I recently sat down with Dr. Mike Israetel – exercise scientist, professor, bodybuilder, and the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization.

Here’s an overview of what we discussed:

• Mike Israetel on how losing weight can upgrade your life
• How Mike Israetel would get the best results someone who has minimal time
• Mike Israetel on healthy eating and it’s simplicity
• What beginners can learn from “hypertrophy training”
• Does Mike Israetel do “mobility training”?
• Mike Israetel on finding inspiration 

I’ve shortened our full discussion for this post, so If you’d like to explore in greater depth (and hear all of Dr. Mike Israetel’s wonderful analogies) watch the full interview here.

Matteo Marra:

I’m excited to pick your brain about how people get in shape when they don’t have a ton of mental bandwidth for it, and maybe aren’t feeling motivated to start. 

To start off, something I’ve noticed in the guys I work with is when they lose a large amount of fat their life just gets so much better.

I’m curious, why do guys seem to upgrade their lives when they get in shape, and, did you experience anything like that? 

Dr. Mike Israetel:

I have a bit of a unique experience with this myself because I purposefully got out of shape when I was “super-bulking”. When I debulked and I lost a lot of fat, things definitely got better. 

There’s a couple of ways in which things get better when you get leaner. 

The first is how you move around and fit into things, like fitting into your car door, getting in and out of your car, just taking walks, going hiking with friends, and turning over in bed. But if you lose lots of weight, you become lighter and start to feel more free physically, which is a big deal.

You can imagine that losing a lot of fat feels like you’re taking a bunch of coats off.

In addition to feeling like you’re more free, you actually have perceptively more energy, because the amount of energy it takes to move your body around is now much lower.

Since you’re metabolically healthier, and you’ve been ostensibly training as well as dieting, you have more daily energy to do stuff with.

Another big thing is how you perceive yourself.

If you think you are over-fat and think you are unattractive, then you’ll have a bit of a harder time in the world, especially if you’re of reproductive age and you don’t have a partner yet.

And even if you do, you’re likely going to feel a little “less than”. When you’re out of shape and you feel like that, that feeling follows you everywhere. 

And then I suppose, lastly, though this is not an inclusive list, how other people perceive you. 

It’s been shown time and time again in the research literature that people perceive leaner people as more moral, and they give them a little bit more moral leeway than they do people that are very much out of shape. 

Some of that is really nasty and discriminatory, and some of that is statistically valid. Either way, people are less likely to be interested in you, or impressed with you, or have the best thoughts about you if you’re clearly not in very good shape.

So, you don’t think you look good, they don’t think you look good, you feel like crap, and you have lower energy than usual.

If someone can reverse all four of those things within a year of working with you, they’re going to feel like it’s kind of unicorn times. 

I guess everything just seems better. It’s an amazing feeling, and everyone should have a chance to experience it. 

The tiny little downside, I just have to say for being intellectually complete, is some people who get a whole lot of that euphoric feeling, but don’t know how it breaks down, and don’t know how to get it for others.

They’ll go hook, line and sinker into a pyramid scheme/fitness Ponzi scheme, where they’ll say, “It’s changed my life top to bottom, I’m a totally new person”.

Meanwhile, It’s probably that you’re really high off of people thinking you look good, and you feel good and look good.

So we should, as adults, seek to understand that this feeling definitely takes you somewhere, but It doesn’t take you everywhere.

There are limitations to what I can get out of fitness, but it’s very nice to recognize, not only yes, am I experiencing these great feelings, but also if I’m a coach or if I’m someone who wants to lose more weight, I can remember that more of these kinds of feelings are probably headed my way if I’m successful.

Matteo Marra:

That’s awesome. The next thing I wanted to ask is regarding training.

If someone were to say, “Hey, I’m looking to give the least amount of effort that I can.”

What would be the things they should focus on? Is it more daily activity? Is it really just dipping into the nutrition side of things? Or should they be making lifestyle interventions to get stuff moving in the right direction? 

Dr. Mike Israetel:

I know enough about sports science to know what actually has the best effects for the least amount of time. It’s not something people would intuitively come to, but if someone wants the lowest hanging fruit, they would be best off doing two things at the same time.

One is to train with weights twice a week, for 30 to 45 minutes at a time. For beginners that’s doing whole body training with minimal rest breaks. You can actually get an unbelievable amount of muscle gain from that, and that’s enough resistance training to do for at least a year, possibly in perpetuity to get what many people would consider more than enough muscle on their body. 

Most people don’t wanna be jacked, they want to get leaner and find that underneath isn’t some Willem Dafoe skeleton-like character. No offense, Willem Defoe, but most people want to look more like Chris Evans.

People really have a poor understanding of this intuitively because they usually compare themselves to pro bodybuilders and other crazy athletes. They’ll say, “The Rock train six times a week”. But that’s why he looks like The Rock. The bare minimum effort is not going to get you looking like The Rock.

If you check your nutrition for the whole week and train twice every week with weights for 30-45 minutes, you’re there as far as putting in the two things that are going to make big, notable changes. I’m not saying it’s the optimal program, but it’ll get the ball moving in a big way. 

The second part of this is all about nutrition.

If we sat down next to each other on a plane and you said to me “I cleaned up my diet and I’m lifting weights twice a week, that’s all I got time for”.

You are so well on your way – don’t you let anyone stop you!

When I say “cleaning up the diet”, I mean that either all, or the preponderance of your food, should be “healthy food”.

And that’s actually not confusing.

Most people will pretend like that confuses them because they don’t want to avoid having to stop eating the foods they know are unhealthy.

But really there’s a list: veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, and healthy fats. It really is just those food categories. Ask yourself these questions about something you’re eating:

Is it a veggie? Is it a fruit? Is it a whole grain? Is it a relatively lean protein source? Is It a healthy fat? As in, is it nuts, nut butters, olive oil, canola oil– or is it something like bacon grease? 

If you stick almost exclusively to those healthy foods, the probability that you’re going to overeat is very, very small. 

You don’t even have to cut calories, just start eating healthier. How do I say this without exaggerating– almost nobody gets fat and stays fat eating mostly healthy food.

Bodybuilders try to gain weight eating mostly or only healthy food, and it’s the toughest thing in the world. If you just say, okay, no more junk food, at least for the next 12 weeks. You’re going to be losing pounds and pounds of fat a week in most cases, and that’ll really transform you.

So I would say those two things alone, train with weights twice a week, and eat mostly or only healthy foods.

Matteo Marra:

Something I’ve noticed through incorporating some more ‘bodybuilding-style’ training principles into my own training, is that things feel incredibly good. For someone just getting into this stuff, there’s nothing crazy explosive or demanding crazy coordination.

This seems like a good entry point for someone who’s just getting into things.

Do you think there’s something that just an average gym-goer getting into training could learn from maybe a “bodybuilding-style” approach?

Dr. Mike Israetel:

So bodybuilding technically is a sport in which you compete in minimal clothing, going through poses and being compared to other people.

What happens under the hood with bodybuilding is something called hypertrophy training, which is a training to maximize or maintain muscle growth. And that style of training is also the style of training that almost all “gen pop” people need to be using. 

When people start training and they’re just sort of regular folks and they want to be able to go to the gym, they’re not going to the gym for some mysterious reason. They’re going to the gym because there’s an outcome variable or set of variables they’re looking to improve. 

One of the big ones is health, and one of the big ones is strength, but the biggest one by far is body composition.

People want that better shape, so bodybuilding-style training is amazing because it gives people the results they want, but also because of the way we do it at RP, it ends up being amazing for your joints and amazing for your full body function. 

At RP this means using controlled eccentrics, with pauses, with deep stretches, and with very, very, very good technique.

