Mike Israetel How powerful is muscle memory? (1:35) The amount of strength training required for the average person to build muscle. (10:01) Why in some cases doing less is best. (14:57) His demons and sharing his own personal journey. (19:00) Balancing relationships, family, and business. (23:20) GLP-1s are here to stay! (29:21) Any downsides to myostatin-inhibiting drugs? (35:05) Hot takes on reverse dieting. (38:45) Science-based vs. being a practitioner. (52:48) Calling out the cortisol junkies. (58:52) Why going down the difficult route is how you are going to get in shape. (1:05:30) What advice has he changed his mind on? (1:12:14) Highlighting the indirect results of taking a GLP-1. (1:16:48) The downstream negative effects of “exercise in a pill.” (1:21:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** May Special: MAPS 15 Performance or RGB Bundle 50% off! ** Code MAY50 at checkout ** Colorado Experiment – Wikipedia Building Muscle with Adam Schafer – Mind Pump TV 207-OR: Myostatin Inhibition Synergizes with GLP-1R Agonism to Accelerate Weight Loss in Male, Obese Nonhuman Primates Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Michael Israetel (@drmikeisraetel) Instagram Website Eric Helms (@helms3dmj) Instagram Hany Rambod (@hanyrambod) Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne) Instagram Melissa Davis, PhD (@regressive_underload) Instagram
Chapter 1: How powerful is muscle memory in regaining muscle after a break?
But if you get much bigger than a moderate amount, you end up during the course of your gain in size, incorporating satellite cells into your muscle cells. These satellite cells are basically just cell nuclei that kind of like come into the regular cell and they help grow muscle, maintain muscle and control all the functions of a muscle cell. It's kind of like,
If New York City, if Manhattan only had one fire department and one police station and one hospital for all five boroughs, it would be ridiculous and all the boroughs would burn down and everyone would die and the police would never get there because it's just one nucleus for a huge area. Your cells work in much the same way.
And so just like if a town or a city grows, it gets multiple precincts and multiple hospitals and multiple fire departments. As your muscle cells grow, the satellite cells incorporate into them and give them these multiple nuclei. The thing is, once you have a lot of nuclei in a muscle cell, once that cell shrinks down, the nuclei don't delete out. They just stay there.
And so when you start training again, you have multiples the power to manufacture muscle protein because the nucleus is what does a huge degree of the manufacturing and all the ultra structures around it. And so now you essentially have the equivalent of like ridiculous genetics when you're coming back. And so when you're coming back to regain that muscle, It happens unbelievably quickly.
And if you've ever experienced this yourself, you're like kind of in awe. You're like, what the hell? So I honestly anticipate that worst case scenario, after about six weeks of training again from taking six weeks off, I expect to be about as muscular as I've ever been. And it's probably pessimistic because probably after about four weeks, I should be very close to my best ever.
That's how fast it comes back. And it's such good news for people that have to take time off because I think there is this very understandable misunderstanding that many people have, which is they think, okay, I train and I'm big because I train. And I've been training for 10 years and I've gotten quite jacked.
And if I detrain for, let's say, a year, then I lose kind of a lot of muscle, which is like very true. And then however much muscle I lose, let's say I was pretty jacked, 200 pounds, pretty lean. And after a year of not training, whatever, motorcycle accident, whatever, I'm 170. What they do is they look back to when they were first 170 and Fucking six years ago. And they go, oh, my God.
Oh, my God. It took me five years to get from 170 to 200. It's going to take me five years again to put this muscle back on. But it really takes like five months. And so that is incredibly good news for anyone that's detrained. And it's news that's used in a really good way. Here's a good way to use this news.
Don't you dare get upset or down on yourself or disappointed when you have to have a layoff of training because it will come back so goddamn fast. And also because you're not pounding your joints into oblivion all the time and you're not pushing yourself through crazy hard workouts, both your joints and your mental aspects are going to be super, super refreshed.
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Chapter 2: How much strength training does the average person need for effective muscle gain?
Yeah, there's no way to figure out how you're going to get your best gains unless you experiment with training much less than you typically do, around the amount that you typically do, and much more than you typically do. And you do each one of these for weeks and weeks and even months if you can, and you very objectively analyze the result. In some cases, doing way less is the best.
In some cases, what you figured out over the years probably works really well. And in many cases, good news or bad news, is like, well, the more you do, uh, the better you get. Um, I have a friend who just, uh, he's, he's in his, um, uh, fuck it. It's Eric Helms. I don't know if you guys know who he is. He's a natural pro bodybuilder. He's in his early forties.
And he just kind of discovered that like the more volume he adds to his program, the better he gets. And he's making objectively the best gains ever in his fucking early forties. And he's like, man, it's like low key. I Cause I didn't want to have to do this, but I love training and it's great news. It's kind of like, damn, I really do have to do 35 sets for my biceps every week.
But for, for many people, they are 100% to your point, pushing it way too far. And it's just a matter of figuring out, I guess through mindfulness, if that sounds kind of lame, why, Why am I doing this? Like, do I really believe that throwing up after every leg day is my best path to success? Logically, like I have to talk to chat GPT and justify how I train.
Could I do it in a way that makes sense? Or am I doing this shit for vibes? And because, you know, my dad didn't love me when I was between the ages of seven and 10 or some shit like that. I made, I didn't make the class one Peewee football team. I made the class two team and I never fucking let that down. I'm never going to fucking hang my head down in front of another man.
So you bet I'm doing nine cents of hack squats today. I don't care if I have a Rabido every fucking workout, I'm a goddamn human adult nail and I will be granted my respect. If that's where the shit is coming from, like listen on vibes, dope, 100% dying on fucking hack squat. What a goddamn honor. But I'm like optimality and getting the best results. Yeah. then it's a different question.
You have to experiment with yourself. It could be more, it could be less, it could be way less. And I always get a bunch of shit, you know, in the comments, like with as many, it was a fucking ego move with as many followers as I have, you know, once you hit a certain level of bullshit, fake social media fame, the number of comments you get is like intractably large. And it's so many people.
And I say like, Hey, here's a way to train. Here's a volume. that you can do that science seems to show is kind of probably the best way to do it, I get a lot of people real fucking butt hurt. And number one reason they're butt hurt is they're doing some shit that's not bad, but they're really fucking emotionally attached to it.
Like it matters to them that they get to like, I often say like training all the way to failure is typically unnecessary for your best gains. And in many cases, a few reps shy of failure is even better long-term sustainability wise. And like I almost never hear a technical refutation And I almost always hear, like, you fucking pussy.
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Chapter 3: Why might doing less training sometimes lead to better gains?
They won't let them do it. They somehow get the audition. They blow it out of the water and the record label is like, do you want a deal? And they're like, nah, I'm good. It was just to prove that I could do it.
off my jewish ass i'm like motherfucker are you out of your mind it's a 50 million dollar record deal are you crazy where are you going someone bring that bitch back to sign that fucking contract you must be out of your mind so when this whole youtube bullshit happened i was like oh fuck i'm like junior league famous or whatever i was like i'm gonna milk this shit out for everything it's worth so i had to i had to take a step back
take way less gear, focus on more like balancing my physique instead of just training everything for size. And so that was a big deal. And then in addition to that, like, you know, being on trend and shit, not exactly good for my relationship with my wife. And so I was like, okay, that, that ship has sailed. Now I'm coming back into my physique phase, but it turns out,
I came basically back to TRT and I functionally lost almost no muscle and I was fucking blown away. I was like, oh my God, I've been taking way too much gear for so goddamn long. And so that was like, I would have never figured that out had I not backed off. So now I'm going to be coming back in the competition and I'm basically going to take no more than like 500 megs of total gear.
And I know for a fact, I can put a physique on stage. It's like 210 pounds fucking shredded, like the shredded thing. We'll see if it works out. That's aspirational, but like muscularity wise, no problem, no problem. And so I'm going to do that. So luckily the trade-offs aren't as big, but next time.
So then 2026, when I hope to come back to bodybuilding competitively, I'm going to have to carve out a lot of time from my day away from work, um,
um and to really do the thing right because like there's a reason they call it professional bodybuilding there's actually two reasons one is you have a pro card from whatever federation you're competing in that's reason number one reason number two is you are professional athlete which means that's what you do you fucking don't you have some you know commitments to your sponsors you post some fucking tiktoks for them every now and again you wear their t-shirt to the gym but that's it you play playstation
You bang your toxic Latina girlfriend, and you just fucking train, and you fucking go to sleep, and that's what you do, and you eat your meals. That is a reason. It's not that the guys are lazy. It's that you need everything possible to recover as much as you can. That requires tradeoffs. I was kind of trying to do it all at the same time.
