Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Recovery & Stress Management - Dr Mike Israetel - #842

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Mike Israetel. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. Muscle building and fat loss are often the main focuses of bodybuilding, but what about recovery? What are the most effective ways to recover quicker, reduce stress and get more jacked in the process? Expect to learn what it means to actually recover from fatigue, how recovery is measured if you're not a professional athlete. Dr. Mike's thoughts on regular weed usage, science's most effective ways to reduce fatigue, the biggest mistakes people make when trying to recover well, what evidence there is for supplements, saunas and coal plunges, and much more. Me and Dr. Mike are spending an increasing amount of time together, not just because he is a man crush and apparently we look alike according to a Q&A from a few months ago, but also because we are developing a product together, which I really want to say more about, but can't quite yet, but is going to be so phenomenal and exciting when we finally do, and it won't be that much longer. But more than all of those things is the fact I think he's the best voice on the internet when it comes to science-based health and fitness advice. The evidence-based movement, which he is at the head of, is fantastic. After decades of trawling forums with bro science, which although entertaining was largely useless, Mike doesn't couch surf, he doesn't sugarcoat it, he just tells you exactly what is going on under the hood of any question you've ever had. And today is so cool. It's so different to what most fitness advice is on the internet. And I really, really think that there's tons to take away from it. So please enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Mike Israetel.
Last time that we spoke, we spoke about fat loss. Time before that, we spoke about muscle building. And today, I wanna talk about recovery, which I guess is the other side of all of that. We've talked about stimulus, we've talked about what's sort of going out in terms of an energy flow. Now talking about how we can get some of that back. So how do you come to think about recovery going on? What's going on under the hood of recovery?

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (2:29)
yes, so it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of maintenance of a machine. But it's not an analogy, I would call it a homology. It's actually the same thing. Humans are machines, period. There's no analogy there. Humans are just machines that are designed by evolution instead of willful conscious agents as far as we can tell. And human machinery is real deep structurally because it goes all the way down to the nanotech level. We don't actually have quite machines that good yet. The iPhone comes pretty close with its little teeny microchips. But the human machine is in the context of sport or getting jacked or getting leaned, operates under all the same rules that machines do. And as machines do high output performance, they take on wear and tear. And there are various things that you do to machines after the factory closes at night that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day, including athletic performance, trying to lift to get jacked, so on and so forth. So the normal state, the uninterrupted state of a high-performing athlete or really any human that wants to get jacked and leaned, etc.
is sort of everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place. So there is a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere degraded in a junction. The vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter empty or refilled.

**Chris Williamson** (4:07)
What's a vesicle?

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (4:08)
So it's this little kind of ball of basically a membrane inside of it, it's like a little bubble, it has neurotransmitters. So at the end of your neurons, when you want the neuron to talk to something else, the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron, that internal becomes externally dumped in our transmitter and that does whatever it does. Now that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact, unfraid, combined with a hormonal situation, which has a high degree of testosterone, relatively low degree of stress hormones like cortisol, a situation in which the nervous system of the person is not depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant, which is fight or flight. This nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance, which means it is in relaxation mode. Your glycogen and your muscles, the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do in athletic terms, those stores are full. And so everything's kind of really good. And then we have to talk about what happens when you run that machine and run it close to its limits.