People ask us all the time  if we do “mobility training.” We are mobile through the entire range of motion of the joint. We’re strong through the whole range of motion. That is the definition of mobility: strength multiplied by flexibility.

That checks the boxes of hypertrophy, but it also checks the boxes of supporting human movement and bodily health really well. And in a sense, it’s probably the best way to train for full body movement and health, because you want to be able to hit strange positions at the end of your range of motion and be strong in them. And it also checks the box of getting you all that hypertrophy that you wanted, which is why you’re in the gym to begin with, to get the sexy body of your dreams.

I don’t like to encourage people to look at hypertrophy training as this very exotic thing that only bodybuilders do. A lot of times really it’s what almost everyone should be doing.

There’s a lot of terms that people use to describe training, most of which are not clear. 

The first one is “weightlifting” and that’s wrong because weightlifting is a sport at the Olympics. So the snatch and the clean and jerk, that’s the only thing weightlifting is. 

There’s another term called “resistance training”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s very general. Strength training, power training, ballistic training, that’s all under the umbrella of “resistance training”.

A lot of times people will say “strength training” – you’ll see this used in muscle magazines and women’s health magazines: “the benefits of strength training”.

Nobody’s actually doing any ‘strength’ training.

If you look at the pictures of the girl doing this stuff, the repetition ranges, and you look at what they’re talking about as the outcome –  it’s physique sculpting training, which is really bodybuilding training. 

At the end of the day, most beginners really just want what hypertrophy training can provide. 

For most people who want to be strong and healthy, plus the 90 percent of it they leave out, which is to look good in clothes and naked – hypertrophic training is the way to go. And it’s not “bodybuilding training” because bodybuilding is training to get a speedo on you, and go step on stage and flex your muscles.

Hypertrophy training is used by both regular people and by powerlifters and by bodybuilders. But the regular folks who use general hypertrophy training are going to find that it’s giving them pretty close to the best combination of results.

Matteo Marra:

That is incredible. I wasn’t expecting you to say it as definitively as you did. Hey, look, this is maybe the best place that people could start. I really love where you mentioned mobility. I heard, maybe Alberto Nunez or someone say, look, this is all just loaded stretching. 

When you’re going and doing deep squats, like what else is that, but loading into deep places?

It sounds like the principles you really highlighted that make this so agreeable for most people are controlled movement, deep range of motion, and moderate loading ranges, if we can call it that.

Dr. Mike Israetel:

Yes. What I would say is, and there’s a lot of reasons that beginners, I believe, should start with sets of five to 10 reps, but just real quickly, a few of them. 

It’s enough reps to learn stuff, but not so many that you get exhausted.

If you do try to do sets of under five reps, the reps are so heavy that folks can screw up the technique. And not only is it a little bit dangerous, but also too heavy for you to really do it right.

So for that reason, sets of 5 to 10 are great, but they are also right at that rep range where you get lots of strength enhancement for people that haven’t trained before, plus hypertrophy enhancement.

If you want to really specialize later, that’s such a great place to specialize from. It’s safe. It’s effective. It gives you a kind of a taste of all the results that you’re going to get. And then if you ever really want to go towards extreme hypertrophy or extreme strength or extreme power, that’s totally cool. But nothing beats that base of starting with sets of 5 to 10 full range, eccentric control, good technique, compound heavy movements. 

Matteo Marra:

Damn dude – that’s practiced. That’s very nice. I love that. That is just awesome, man. This approach gets you everything without giving you too much of the things you don’t want. 

I watched a video that you had, about getting motivated to lose fat through dieting, and one of the most interesting sections to me was when you talked about inspiration as the spark to getting started and seeing results.

To wrap our time up, how can people find inspiration to start?

Dr. Mike Israetel:

Yeah, inspiration is interesting. I had reached a point in my academic career where I was tasked with teaching an exercise behavior course.

So it was a question of, why do people behave a certain way towards exercise?

What are the ways we get them to stick to it more? 

What are the stumbling blocks? 

But there was not one grand unified approach.

A transtheoretical model came the closest, but it had a bunch of big holes and it’s something like a theory of planned behavior.

So I had to redo all that stuff myself and kind of re-architect the theory. And what I came to is, that, there were a couple of different distinct things going on, like inspiration, motivation, intention, discipline, habit, et cetera.

These are all distinct concepts, but they all occurred on a timeline. So they were linearly escalating, which is really convenient.

The problem was a lot of people had misunderstood some concepts, and they didn’t understand the framework. So they would say, “the number one thing in getting your goals done is discipline”.

But actually, if you look at it, discipline is only the thing that is your non-system. It’s your reserve battery. You can’t just run it all the time. So any day in which you’re totally in the dumps, you just totally have no idea why hell you’re even doing this. 

Willpower says: “Hey, just shut up and get through it!” 

Great.

You can’t do that for five days. You can’t do that for 10 days on end. 

So you have to realize there’s all this other stuff going on.

It’s up to you, or up to your coach, to arrange these things in such a way that you kind of hop from lily pad, to lily pad to get across the lake-sized chasm so you can meet your goals.

The first lily pad is inspiration.

Really it’s the left bank of the lake, not even a lily pad yet. You’ve got to have a reason to jump across all the lily pads to get to the other side, and inspiration is that reason. 

There’s a very decent argument that you actually will not accomplish any results unless you are sufficiently inspired, kind of by definition, to do something about it and to change your ways, even if that inspiration was like “Ah – fuck it. Why not change my body?“

It’s usually something more profound, especially with folks that have been, dare I say, “politely ignoring the problem”. And I don’t mean that this is some kind of sociological problem and that fat people need to lose weight– I love you one way or the other.

But if they didn’t like their bodies for a long time, maybe weeks, maybe years, then things have been bubbling up. Inspiration often comes from a stark realization of: “I can’t do this any more”.

Now, how long is that feeling going to last?

It might last long enough for you to go to Matteo Marra’s Instagram and book him for coaching, but it might not.

A lot of times, inspiration is this little firework that goes off that nobody called, and then goes away. It’s a fleeting groundswell of emotion, but sometimes the groundswell is so high that it compels you to do something.

And sometimes that’s enough to get you started.

Now, as soon as you get started, inspiration is no longer the thing. And that’s why people get it twisted again.

They’ll think, okay, I need my Instagram feed full of inspiring stories.

Well, hold on a second.

Once you’re kicked into your process you need a goal and you need to aim towards something.

What inspired me to go hiking was that I need to get in shape. What motivates me to finish is I know the hike is two miles long and there’s little way points at every quarter mile to tell me I’m almost there.

It’s the goal that I need now. And that’s something that I need help with, but it has to occur first as inspiration.

Try to imagine having a goal without inspiration! Like, do you feel inspired to run a marathon? I sure don’t. If someone’s asked me, how much motivation do you have to run a marathon? I’d be like, literally zero. And they might say, why, what’s wrong?

But nothing is wrong, I just haven’t been inspired to do it. 

One of the most, in a sense, difficult questions that I’ll ever get is the following – and this is a question I’m sure you’ve gotten before.

They’ll say: Hey, just getting real. It’s really tough to get motivated, to go to the gym and eat healthy. What words of wisdom do you have for me? What they mean is inspired, not motivated.

But, I don’t know, Matteo– what do you tell people about that? Inspiration’s got to come from within. 

So a lot of times I feel the least competent, or least powerful to help people when they say that they need motivation/inspiration. They came to the wrong place, because it’s got to come from within, at least at some level. 

One of the things at RP that we say is that when you’re ready to come get in shape, we’ll get you there.

If you’re not ready….well I would love to help you, but I can’t do it for you, and I can’t do it against your will. Does that make sense?

Matteo Marra:

100%. You’ve got to have that origin story, whether it’s a negative start or an aspirational one.