I get pretty decent results at everything, and then decent isn't good enough. And so for me, next time I come through competition, I'm going to have to lessen the shit for a little while and then come back into it. But as far as will I ever want to back up and focus on other stuff? Like I could, I could tell you yes, but.
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Chapter 4: What personal struggles and demons has Mike Israetel faced?
And you can't have older women and older men Obese populations losing muscle because it tanks their metabolic health. It makes them fucking unable to take care of themselves. That's no good.
And so these companies have been working on these non-androgenic anabolics, these drugs that do nothing to do with steroids, no mood swings, no ball shrinkage, no yelling at your girlfriend and then crying afterwards and begging her not to leave. None of that shit. Some of it's fun, right? Trend is fun. It said no one ever. And then – So none of that, they just, these drugs are here.
And they, in several years, probably three years or less, depending on the FDA regulations, will be hitting the market. This will change everything. And I can't fucking wait because your boy's going to get fucking nonsense arms.
The motivation behind this has got to be the GLP-1s because those are blockbusters. They're changing. They're shifting culture. Yeah, the motivation before was for things like muscular dystrophy and muscle wasting disease, which is a big deal, but it's not that big of a deal from a market perspective like the obesity.
So we're basically going to reach the exercise in a pill mythology that people will bring up with those combinations. Are there any –
downsides to myostatin inhibiting drugs and because you're not working out you're not getting fit you're just building a bunch of muscle do you still get a lot of the same effects uh insulin sensitizing the yes okay but but are there any downsides why is myostatin exists in the first place like you know one of those like it's natural therefore it's good type of deal are they seeing any negatives
two percent of the people become insane and homicidal it's maybe just a chance i'm kidding oh god the ceo of regeneron's like getting you know i think all ceos have like one of those old revolvers in their desk that they take out to you know and and the whole thing when the stock goes down so that's what's happening um there's a reason that myostatin exists
And all of the other related compounds exist. And that is because muscle growth is two things in the natural evolved environment. At some point, totally fucking useless. Cause like take Ronnie Coleman in his prime. What exactly is the adaptive value of being 287 pounds of 3% body fat? Like, I mean, you're not really any better at hunting.
You're not going to be picking fucking pear trees any better to gather the shit. You don't weave baskets any better. So in a typical human evolved environment, it's fucking pointless. And the second thing is it is metabolically insanely expensive to build muscle and to maintain muscle. And so your body evolved in an intermittent starvation environment.
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Chapter 5: How does Mike balance his relationships, family, and business with his fitness goals?
But for that size of a girl, that's a decent amount of muscle. And now she's eating 2,600 calories and not putting on any body fat and staying lean or getting leaner. And it doesn't math. It doesn't add up to what the studies say. So do you think there's something more going on? What's the answer to that?
Yeah. There's like one answer that probably explains 80% of the variance. It's not very nice, but it's probably true. Uh, she was not eating 1400 calories. The way that people report their diet is typically like how you tell your dentist, you guys go to the dentist, right? Clearly you're all handsome men with great teeth. Um, The dentist is like, you've been brushing and flossing?
You fucking haven't. You've just been, you know what I'm saying? Like, is eating pussy a way of flossing? Yes. Then no. But, you know, like, you know, we're not great about it. Like, technically, the American Dental Association, I think, says, like, ideally, you should brush and floss after every meal. Fellas, what? Who the fuck does that? You don't do that.
But when your dentist asks you, you know, have you been brushing and flossing? A lot of us were like, yes, yes, ma'am. And yeah, like, that's just how it goes. So when you seek out the help of a trainer, there's this kind of like, it's like going to a religious figure, like a pastor. And he's like, how have you been? And you're like, great, really trying to live a Christian lifestyle.
And it's like, no, you haven't, dude. You're basically a professional gambler at this point. Yeah. But when you talk to Pastor John, you're going to tell him a nice story. And so when people go to trainers, there's that halo effect where they want to present their best case. I was working for a fitness company with my co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw.
