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Dr. Mike Israetel

lines on the record: 21
first: 2025-05-30
most recent: 2025-05-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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. My god, I'm gonna have to restart all of us from scratch. 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 going to skyrocket.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, all the time. Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining. Oh, yeah, they've done studies where they purposefully lift for a while and they stop lifting for a long time and they see how long it takes to get back. There's one study I'm familiar with offhand that there's a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks. And there's 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 for a few weeks later. Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study. And so we were like, okay, 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 goes right back into regaining old lost muscle so rapidly that this is such great news because look let's say you lifted consistently most of the year”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of ten 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 lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep, and you stopped lifting for three months, and it looks about the same as when you started. If you really careful, like it gets a little bit bigger, but really it's just back to square one. Most people think, oh my God, another eight months 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 going to 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 in a few years, it comes back in a way that is so fast.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very true thing. 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 as when you started. It's just always going to be bigger until you reach your eighties 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 going to 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?”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to 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.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed 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 because that stuff comes back super quick.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food. They're stimulated in the workout, but that's just phase one. Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside the gym and it occurs not at any specific time point, like magic window of two hours after the gym. Like that's when all the growth occurs. That's actually when it just starts to go up. It's four days afterwards. So if you train twice a week, you train on Monday, you go on a lot of muscle Monday night, Tuesday and Wednesday back 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.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 drops off about a day or two later. If you train really crazy hard, it'll peak like a 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 your growing muscle at every single point, another 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, not seeing any results. Well, the results are actually created. When you're resting, when you're sleeping, when you're eating nutrition.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually training breaks down more muscle than a pills. However, as you go home when 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 a laboratory, you have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff. Every couple of hours they measure, the amount of muscle growth that's going on of the biceps goes up and up and up and up and it usually peaks about”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 us that you're like, ah, the metabolites, the 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 them molecular machinery that grows muscle for you again later to 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 we know it's probably 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 negative because the gym is catabolic. It breaks down your mind.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so 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 tens And when your muscles generate tension, the molecular detector machines go oh, we got tension here, and they start saying to other parts of the cells like, hey, 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 slash probably.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two to four times a week is what I say is kind of 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 the major muscles of your body in the same session twice or three times or four times a week and that is an awesome beginner fitness plan.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 an exponentially de-escalating amount of impressive differences. So one time a week work, it'll get your results. Two times a week gets you like one and a half times the results way better, better. Three times a week is like another little bit more result, still notable. Four times a week is like, you got to 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.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That answer depends on how much you've been doing before. 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 going to cause months and months and months of consistent progress. 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 Jem 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 twenty minutes twice a week, you're going to get great gains.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As long as they're not so tiny that you're on rep number 45 and you're like, I could just do this forever Were there not so enormous that you're like, I can't really even do two reps of this, anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps, challenging is really, really good.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, great. So it's 17 There is, so there's just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff. Some people, some of their muscles will respond better to sets a five to ten. Other folks, even the same person could have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of twenty to thirty and everything in between. But generally you get in the exercise science data, you'll have a group of people training for sets of roughly five reps, another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps, and their change in muscle growth over eight, twelve, sixteen weeks is statistically undifferentiable, which means if I delabel the groups and you don't know which one's which, you can't actually tell me who trained with higher reps or lower reps. For muscle growth, it's roughly the same.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One set, yeah. And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy. Anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set were the last few reps are getting close to you not being able to use good technique and lift the weights check plus.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So specificity is telling yourself, okay, I want bigger biceps and whatever XYZ other muscles. Then we move in to 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, this, and in a couple reps, you're like, That's what you want. Every real working set should be challenging. You should be approaching every real set with just a teeny teeny dose of trepidation. Like oh boy, here we go. I'm going to have to try. Once you have that.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is specificity It's the most important principle in all of sport gaining an exercise science is 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? And you're like, well, what I want is a bigger bicep. Like, how many bicep exercises do you do? I think upright rows, maybe.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 in evidence based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan. So that's how those two concepts relate to each other.”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, periodization is the scientifically based organization of any kind of training that you want. 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 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”
2025-05-30 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT