just not die soon, and I have two hours a week to give you." Very different plan.

    11. SB

      So I've got... Let's say I've got a couple of hours a week, so, you know, two, three-

    12. MI

      Mm-hmm.

    13. SB

      ... hours a week that I could probably spare, maybe four, and I just wanna get a bit leaner, and I wanna gain some muscle.

    14. MI

      Yeah. I also ask, "What have you been doing so far? Tell me about your approach to fitness," and the answer could be, "I don't have one. I've never tried to do anything." Once we get a lot of that information, I don't wanna say the plan writes itself, but sort of almost. Now, we really, really, really have all the details to fill in the blanks.

    15. SB

      And then from there, once you've done that sort of needs analysis, and you've understood the investment that they're willing to make, you understand what their goals are, you understand their current approach to fitness, what becomes step two? So if, again, I'm trying to embody the viewer here who's trying to change their life-

    16. MI

      Yeah, yeah.

    17. SB

      ... and get going for-

    18. MI

      Step two, oftentimes, uh, just to keep it sweet, we can... I, we can definitely do nutrition, uh, if you'd like, so please cue me in for that, but I'll just use, um, training as a quick example here. Uh, a big one is, do you go to a gym? Can you make it to a gym? Or are you gonna be training at home? Because training at home is a bit of a different world. You can get amazing results at home, but we need to make sure you have the right equipment, and it's super minimal. Two 20-pound dumbbells. I like that you're looking over at the dumbbells like, "Uh, uh."

    19. SB

      A- at least 20 KG dumbbells?

    20. MI

      They're 20-pound dumbbells.

    21. SB

      Is that what I need at home?

    22. MI

      For many people, 20, uh, like adult males, quite spry like yourself, 20-pound dumbbells at home will give you phenomenal overall result. Yeah. What is that, nine KGs or something? Oh, here we go. Your assistants are quite strong, by the way.

    23. SB

      Thank you.

    24. MI

      Do you fight crime in your spare time?

  7. 17:46 – 19:31

    Work Outs At Home With 20lb Dumbbells

    1. MI

    2. SB

      (laughs)

    3. NA

      Only on Mondays.

    4. MI

      (laughs)

    5. SB

      Okay, so these are 20-pound dumbbells.

    6. MI

      You're just showing off now.

    7. SB

      But the- but these are what I need at home to, to do a workout?

    8. MI

      Uh, yeah, somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds, 10 for smaller, lighter females, 20 for larger, more strong males, somewhere between that. Two of those dumbbells at home and a little bit of floor space can be the beginning of an absolutely revolutionary workout program.

    9. SB

      Really?

    10. MI

      Hell yeah.

    11. SB

      How... So...Give me the starting position and the end position that I could get to just with these s- dumbbells at home.

    12. MI

      If you properly control your diet, and you haven't really lifted weights before, and you're, let's say, 30, 40, 50 years old, in a six-month time span, we can reliably get you to gain five to ten pounds of muscle, which if you go to the store, what is that like? Five, let's say, uh, two to five kilos of muscle.

    13. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MI

      You ever buy two to five kilos of meat at the store?

    15. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    16. MI

      That's a lot of meat that's going on your body. And we can reliably get you to lose, oh, gee, five to seven and a half kilos of fat in a six-month timeframe just by being intelligent about your diet and doing two workouts per week at home with your dumbbells, and the workouts each take roughly 20 minutes.

    17. SB

      So that's 40 minutes a week?

    18. MI

      Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Now, that's if you're unaccustomed and un- unadjusted. If you have already... And that's why those intake questions are important. 'Cause if you're like, "Look, I go to the gym six times a week, I spend two hours at the gym," like, uh, dumbbells can keep you in pretty good shape, but they're not gonna elevate your shape very likely. At the ve- very least, it'll be highly inefficient and incredibly discomforting for what you'd have to do with such

  8. 19:31 – 22:23

    Gym Anxiety

    1. MI

      dumbbells.

    2. SB

      So what is step three then? So if we've got the equipment part figured out, and I guess the complicated element of that is some people have anxiety as it relates to going to the gym. I've got a lot of friends that, because they're so inexperienced with weightlifting or the machines, they feel embarrassed to go to the gym. So that, well, at least that's what they tell me. Now, I don't know whether they're piercing themselves-

    3. MI

      (laughs)

    4. SB

      ... but they tell me that they have gym anxiety.

    5. MI

      Yes. That's a big one.

    6. SB

      You know, you walk... And I, no, actually I can relate. You walk into a gym, especially if I go to like a, uh, like a bodybuilding gym, and I do look around and I go, "Okay, everyone here knows what they're doing more than I do." And-

    7. MI

      Ooh, that's already wrong. But we'll get to that in a bit.

    8. SB

      And are they looking at me? Are they, do they know that I, I don't know how this machine works? And if I don't know how a machine works and there's nothing, you know, no label to tell me, sometimes I just avoid the machine if I'm in, in like a bodybuilding gym, 'cause I go, I go, "Fucking hell, I don't know how to do my wrist muscles."

    9. MI

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      (laughs)

    11. MI

      I just look like a doofus and everyone's making fun of me in their heads.

    12. SB

      That's what I think sometimes if I go to, like, a really elite gym, so...

    13. MI

      Yeah. So first of all, I think people's gym anxiety is absolutely a real thing. I can speak to that at, at length. The next step would be to say, "Hey, listen, based on all the information we've collected on your limitations, desires, abilities, we've cultivated a plan for you." It could be a diet plan or just, just sticking to the muscle growth stuff. "Here's your plan for your training." And we actually have an app for this sort of thing where we would say, "Okay, here's how you type in all your stuff in the app. The app will create a plan for you and it'll tell you, 'Here's what to do for warming up. Here's...'" You know, you pick a weight and it tells you how to pick your weights, and then it programs the rest of your, you know, two months of training for you. You fill in the, "How do we, how do I feel? How am I recovering?" It'll take care of everything else. And if you ever get confused, you click on the exercise and it opens up a video with an audio demonstration of how to do it and of someone, a professional bodybuilder doing the thing, and you're going, "Oh, that's, that's what bicep curls was. Okay, got it." So now you have all the answers. And you don't have to have our app. We think it's nice, but you don't have to have it. Just whatever kind of plan you have, that's your little map of the Caribbean Sea with the Xs and the pirate ships, and you know exactly where to go. And it's you, your app or your map of how to train, your program, and everyone else, like, in the Avengers movies, just, just floats away. There's no one else. There's not even any other machines. It's you and the bicep curl machine, and the hypertrophy app says, "First set is 12 reps at 50 pounds." I take the SelectRise stack, I go to 50, and I'm nice and warmed up, and I do 12 reps. And that's as far as you have to think about it. Comparisons to what everyone else thinks, without a plan, oh, boy, are you second-guessing yourself? With a plan, you don't have to second guess anything. Most of those people don't have a plan, they're just in there on vibes. "Okay, I feel like my delts are gonna grow today if I do this." Like, thanks, uh, thanks for that intellectual opinion.