Him and I were working for a fitness company in New York back in the day. I'm not going to say which company it is, but... Um, they were basically like, uh, it was a training company that had regular people come in and you train them as a private personal training studio. And the, the, the boss was like, here's a worksheet. You can give them a little thing for nutrition.
It's like a little mini diet. He's like, I'm going to tell you what's going on with diet. These people all are going to tell you that they eat in the following day. They're going to say they wake up and they have some eggs or some egg whites for breakfast. Um, and maybe some oatmeal. They're going to say they either skip lunch or they have a turkey sandwich or a salad with chicken.
And they're going to say they have some fish and some brown rice and maybe a glass of wine for dinner. And they're all fucking liars. And I was like, holy shit, this is the real world. I was just out of college. I was like, god damn, he's talking about real people. And the thing is, he was a mean, curmudgeonly Jewish man. But he wasn't wrong.
And so 1,400 calories is some shit like on their good days, they 100% eat. And fuck, man, they might have six good days out of the week. But when that cycle hits of the fucking time of the month, or just like a fucking, there's like a Netflix special on the real story behind the Friends series, they don't want you to know. And it's a five pound fucking episode series.
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Chapter 6: What are GLP-1 drugs and why are they significant in weight loss?
So it's a huge part of the equation, but it's not a standalone, a thing you can rely on. And, and, It's dope if you're a fucking pencil neck motherfucker and you've never lifted a lot and you can't look a woman in the eyes, even as an adult, to do PubMed searches and jack off a lot and then dunk on stupid meatheads in the comments. It's dope.
It's a cool vibe, but it doesn't get you all the way there to explaining all of the human variation you're going to see. If you've done the shit yourself, if you've competed, and if you've coached other people, you start to be like, man, the science makes a ton of sense. And in addition, there's all this other stuff from the real world that can super, super help figure a lot of shit out.
Yeah, like behavioral psychology. I mean, talk about, I mean, I'd love to hear because you have a PhD, right? So were you at one point? Were you the pencil neck nerd who was like that all science, all study? Or did you have a nice blend of experience and hands-on while also going through your PhD?
Tell me a little bit about your personal journey of coming kind of full circle as a coach, of kind of knowing how to meld all the science with the psychology, with everything. What's that been like for you?
Yeah. Well, that's a great question. I started out as a person who was good at science science, like in school, but I hadn't read any exercise science because there was hardly any. And so I started out just doing meathead shit. And then I started learning more science because I was like, yeah, some of this shit sounds dumb. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
And so I came into the science with a lot of my own preconceived notions and a lot of information, both from meathead shit and about how my own body was responding. But I hadn't really coached a lot of people yet. And then I started being very adept at the science, very adept at understanding my body, but I still hadn't coached a lot of people.
And then as I coached more and more people, it's that third tier that probably helped me learn the most, to be completely honest. Maybe not the most. It was indispensable. Because you can learn all the science you want and that's dope. It's actually the most straightforward part. Like if you're smart enough reading all the science and understanding, it's not that complicated. It's very accessible.
Learning about yourself is just going to require like years and years of trials and tribulations. But a lot of people learn stuff about themselves. They just assume it applies to everyone else. And then you can really tell apart who has learned science, who has learned science plus learned a lot about themselves through experimentation, and then who's actually coached a bunch of people.
Only through working with tons of other people, especially competitors, do I learn, oh, shit just doesn't quite work the same way that I thought it did. And so for me, the last thing for me to happen was –
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Chapter 7: What are the benefits and downsides of myostatin-inhibiting drugs?
In addition to that, cardio doesn't really do a whole lot of much for weight loss because your body just reduces your energy expenditure concomitantly and you just don't get a lot of it. It's healthy for you. If your diet is very set in stone, more cardio can help you lose a little bit more weight, which is meaningful for competitors and stuff, but it's not this big thing. Probably one of the
biggest variables is diet control. It means knowing what you're putting in your body by tracking slash programming what you put in your body, and then maneuvering from that. Because people will say, oh, I can't lose weight. I'm like, well, how much do you eat on average? Like, well, I don't know. Well, who the fuck? No shit.
