Most Replayed Moment: The Science Of Building Muscle Faster With Smarter Training - Dr. Mike Israetel

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Steven Bartlett (0:30)

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

Mike Israetel (0:37)

Very good.

Steven Bartlett (0:38)

And the other one is periodization.

Mike Israetel (0:42)

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 fricking 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. Peek at an appropriate time, apps 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 evidence-based fashion, that is now what is considered a periodized plan. So that's how those two concepts relate to each other.

Steven Bartlett (1:40)

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

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

Mike Israetel (2:02)

One is specificity. It's the most important principle in all of sport training and exercise science. It's 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, what I want is a bigger bicep. Like, how many bicep exercises do you do? Like, I think upright rows, maybe.

Steven Bartlett (2:24)

So I want a bigger bicep. If we just focus on me getting Steven Bartlett a bigger left bicep.

Mike Israetel (2:30)

So specificity is telling yourself, okay, I want bigger biceps and whatever X, Y, Z 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 perceptively harder. You know, you do this, this, this, and in a couple of reps, you're like, that's what you want. Every real working set should be challenging. You should be working, 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.

Steven Bartlett (3:23)

And a set is a group of repetitions.

Mike Israetel (3:26)

Correct.

Steven Bartlett (3:26)

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

Mike Israetel (3:29)

One set. Yeah. And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy. 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.

Steven Bartlett (3:45)

So there's not a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do?

Mike Israetel (3:48)

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

Steven Bartlett (3:52)

Okay, we're off camera.

Mike Israetel (3:53)

All right, great. So it's 17 So there's just tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff. Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better to sets of five to 10 Other folks, even the same person could have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30 and to 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, and another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps, and their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 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.