  9. 22:23 – 27:19

    The Science To Muscle Growth

    1. MI

    2. SB

      You said there's two types of effective training. One of them is hyp- hyp- I can't say this word. One of them is hypertrophy?

    3. MI

      Very good.

    4. SB

      And the other one is periodization?

    5. MI

      Uh, so periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want.

    6. SB

      Okay.

    7. MI

      Hypertrophy training is a type of training, it's just muscle growth training. It's like a fancy fucking science word for just getting more jacked, putting on muscle. That's the technical definition of hypertrophy. And when you train for hypertrophy, you can do it kind of, like, by feel and more or less at random, and you'll get pretty good results in most cases. But to get your best results you want that training to be periodized. Periodization is the scientific approach to how to organize your training to get sort of roughly three things. Some of these are a bit more for athletes and not regular people. Get the best results that you can, peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer, and minimize injury risk. And taking all the science that we know, that plan that you've made because you did it in an evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan. So that's how those two concepts relate to each other.

    8. SB

      I- what do I need to know about hypertrophy in order to be able to achieve it? Is there anything really foundational? 'Cause I think everyone wants a bit of muscle growth.

    9. MI

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      Um, I spend, I think I spend too long in the gym. I think I could be much more efficient, um, when I'm training. What would you recommend that I start thinking about as fun- foundational principles when it comes to hypertrophy muscle growth?

    11. MI

      One is specificity. It's the most important principle in all of sport training and exercise science, is, uh, what am I here for? What do I want? Because you can do a bunch of exercises in the gym and you're like, "That was great." And someone's like, "Are you getting the results you like?" You're like, "Well, I, uh, what I want is a bigger bicep." Like, "How many bicep exercises do you do?" Like, "I think upright rows, maybe?"

    12. SB

      So I want a bigger bicep.

    13. MI

      Bicep. Right.

    14. SB

      If we just focus on me gi- g- getting Steven Bartlett a bigger left bicep.

    15. MI

      Specificity is telling yourself, "Okay, I want bigger biceps and whatever XYZ other muscles." Then we move into the principle of overload, which means you have to challenge yourself. If most of your sets, someone else watching them can't tell if you're warming up or doing what's called a working set, like, a real set, you have a problem. So towards the end of all of your sets, either the weights are slowing down, or even if it's the same speed, to you, they feel perceptibly harder. You know, you do this, this-

    16. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    17. MI

      ... this, and in a couple reps you're like, "Ugh." That's what you want. Every real working set should be challenging. You should be wor- approaching every real set with just a teeny, teeny dose of trepidation, like, "Oh boy, here we go. I'm gonna have to try." Once you have that-

    18. SB

      And a set is a, a group of repetitions?

    19. MI

      Correct, yeah.

    20. SB

      So, uh, if I do 10 repetitions, that's one set?

    21. MI

      One set, yeah.

    22. SB

      Okay.

    23. MI

      And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy. Uh, anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set where the last few reps are getting close to you not being able to use good technique and lift the weights, check plus.

    24. SB

      So there's not-

    25. MI

      You're good.

    26. SB

      ... a, a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do?

    27. MI

      There is. It's a trade secret, and I'd have to say it off camera to you.

    28. SB

      Okay.

    29. MI

      Like, the NDA to sign-

    30. SB

      Okay, we're off camera.

  10. 27:19 – 29:32

    How Many Sets And How Often Will Grow Muscle?

    1. MI

    2. SB

      How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym to get this bicep to grow?

    3. MI

      That answer depends on how much you've been doing before.

    4. SB

      Okay.

    5. MI

      But if you're new to the gym, two sessions a week with two to three sets per session for your biceps is something that's gonna cause months and months and months of consistent progress.

    6. SB

      Really?

    7. MI

      C- can you do more? Yes. Do you have to do as a beginner? No. Eventually, as a more advanced person, do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions to get consistently better results? Yes. But for beginners who haven't been in the gym very much or at all, the minimal effective dose is profoundly small, which is why I can say things like, "If you work out for 20 minutes twice a week, you're gonna get great gains."

    8. SB

      What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps and I just go to the gym once a week? Does the distance between the workouts in a muscle group have an impact?

    9. MI

      Yes. Once a week training gives you good results, but twice a week training for the same muscle gives you notably better results. Training three times a week versus twice, training four times a week versus three times, training five times a week versus four times is, uh, an, uh, an exponentially deescalating amount of impressive differences. So one time a week works. It'll get your results. Two times a week gets you, like, one and a half times the results. Like, way better, better. Three times a week is, like, another little bit more results, still notable. Four times a week is like you gotta be training for a while to notice the difference between three and four. Four and five is contextual and nuanced, and I can't actually tell you that categorically five days a week is better than four. There are some things I would have to know about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion.

    10. SB

      So really, I wanna be aiming at twice a week per muscle group.

    11. MI

      Twice is our minimum. Two to four times a week is what I say is kinda the best overall recommendation per muscle group. And if you train all of your muscles together at the same time, a whole body workout, which most people in the realm of just, "I'm busy and I can't train a lot," it would be all of the mus- major muscles of your body in the same session twice or thre- three times or four times a week, and that is an awesome beginner

  11. 29:32 – 33:31

    What's Going On In Our Muscles To Make Them Grow?

    1. MI

      fitness plan.

    2. SB

      What's going on in my muscles that's encouraging them and making them grow, and when are they growing? Is it when I go to bed at night? Is it when I, uh, do they grow the minute that I curl the, the dumbbell? What's actually going o- 'Cause sometimes understanding what's actually going on inside-

    3. MI

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      ... helps me to think through and change my behavior.

    5. MI

      Yeah, so, uh, the primary stimulus for muscle growth is there are molecular machines in your muscles, in your muscle cells, and they are designed to detect the presence of tension. And when your muscles generate tension, the molecular detector machines go, "Ooh, we got tension here." And they start, uh, saying to other parts of the cells like, "Hey, uh, let's get this muscle growth thing started. Started. Not happening. Started." It's a stimulus of muscle growth. There are a couple of other mechanisms which might/probably have an effect, and that a couple of them are metabolite sequestration, which is a very fancy way of saying the burn. You know at the end of a set you're like, "Ah."... the metabolites, the, um, s- byproducts of training, if they accumulate to high levels, it's been shown in tons of animal studies and a few human studies that, like, mechanistically, they might also tell the molecular machinery that grows muscle for you again later to, uh, hey, get the muscle growth process. Another one is the pump. So, you know, you do a couple sets of biceps and you're like, "Oh my God, what's going on here, baby?" Flash it at some girl, she runs away as usual. And the actual cell swelling itself might play a causal mechanistic role in generating more muscle growth. But, but we know it's probably at least, at least 80% of the muscle growth anyone will see is because of those receptors for tension. Muscle growth, as soon as you leave the gym, is a negative because the gym is catabolic, it's a m- it breaks down your muscle. Actually training breaks down more muscle than it builds. However, as you go home and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day, and you're resting, when the food's coming in, several hours after training begins, if you measure muscle growth consistently, which is real difficult to do, they don't do it super often, you have to keep people in the laboratory, you have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff. E- every couple of hours they measure, the amount of muscle growth that's going on in the biceps goes up and up and up and up. And it usually peaks about half a day to a day and a half after you lift, depending on how hard you went. If it's a pretty easy workout, it peaks a little sooner and dives- and drops off about a day or two later. If you train really crazy hard, it'll peak, like, a day, day and a half later, and then half a week later it'll drop off back to baseline levels. But it's this really smooth curve, and you're growing muscle at every single point under that curve, so when you say, "Is it while I'm sleeping? Is it while I'm eating? Is it while I'm resting?" The answer is all of those, except it's not at the gym. You don't grow muscle at the gym, you give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym. And then what you do outside of the gym matters, so some people train really hard, they don't eat right, they don't eat enough protein, their sleep is total insert bad word here, and their stress levels are just totally psychotic. They train hard, and then week after week after week, they're like, "I'm not seeing any results." But the results are actually created when you're resting, when you're sleeping, when you're eating nutritious food. They're stimulated in the workout, but that's just phase one. Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside of the gym, and it occurs not at any specific time point, like a magic window of two hours in- after the gym, like, that's when all the growth occurs. Th- that's actually when it just starts to go up. It's for days afterwards. If you train twice a week, you train on Monday, you're growing a lot of muscle on Monday night, Tuesday and Wednesday, back, uh, uh, towards the end of Wednesday, you're just not really growing much more muscle. You go back to the gym Thursday, you hit it hard again, you hit that curve up. By Sunday, you're totally relaxed. During Sunday, you're not growing any muscle, your body's really recovering a lot of that fatigue, and then by Monday, you're fresh as a pickle and you're ready to go at it again.

  12. 33:31 – 38:28

    How Long Will It Take For Me To Lose Muscle?

    1. MI

    2. SB

      How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I've gained if I don't go back to the gym? So again, focusing on this bicep. I train it, I do two times a week, I get it nice and big. How long before it vanishes?

    3. MI

      Great question. Two-part answer. Part one is within about two weeks of not training it, the first reduction in muscle that is detectable by modern machinery occurs. So if you don't lift for two weeks and we put you in an MRI scanner or a DEXA scanner, let's say a week and a half you don't lift, I can't tell, you're not really losing any muscle yet. You're just going insane. And so me personally, I'm, like, addicted to lifting, so if I don't lift for a week, I'm like, "Oh my God, oh my God, all my muscle's gone." There is some kind of intuitive truth to that because when you don't stress your muscles, they... When you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed.

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MI

      And they bulge up a little bit. So when you're not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller, like they've lost weight, but it's really just all water that they lost. You do one gym session thinking like, "Oh my God, my biceps are gone," a week and a half later, you do one session, at the end of that, you flex and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm the biggest I've ever been. I was just delusional that whole time." 'Cause that stuff comes back super quick. After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle. But it happens really, really slowly and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. After several months of not lifting, you're gonna look considerably smaller in your biceps. But probably not as small as when you started lifting because your muscles have a certain memory, if we can call it that.

    6. SB

      Is that true, that, there's some memory thing?

    7. MI

      Very true. Oh, yeah. And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle, especially if you've been at it for years, it just never goes back to the same size it was when you started. It's just always gonna be bigger until you re- reach your 80s or something like that. That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size. So two weeks is the direct answer there, and it's gonna take weeks and weeks and months and months to recede. However, here's part two, and this is awesome news. Because of that muscle memory situation, however long it took you to gain the muscles initially, it's going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of 10-ish or so less time to get it back. If you've been more jacked before, if you've had bigger muscles, they come back to their old size... If it took... If you, you, you lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep, and you stop lifting for three months, it looks about the same as when you started. If you're really careful, like, okay, it's a little bit bigger, but really, it's just back to square one. Most people think, "Oh my God, another eight months, uh, just to get back to where I started?" Like, forget the gym. The truth is after roughly about a month, maybe as little as three weeks, you're gonna have the same size biceps that you did in your peak. Because the degree to which your tissue grows, if it's been a certain size before, especially if it was notably bigger than normal and you held that around for a few months and a few years, it comes back...... in a way that is so fast, if you experience, i- i- i- if you experience it yourself, it's, it's like you don't believe that it's happening to you. You gain back-

    8. SB

      Have they been able to, like, scientifically test this?

    9. MI

      Oh, yeah. All the time. Yeah. Retraining studies. De-training, retraining. Oh, yeah. They've, they've done studies where they purposefully, like, lift for a while and they stop lifting for a long time, and they see how long it takes to get back, and ... Um, th- there's one study I'm familiar with offhand that there was a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks, and there was another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks and then took two weeks completely off in the middle and then just started retraining again first few weeks later. Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study. And so we were like, okay, so, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off. Could we say that they purposefully, like, dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing? Uh-huh. Yeah. Your body v- goes right back into regaining o- old lost muscle so rapidly that ... This is such great news because, look, let's say you lifted consistently most of the year. Holiday season comes up, winter holidays. You're not going to the gym as much, maybe not at all. Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself, you look a little small or kind of deflated and you're like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna have to restart all this from scratch."

    10. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    11. MI

      Nope. Two weeks later, you're in the best shape of your life again. If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you're in the best shape of your life again. That's how rapidly it comes back. So it's really good news for anyone who hasn't been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it. Go back, get consistent again. You're just gonna skyrocket.

    12. SB

      That is very exciting.

    13. MI

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      Because, yeah, we always have ... It, sometimes it's the trough, the, the couple of weeks off that makes us demotivated, 'cause that's crossed my mind before. "Oh my God, that took me three months to get there and it's gonna take me another three months to get back."

  13. 38:28 – 43:32

    Warming Up For Workouts

    1. SB

      But what about ... So if I'm training that bicep, h- how have I got to think about stretching and warming up before I start, before I get going with my training?