Like, how theoretically would we be able to help you if you don't even know what's going in your body? So Getting these people to eat four meals a day of high protein and some fucking veggies, knowing what they're eating, and then going, okay, we have your maintenance. Now we're going to crank it down by 500. We're going to have you weight train. We're going to track your steps.
All of a sudden, fat mounts off, muscle builds. Because you're actually doing the thing for the first time. It's like people are trying to build the Lego spaceship or school bus or whatever they got, but they don't look at the instructions on the fucking back of the box. They're like, it's not a school bus. No shit. Do you ever try looking at the instructions?
You're like, well, I thought I could just figure it out. Well, that clearly didn't fucking work. And here's the thing. If you're some kind of genius savant, maybe you can figure it out.
The big irony here is that as a busy mom who doesn't get enough sleep, who's diet is shit, and she's in her fucking late 40s, and there's no one in her family that had very good genetics to begin with, she is working completely at a deficit on all of these things. And so for her to get in remotely good shape,
often requires a level of intricacy and effort and organization of diet and training that's like damn near competitor level. And the thing that, you know, that makes sense once you think about it, like, well, yeah, if you have everything going against you, you're going to have to do your best to, you know, to be as good as possible.
So that is always kind of a little bit of a shock to people when they're like, wait, I have to do all the shit to get in shape? Like, yeah. And another thing that's crazy to me is, This is understandable, especially with tech getting as good as it's getting. With tech getting as good as it's getting, you just expect things to work.
If ChatGPT doesn't get back to me with a perfectly polite, incredibly, incredibly intelligent answer in three seconds, I think there's something wrong with the internet, and I start getting fucking pissed. And that is understandable because tech sets such a high bar.
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Chapter 8: What is the truth about reverse dieting and its effects on metabolism?
And this is actually a great part of being a trainer and a coach is getting people to articulate their daily schedule and
and articulate why they can't go to bed at 9 p.m and watch them tell you that like well like i don't know like i just like to stay up with my husband and and watch tv for three hours and drink like three bottles of wine and order sushi at midnight i got it do you want to look like what you told me you want to look like yeah take three months off of that dumb have a protein shake go the to sleep at nine aren't you tired well yeah
go to sleep. All right. But it's kind of boring. No shit. You know, those people you look up to in the fitness magazines, you live in the most fucking boring lives in the world. I remember once Jay, they asked Jay Cutler, like after his second Olympia win, what he was going to do. He's like, well, you know, typically, uh, You know, I like to party it up at the Olympia.
So, you know, I normally go to bed at nine. And I think I think after the Olympia, I'll go to bed at 11. And everyone's like, what the fuck? What? That's crazy. Like, yeah, that's just that's how he lives his life. Like a fucking machine. You want to look like a machine. You do not have to live your life like a machine.
But you're going to have to live three months of your life like more of a machine. And so when you say, I can't get any sleep, I know you're fucking lying because you only work so long during the day and you just have a lot of entertainment built in. You're going to have to curtail that a little bit and start entertaining yourself in three months when you have the body. And good news.
Once you lose a lot of fat and you gain a lot of muscle, maintaining that look is like, I don't know, five times easier than getting it. Then you can start having wine and fucking mimosas and the ultimate killer of female physiques in the big cities, brunch. There's no amount of physique progress one fucking brunch can't undo. I'm convinced of this shit.
It's like the menu items in a brunch seem like they were made up just to see how many grams of saturated fat we can cram into products needlessly. It's like salmon. You're like, salmon, but it's dipped in a fat reduction, and then it's panko crusted, and then a fat-based oil, a fat-based sauce is strewn on top of that, and it's dipped again in fat flakes. What the…
the fuck like oh my god but you gotta try it it's so good i get that it's good you have to back the fuck away from that for a short amount of time one of my colleagues dr melissa davis is a fellow coach at rp and helped co-author a bunch of our books she made a huge huge point of this a ton where The diet, quote unquote, to get you in shape is not a lifestyle. It is temporary.
And one of the things I used to love to do to my high elite clients was talk that shit because they would be like, it's really hard to diet. I'd be like, oh yeah, no, for sure. You're totally right. They're like, yeah. I'm like, hmm. So you never went to school, did you? They're like, I graduated top five at Harvard Law. I'm like, but that was easy, right? They're like, no, it was brutal.
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