    2. MI

      There are many ways to do it, but, uh, there's some research on this recently actually. You don't need much. Th- one of the simplest ways to warm up that we recommend at RP and our app has it in the, in the instructions, you want ... Let's say you have your final weight already picked out. Like, last week you did 20 pound dumbbells for sets of 15. This week it's sets of 16 with the 20 pound dumbbells. What you wanna do is you want to do very lightweight, maybe the five pound dumbbells, for a set of 12. Just to get everything moving and grooving. Good technique. Same technique you're gonna use. 30 seconds of rest, a minute of rest. You pick up the 10 or 15 pound dumbbells and you do a set of eight reps. It's a little bit more challenging, you're feeling your, your groove a little bit, but your body's already more warm, your nervous system is more active, your muscles are more pliable. You rest a, uh, a minute, uh, after that, and then you'll pick up the weight you're actually using, the 20 pounders, and you'll do a set of two to four reps with them just to get the feel of that heavy weight that you're gonna be doing, to a- acclimatize not just your muscles and your nervous system, but your psychology to, like, okay, this is, this is the business weight that I'm gonna be using. So twelve, eight, four. Rest another 30 seconds. First working set of, whatever, 16 repsYou're up. When you have multiple exercises for the same muscle group, you just need to do one set of, like, four to eight reps in that middle weight range between zero and whatever you're gonna do just to get the feel of the exercise 'cause you're already generally warm in that area. One little warmup set. Rest, uh, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, and then hit your first set. If you're switching which muscles you're using, like you were training chest but then in the same session you started training back, that first back exercise, twelve, eight, four. The weight goes up, up, up, the reps go down, down, down, just a little bit of time between, and then you hit your first work set and you're good to go. You don't have to do cardio before. You don't have to get on the treadmill. You can if you like it. You don't have to do some kind of cardio warmup. You don't have to do any kind of stretching or anything like that. You don't have to do any kind of weird BOSU ball band around your neck crazy potentiation exercises. Just that little ramp up is basically in 98% of all cases exactly and only what you need to do.

    3. SB

      What is a warmup? What is going on physiologically inside my muscle? Because we, we all just warm up, and I don't think anybody actually knows w- what's going on.

    4. MI

      Yeah. (laughs) So your muscle tissues, um, they have, uh, they have physical qualities that can be measured almost in, like, a fluid dynamics terms, like viscosity and hysteresis and all that stuff. And so when you're very cold, a lot of times the, uh, there's kind of a frailty implied there. As you're warming up, you're sending blood to around the muscle. The muscle itself is literally becoming warmer, and a lot of those kind of tight structures that are, uh, they're proteins that are made of kind of a stretchy material, they loosen up a little bit. And that allows you to go through that full range of motion in training and not actually get hurt. And that's from the muscle perspective. You also get some kind of chemical stuff that happens and certain structures fill up with chemicals, certain structures, uh, chemicals go down, and that gets you ready to perform super hard work. But that's part of the story. The other part is the nervous system, because your nervous system is also getting warmed up, and in technical terms it's called potentiation. When you just show up to the gym and you ... Let's say we said, "Look, okay, we re-engineered your tendons when you were asleep. You're not gonna get hurt. It's impossible for you to get hurt. Like, a car would have to hit you for you to rip your bicep off." You can just go and just hit the curls right away. You wouldn't get hurt, but it would feel really strange and you wouldn't get four or five reps close to where you're supposed to be from last week 'cause your nervous system was like, "What the hell is going on? I'm supposed to be doing something." So you need to warm up the nervous system-... a part of that is literally, like, the actual nervous system itself down to the cellular level. It's flushing all kinds of metabolites through, the connections are getting stronger. You're, uh, sort of doing a little bit of kind of mini-rewiring of primary motor cortex to say, go, go, "Oh, we're doing curls. This is how you execute this pattern." Another part is technical. Like, "Oh, this is the technique I'm gonna do."

    5. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. MI

      Because if you just get in the muscle and just do stuff, like, imagine if I told you, like, "Hey, here's a ball. Just, like, go, go shoot some hoops. Just g- hit that, f- you know, three-pointer shot." You're like, "Mm, mm, mm, I need a couple shots to remind my body of what it's like to shoot the basketball."

    7. SB

      Yeah.

    8. MI

      Same idea for lifting. You gotta remind your body of what the curl motion is. And if you remind it a couple sets in a row, by the time you hit that real working set, that fourth set, your body's like, "Oh, I know exactly what I'm gonna do, which parts of the muscle I'm gonna activate to contract, which other parts of other muscles I'm gonna activate to relax and co-contract to make this whole thing happen."

  14. 43:32 – 45:44

    Common Gym Mistakes People Make

    1. MI

    2. SB

      What are the, the other sort of common mistakes people make when they're, they go to the gym or they start training or they start exercising? So there, I've, I've kind of ticked off not stretching and taking on a heavy load too quickly, um, but also ramping up volumes and loads too fast. So that sort of overstrain before my body is ready for it. Are there any really other sort of common obvious mistakes people make that inhibit their progress?

    3. MI

      One of them is a failure to pay attention to good technique.

    4. SB

      Okay.

    5. MI

      There are sort of some universal principles of what is good technique in the gym for muscle growth. One of them is, are you moving in a way that properly activates, stimulates that muscle to actually get it to grow? Because if you do a curl that arcs up, it does a lot of bicep. If you do a curl that arcs back this way, because the bicep is being pulled one way and pulled the other way at the shoulder and the elbow, it ends up m- doing more of a stabilizing contraction than actually being the prime mover for the movement. So when you see people curling at the gym and they're just kind of doing this, you're like, "Th- th- th- th- th- yes, that is training your biceps, but if you just moved a little bit differently, it would be so, so much better." Here's another example. Squatting, right? For your legs. If you squat really far back and not so far down, like, your glutes get hit okay, your lower back and upper and mid-back is gonna get hit a lot. But because there's not a huge change in your knee angle, you're not getting a ton of quad stimulus. If you stay more upright and your heels and toes are on the ground and you allow your knees to go way forward beyond your toes as you stay upright and sink down really low so that your knee goes into one of these, oh my God, it's all quads all day long. So you want technique that is targeting the muscle. It's very similar rep to rep to rep. And it puts the muscle consistently through a range of motion that is in that deep, painful, uh, lengthened stretch position.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MI

      If you just have all those three, everything else we can say about your technique is just nuances and finer points. Those are really the big ones.

  15. 45:44 – 47:40

    Best Foods To Grow Muscle

    1. MI

    2. SB

      We talked about nutrition earlier as well. So if I wanna make my bicep grow and also drop off the weight around the bicep so you can see it- see it even more, what should I be putting into my mouth?

    3. MI

      The number one requisite for muscle growth is protein. Foods with lots of protein in them ideally should be consumed three to five times per day at roughly equidistant intervals. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, totally fine. Even better, breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening snack. The average person needs a little bit less than, let's say, a gram per pound of body weight per day of protein. Actually, considerably less. So that's kind of the top limit and a cool aspirational thing to shoot for. So if you weigh, let's say, 200 pounds, you should be consuming something like 150 to 200 grams of protein per day. And 150 for almost everyone's totally enough, but if you're real serious and hardcore and what, just want that insurance policy, 200 grams of protein per day. So then if you're eating four times a day, that's, oh yeah, 30, 40, let's say 40 to 50 grams of protein per meal.

    4. SB

      Can I eat too much protein-

    5. MI

      No.

    6. SB

      ... and it, and then it becomes fat or something?

    7. MI

      Uh, that's, uh, so protein by itself, no. If your protein is so high that your carbs and fats are the same and you jack up your protein super high, but your carbs and fats stay where they are, your calories become excessive, that will cause fat gain over time. But if you're doing a diet where you eat a ton of protein, but you dropped your carbs and fats and your calories are at maintenance levels, you're not gonna gain any fat. It's not bad for your kidneys. It's not bad for any other part of your body. Excessive protein as a health malady has been a myth the entire time. And that's one of those, um, notions that people carry with them that, "Oh, too much protein's bad, right?" Like, yes, if you've had kidney surgery, absolutely. Short of that, you're probably good to go.

  16. 47:40 – 48:48

    Is Intermittent Fasting Good For Muscle Gain?

    1. MI

      You'll fart a lot and people will hate you, but, you know.

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm. You mentioned three to five meals a day. A lot of people are now in this camp of, of fasting and intermittent fasting-

    3. MI

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      ... and not eating often. Is it possible to fast but also to gain muscle mass in the way that you've described?

    5. MI

      Yeah, totally. It just won't happen at a, as an impressive rate, so you have to make a trade-off for yourself. If you want, you know, most jacked Steven that you can be, three to five meals a day consistently spread, and almost to an individual, competitive bodybuilders eat that frequently and eat high protein.

    6. SB

      How often do you eat when you're training?

    7. MI

      Uh, I eat about five, five times a day, four or five times a day, usually.

    8. SB

      And do you eat before or after you train?

    9. MI

      Both.

    10. SB

      Okay. So before you train and after you train.

    11. MI

      Yeah. But, uh, uh-

    12. SB

      Do different things?

    13. MI

      A lot of times I'll train early in the morning and so I won't train at a- I won't eat at all. I'll wake up and I'll have, like, a protein and carb mix shake with my training. Totally optional. Super extra credit. May not do anything at all if, if you look at the literature. But I find it a little bit compelling to do a little bit of that. And then afterwards, I have my first post-workout meal, second meal, third meal, fourth meal, bedtime, wake up, do it again.

  17. 48:48 – 51:49

    Pre Work Out & Caffeine Stimulants

    1. SB

      What do you take to get you going? Do you do pre-workout?

    2. MI

      No.

    3. SB

      Why?

    4. MI

      No. Uh, I don't do any stimulants of any kind.

    5. SB

      Why?

    6. MI

      Uh, I'm just kind of coked up all the time naturally, so like if you give me stimulants, it's just gonna go into the not so pleasant side of side effects. Like, I'm just gonna be like this and way too amped up, super high anxiety, and my thoughts get to be like I have less fluidity of thinking and stuff. So I just, it's just a lot of me, I guess. And so when I wake up in the morning, I don't need anything to get me going. I just go. And a couple warmup sets later, I have all the energy I need. That's not everyone. And so some green tea, some black coffee, or some pre-workout 30 minutes before the gym is great advice for a ton of people.

    7. SB

      I feel like pre-workout can't be healthy if you're doing it five, six, seven times a week, because some of that stuff is so unbelievably strong.

    8. MI

      Yeah.

    9. SB

      Like I've had it before where I've got literally, like, heart palpitations when I've had a pre-workout. And you know, you talk about anxiety, that anxious feeling. It can't be, it can't be he- healthy for people to be doing that frequently.

    10. MI

      It seems to be quite fine. It seems to be quite fine. Now at the extremes and ins- for some individuals, it's not ideal, but um, the upper limit dose of caffeine in milligrams per day at which we can confidently say most people will experience the beginnings of health maladies is 1,000 milligrams.

    11. SB

      Hm.

    12. MI

      And a cup of coffee has, depending on which cup, 50 to 100. Now some pre-workouts have 250 gram, milligrams of caffeine. Some have 500. Uh, last I checked, Ronnie Coleman's pre-workout has 550 mgs of caffeine per scoop or per serving. And so that's kind of a lot. Uh, I, if I took 550 mgs of caffeine, don't take me to the gym. Just take me right to the hospital, put me in the psychiatric ward. 36 hours later, I'll be okay. But for some people, they get so accustomed to high doses of caffeine that it's almost not unhealthy for them to consume. And also, uh, they feel quite fine. So I would say start with as little as you need to get you going, and if you need to titrate and work up from there, that's a good thing. The other thing I would say is I would have a compelling case for pre-workout or stimulants. If I ask you, like, "Hey, how much energy do you typically have at the gym?" You're like, "Oh, it's super great." And they're like, "Should I take pre-workout?" I'd be like, "No. There's no compelling case for that at all." If you're like, "Look, I wake up in the morning. Some days I just don't get a ton of sleep and I need something to get me going. Not every day, but sometimes." I'll be like, "Hey, look. Consider green tea, black coffee, some diet soda or, uh, all the way up to a pre-workout if you need it." But some people take it kind of as like a, a r- like a religious thing, as a habit, uh, as a ritual. And it's like, dude, you're training your forearms and biceps for 20 minutes total at 9:00 PM. You do not need three scoops of pre-workout for that. I don't even know where it's going at that point. So some people get a little crazy with the pre-workouts. The end of the world. It's at- at- at best, needless.

  18. 51:49 – 57:16

    Calories Are The Only Thing That Matters

    1. MI

    2. SB

      What's your stance on the whole idea of calories in, calories out? A lot of people just focus on that as their- their sort of, their script to lose body weight, lose body fat, and gain muscle. Is- is that a useful frame to- to use, and why do so many people fail at it if- if it is a useful frame?

    3. MI

      Most people fail at it because they don't consider both the calories in and calories out side of the equation. And a lot of people fail because they're very bad at estimating food amounts and calories. They'll, someone will say, like, a tablespoon of peanut butter. "Steven, have you ever actually seen a tablespoon measuring cup? It does not look like mom's tablespoon where she takes the peanut butter and goes like ouch. That's like four tablespoons." And so they're like, "But I'm eating the calories," blah, blah, blah. Every time you take people into what's called a metabolic ward, which is a study center where you're not allowed to have visitors that bring you food, the workers only give you the food that you need, and all of your exercise and your output is controlled and monitored and so is your intake, no one has ever violated laws of thermodynamics. We give you a certain number of calories, and we expect you to lose a certain number of weight. There's a variance about that, but it, you're gonna lose the weight that roughly we predict. If we account for all variables, you're gonna lose almost exactly the weight that we predict. So calories in, calories out is incontrovertible. In among 90-something percent, 98% of people who do research in the field and are scientifically literate and educated, calories in, calories out is not controversial. It never has been. There are some people who say, "Well, calorie counting didn't work for me." That's probably because you did it wrong or you weren't even concerned about how much protein you're taking in or how many carbs or how many fats. There are other details that matter. Like, if you say, "I need a V8 engine in a car. That's all that matters." Like, okay, well, there's no steering wheel and there's no pedals. Cool. Like, well, okay, I need those things too. So calories in, calories out is the very core, 'cause without an engine, you're not going anywhere. But what types of foods you're eating matters a little bit. Are you getting enough protein, carbs, fats? That matters a bit too. So people like to just bash calorie balance and calories in, calories out as, "Well, it's- it's totally meth. It doesn't work." No, no, it works great. It's just not always enough to get you in the best shape you can. But if you do it right, as far as net balance weight gain or weight loss, calories in, calories out is actually the only thing that matters. Tissue-wise, is that gain mostly muscle or mostly fat? Is the loss mostly muscle or mostly fat? That has not so much to do with calories. It has much more to do with proteins, carbs, fats, the quality of food you're eating, nutrient timing, and all the rest of it. So calories in, calories out is amazing, super explanatory, critical, but it's just not the whole picture.

    4. SB

      A- and that's really it, I guess, because so many people say they've heard about calories in, calories out, but they fail at maintaining it. Now that's really about motivation and the psychology of doing such a thing. Um, some people have said to me that our bodies wanna defend our weight, so if we start eating less, we'll become a little bit more hungry. If we go for a run, after the run or after a- a physical exertion, our body will try and make up for it because it's programmed to try and defend its weight 'cause its weight correlates to our-... ability to survive.

    5. MI

      Mm-hmm.

    6. SB

      Um, why do people fail at it? Y- one of the reasons you said is because, you know, they're, they're not actually measuring the calories correctly, but the psychological reasons that it isn't, hasn't worked for some people. Can you think of many? Because when I, when people-

    7. MI

      Oh, yes.

    8. SB

      ... talk about calories in, calories out, if you look at the comments sections on those videos, people say, "I've tried this and it didn't work."

    9. MI

      Okay. So first of all, I typically don't look at comment sections of videos because comment section is not representative of the population. It's not representative of the people that watch your videos. It's not representative of the hardcore demographic that watches your videos. So just as a statistical artifact, every single claim by people against calorie balance in that comment section could be true for them, but they represent 1% of the population. So 99% of people, it works just fine. For 1%, they get into some kind of trouble. Usually that trouble is they didn't count calories properly, they didn't account for macronutrient profile, proteins, carbs, fats. They didn't account for nutrient timing or the kinds of foods that they're, they're doing and so on and so forth. And another one is, like you said, sustainability. How long do I have to count calories for in my life for me to get the body that I want and keep it? It's sure as shit not gonna be forever. So what I'll do is I'll count calories for a few months, I'll lose a lot of weight. Then I'll go back to eating on vibes and the weight comes right back. Absolutely. So better than just counting calories, what we wanna do is instill people with good eating habits. If you learn how to construct meals made of lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, you know roughly how to see how much food you need and how much food looks at least like it's what you eat per day. If you're checking your body weight relatively often and when your body weight starts to get a little higher, you kinda clean up your diet a little bit, uh, and when your body weight's nice and low, you cook a couple cheat meals, couple kebabs, you know, burgers and stuff. That's all good. If you do that and you have those healthy habits, whatever weight you lost on calorie restriction, you can maintain with very, very little work, not counting a damn thing, just on good habits. But if you count out calories, you do some weird diet where you only eat, like, two f- orange slices and protein shakes or something, yeah, the calorie counting will get you wherever you need to go. But then afterwards, like, the diet's over and you're like, "A- so, so, um, now what do I do?" Like, uh, good luck going out in the world and eating the same diet that got you fat in the first place. That's the big kicker.

    10. SB

      People

  19. 57:16 – 58:52

    The Dangers Of Calories Out & Calories In

    1. SB

      might say it takes so much time to count calories, it leads to a- an unhealthy relationship with food. Think there's a big movement at the moment to try and get calories off menus because it's said to increase the amount of people that have eating disorders and things like that. Is that a, a, a conversation worth entertaining in this, in this regard?

    2. MI

      Sure, sure. Very few people will develop eating disorders based on increases in information they are presented. I would actually call that eating order instead of eating disorder. Most people who get eating disorders are highly at risk genetically and with a few other social circumstances. Eating disorders are, uh, for example, the most, uh, deleterious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa seen not exclusively, but almost exclusively in females of reproductive age. There ain't calories on a menu doing that. That's something you bringing to the table, uh, usually because you have the genetic proclivity for it and additionally because you've been in a social and cultural circumstance where not only were you the wrong person to get ridiculed for your weight, but also a lot of people ridiculed you for your weight. And then you go all careening off on this path where no one can even tell you're super skinny anymore because you don't believe it. So the idea that, uh, you're gonna see much higher prevalence globally in eating disorders from putting menu calorie labels on things is true by this much at the margins and is just largely not the case.

  20. 58:52 – 1:03:30

    Body/Muscle Dysmorphia & Mental Illnesses

    1. MI

    2. SB

      Adjacent to that is this idea of muscle dysmorphia, which affects a lot of people, but specifically men, roughly 87% of men that are between 15 to 32 years old that experience muscle dysmorphia, which is what?

    3. MI

      So muscle dysmorphia generally is for whatever level of jacked that you are, you think you are considerably less jacked both in reference to yourself and your own desires and in reference to an ethereal make-believe comparator population in your head. So if you were to ask me, like, "Hey, Mike, do you feel jacked?" And I'm like, "Nope." You're like, "Ooh, not good, not a good sign. Clearly he's jacked." And then you can ask me, "Mike, compared to other 40-year-old Ashkenazi Jewish men, how jacked are you?" And if I'm like, "I'm probably, like, bottom 50% for sure, probably bottom 25." You'd be like, "Okay, he's mentally ill, take him away." That is high-level muscle dysmorphia, a disassociation from any objective reality about how much muscle you actually have.

    4. SB

      Do people overestimate or underestimate their appearance as it relates to their muscles?

    5. MI

      Uh, dysmorphia is almost always cataloged as an underestimation.

    6. SB

      But, but from your experience working with people, do people think they're more jacked than they actually are? (laughs)

    7. MI

      (laughs) It really depends on the individual. Most people that are in gym culture that are very invested, if you catch them on their not-so-great days, they think they're substantially less jacked than they really are. And if you tease it apart via conversation, they'll end up being like, "Yeah, no, no, I know I'm jacked, but I'm just saying, like..." And then it's aspirational, like, "For my goals, I'm not as jacked as I would like to be."

    8. SB

      It's interesting because we typically think of women, I think stereotypically in society, as caring more about their body image.

    9. MI

      Mm-hmm.

    10. SB

      But I've, I've read a lot of stats lately that suggest men care equally about their body image, but just in slightly different ways and their-

    11. MI

      Mm-hmm.

    12. SB

      ... about the correlation between their perception of their body image and their own mental health and the link between the two.

    13. MI

      Sure, sure.

    14. SB

      D- do you see a lot of that? Do you see this link between mental health and male body image?

    15. MI

      Yes. Huge proportion of psychological proclivities are genetic.The others are very individually acquired, they change through time. It's not as easy as saying upbringing or family environment. So the one consistent thing about how you relate to the world and your own thoughts is genetics. And a lot of the traits tend to aggregate together, so it is true to say, on a spectrum, very nuanced, that some people aggregate a lot of negative psychological traits and some people aggregate a lot of positives. And there are absolutely people, everyone's a mixed bag somewhere in between, but there is a little bit of this kind of, uh, I don't wanna use a, a term for a- another mental illness, uh, a bipolarity to the distribution, right? And so a lot of people that are generally neurotic, they feel consistently, uh, unsafe and unsure of themselves, are gonna be also the type of people that when they get more jacked through lifting, they're still not gonna believe that they're as jacked and accomplished and awesome an alpha male as they really are, because they're always like, you know, to use the old Jewish joke stereotype like, "I, I, I'm never gonna be big." And it's like, you're already big. Like, "Oh, I don't know. It could get, it could get worse tomorrow." And a lot of people just bring that to the table, and so when you get neurotic people jacked, they don't think they're that jacked and they're always like, "Oh my God, it's always gonna end." But if you take not neurotic people and make them jacked, they, one week of lifting and to those people, they're like, "Dude, I'm like... Do you think I should turn pro in bodybuilding?" You're like, "Get outta here. You're just overconfident."

    16. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    17. MI

      So it really depends on who's doing the thing. Now cultural stuff, social, who's in your circle, I'll give you a good example. I have a lot of my closest friends have no relation to fitness whatsoever. A bunch of them are actually neuroscientists, just randomly people I knew in college that ended up being my friends for life. And so when they assess their muscularity relative to myself and my bodybuilder friends, they're like, "I'm in terrible shape and I'm not remotely jacked." And they have such a weird comparator population that I always remind them like, "Dude, not everyone looks like this." They go to the store, they go to school, they go to the bank, and they're like, "Oh, crap, you're right. I'm actually the most jacked person at the bank." It's just not like Gold's Gym where everyone's enormous, so if you happen to be in an environment, let's say you're a university student and you go to the university gym and there's lots of jacked people there and you're there all the time trying to do your best, you may, if you're neurotic to begin with, more neurotic, start to develop a sense that you're just not nearly as jacked as you should be or could be or whatever. But if you, like, hang out at an old people home with your grandma and grandpa all the time, you're gonna feel like Superman all the time because holy shit, you're like, you can do real things and move furniture

  21. 1:03:30 – 1:06:19

    The Myths About Weight Loss And What Hold People Back

    1. MI

      around.

    2. SB

      And, and so then going back to the point about weight loss, if I'm trying to lose weight, what are the biggest, biggest myths around weight loss that hold people back and inhibit them?

    3. MI

      One is you have to be perfect. If I'm on my diet, I'm good. If I'm off my diet, not only am I bad, but as soon as I'm off my diet, I have sinned and there is no solace for me. Um, I, a lot of people have that falling off the bandwagon thing where they'll eat clean food, whatever that means, diet food, for weeks and weeks and weeks. They have one kebab, they have one cheeseburger and they're like, "Fuck it. That's it, man. I'm done dieting. I'm not a good person anymore." It's like that whole dichotomizing and kind of a religious approach-

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MI

      ... that hurts a lot of people, because in reality if you just eat a cheeseburger, your body's like, "Oh, sweet, like, I got a little bit more carbohydrates stored in the muscle. I recovered a little bit more. My diet fatigue is actually lower 'cause you fed me some food. Tomorrow, I'm back on the diet, I'm making even better gains than if I didn't have that cheeseburger 'cause I was so exhausted."

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MI

      And so a lot of people have that approach completely backwards and they're like, "I'm either good or I'm bad." A- a- and that's really tough. Another one is people think that the approach to lose weight is the same as the approach to maintain it. Um, this is really, really, really nasty because so my wife is a, uh, board certified, uh, family med sports med doctor, and she does a lot of work, international Olympic teams, all that stuff. And she is looking at these formal recommendations from medical literature and it's like, here is the kind of diet you need to get, to lose weight. And then she was like, she followed up with some of the professionals and she's like, "And so what about maintenance?" And they're like, "Uh, yep." "What do you mean yep? What are you talking about?" That's not the conversation. So people think, "Okay, I'm gonna clean up my diet, no more ice cream, no more, no more crisps, no more Cheetos. I'm gonna eat super healthy, and then when I get to the weight that I want, I eat continuously super healthy and never have ice cream again? What kind of bizarre world is it?" And so they'll flop back to the other one where they'll try for a few months after they've gotten to the weight they like to just eat completely super healthy, clean, everything like that. They lose a little bit more weight, they're exhausted, they're tired, their food focus is driving them nuts. They'll eat some ice cream and they'll go, "I'm a sinner." And then ice cream, ice cream, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, up they go and then they regain all the weight. So a huge myth is the fact that yeah, when you're losing weight, you gotta pay a little bit more attention to what you eat. But once you've gotten to that weight, you both need some time roughly every three months that you diet hard to lose weight, you should be taking about at least two months at maintenance, just maintaining it. So if you weighed 100 kilos and now you're down to 90, after three months, for about two or three months just stay at 90. Eat mostly the healthy stuff that you were, but throw in a little

  22. 1:06:19 – 1:06:56

    The Biggest Myths Around Weight Loss

    1. MI

      junk in there. Maintenance, again, is much easier than losing. When physiologically and psychologically your diet fatigue comes down after those two or three months, you're able, if you'd like, to start dieting really hard again to get to that next goal that you have. Or you just live in balance for the rest. But if we tell you, like, "Here's your diet to make you lean and healthy" and you're like, "Okay, how long do I have to do this?" And the doctor's like, "Forever," what, what am I supposed to do? I'm never su- I'm never allowed to have tiramisu after dinner ever again? And they're like, "Well, try not to." That's terrible advice, and not only do medical people too often say that, most people have that in their heads, and it's, it's a very, very untenable situation.

  23. 1:06:56 – 1:12:04

    How Much Of Weight Loss Is Diet?

    1. MI

    2. SB

      One of the big sort of narratives that I was exposed to for most of my life about weight loss is that 80% of it's diet.What do you think about those ratios? How much of weight loss is determined by diet versus exercise?

    3. MI

      Yeah. Diet has a hu- bigger effect than exercise. As a heuristic, I'm very comfortable with 80/20. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is there's the constrained energy hypothesis. Uh, it's also called Pontzer's Paradox, based on Herman Pontzer's work in physical anthropology. And so basically they realized that the amount of physical activity that humans can do has a range, but if you try to get people to, like, double their physical activity, you say, "Look, I'm not gonna change my diet. I'm gonna work out twice as much as the next guy," your body becomes so fatigued so rapidly and your metabolism adjusts itself, your physical activity that's not planned exercise, like, how much do you get up when someone calls you? Are you still on the couch talking to them or how much do you get up and walk around your kitchen a bunch? Your body makes all these adjustments, so if you try to really outwork a bad diet, it doesn't work, and usually you just come back to the same physical activity 'cause you're too exhausted to continue, and then you fail. Whereas with diet, you can make some dietary changes, principle-based, like stop eating junk food every day and just eat two pieces of junk food on Friday and two pieces of junk food on Saturday. Just that alone is sustainable. Your body, as long as these are filling foods, a lot of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, you're not hungry. You're just like, "Damn it, I want a bag of chips." That's not a reason. That is mostly psychological, it's not physiological, and thus dieting is just able to take bigger chunks out of your calorie balance equation without d- completely destroying you. That has limits as well. You can't diet forever, so you have to take it in chunks. Another thing is this. In order to burn a lot of calories to lose a lot of weight, you gotta do some serious work. The average person will burn something like 100 to 150 calories per mile of run. Oh my God, you start thinking about it, like, a donut has 300 calories. How fast, Steven, can you eat a donut if I time you?

    4. SB

      Five seconds.

    5. MI

      Five sec- no problem, boom. You gonna run three miles after you eat each donut?

    6. SB

      No.

    7. MI

      It's insane. So taking your diet, cleaning it up, reducing the junk, reducing the calories is not that hard, but if you try to fight off the nasty extra junk food calories you're taking in with exercise, it's kinda like a three-to-one fight. Y- you eat two donuts at your work function after work, you have six miles to run that day. Nobody doing that. And that's why diet is such a huge factor. It's so easy to do, quote-unquote, "damage" with it, and it's much easier to take control of it versus with exercise, the boundary layers are just smaller, and what you would have to do to fight the bad diet is just grotesquely large and outside of those boundary layers.

    8. SB

      I think this a lot 'cause I think people typically assume that the way to lose weight is to go do a run.

    9. MI

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      That's typically... You know, you'll see people in the gym, and if you ask someone why they're on the running machine, they'll probably say, "I'm trying to lose some weight."

    11. MI

      Yeah. It helps a little bit, but if you run and you burn 200 calories extra per day, three days per week, then it's 600 extra calories you're burning through the week. That's good stuff. You can lose some decent weight like that. But-

    12. SB

      Aren't you just gonna be more hungry, though, afterwards?

    13. MI

      Uh, typically, exercise does not dependably increase your hunger in most people. So, uh, uh, depending on the context and the individual, i- i- it's not a dependable thing to say that doing more exercise necessarily makes you more hungry. Which is kinda cool because usually you're not really any more hungry, and if you stick- consistently exercise, but you control your diet, you're good to go. However-

    14. SB

      But is there a psychological component to that where because I've g- done the run, I now feel like I deserve it?

    15. MI

      Oh, yeah. That's huge. And some people do have a hunger response. But what you put in your body after that could be really healthy stuff that doesn't have a ton of calories, is really filling, or it could be like, "We're done running, pizza and beer," and then that's really bad news. But real quick, so let's say you're burning 600 calories extra per week by running two miles at a time or whatever, or whatever, you run an extra four miles per week, right? Six hundred calories per week. Okay, what is that? Well, to burn a pound of body fat, you need to get 3,500 calories per week out of your diet, or do 3,500 extra calories of activity per week. Six hundred's a drop in the bucket to that. You'll never notice. I mean, yeah, after a year, you'll lose, like, two or three pounds or five pounds or whatever. Nobody thinks in terms like that. But if they were to simply alter their diet and keep training to ke- keep the calorie burn at a moderate to high level but take food out of their diet, especially through junk food, the total calorie sink deficit they can make for themselves is now in the hundreds of calories per day. Now you're losing a pound of fat every week. Now you're having big results.

  24. 1:12:04 – 1:14:40

    Cardio Vs Strength For Weight Loss

    1. MI

    2. SB

      Is there a preference between doing cardio or strength as it relates to long-term weight loss? Because I'm thinking if I've got more muscles, then surely my body's gonna need more... It's gonna burn more calories.

    3. MI

      Just by a small margin.

    4. SB

      Oh, really?

    5. MI

      Almost unnoticeable. Yeah.

    6. SB

      So your- your body versus my body, you're not r- burning more calories?

    7. MI

      I a- How much do you weigh?

    8. SB

      Um, 90... I don't even know it in pounds. It's about 92 kilograms.

    9. MI

      Okay, solid. So I currently weigh-

    10. SB

      Which is?

    11. MI

      ... about 98 kilograms.

    12. SB

      202 pounds.

    13. MI

      So 202. So I weigh, like, 216 to 220 right now.

    14. SB

      So we're, eh, not too far off of each other.

    15. MI

      Not too far off, so i- even though I have considerably more muscle-

    16. SB

      In your opinion. (laughs)

    17. MI

      Of course. Uh, in my... (laughs)

    18. SB

      (laughs)

    19. MI

      In my very biased opinion right now.

    20. SB

      (laughs)

    21. MI

      Um, no dysmorphia here. Uh, I would be burning a teeny bit more fat, or more calories per day because of my h- higher muscle mass, but it's mostly my absolutely higher weight. So for example, the people in the world that burn the most calories and need the most calories to sustain their body weight are the fattest people in the world. That, like, lady that weighs 800, 900, 1,000 pounds, like, just to keep her the same size, it's 15,000 calories a day.

    22. SB

      Wow.

    23. MI

      And if it was all muscle and no fat, somehow she was 1,000 pounds of muscle, which would be sweet to look at, she would be burning, like, maybe-... 16,000 calories per day instead of 15, and probably even that's an exaggeration. Muscle mass doesn't help you burn tons of calories. That's not what it's there for. It is incredibly good for your health. It is incredibly good for how you look. Those things by itself make muscle mass an awesome thing to do, but it is neither true to say that cardio reliably over the long term burns lots of, uh, weight off, and it is not true to say that gaining lots of muscle burns lots of weight off. What is really, really critical is do you have a well-controlled nutritious diet, and do you have an average moderate to high level of daily physical activity? Dancing and swimming and running and having fun and chasing your kids. If you're on the higher end of activity, not psychotically high to where you get super tired, just not being a total sl- like, slouch, and making sure you're aware of your body and your diet, that's what really pays these massive dividends in long-term weight control. It's not like, "Well, if I put on a ton of muscle." That's great for everything else.

Episode duration: 1:59:06

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