If someone has a PhD in something, I tend to think they’ve earned some degree of respect and their ideas at least merit some attention. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be right, but at least one should listen, potentially learn, and give their thoughts some consideration as possible candidates for truth. That’s truth with a small “t” unless we’re talking mathematics where things can actually be proven and shown as True with a capital “T.”
Mike Israetel has a PhD from East Tennessee University. I don’t know how intensive of a program this is or whether it’s an online degree or what have you, but that isn’t the point I’ll be driving at. Let’s just give him the props for obtaining an advanced degree in Sport Physiology and move on from there.
I first heard of Dr. Mike when I used to read Juggernaut but I don’t recall his writing making any lasting impression. I became most familiar with him as a frequent guest on the Revive Stronger podcast hosted by Steve Hall, who seems to be a fan of the good doctor and follows some of his hypertrophy programming methods. Dr. Mike is probably best known for his ideas around training volume with his volume landmarks concept that include things like Minimum Effective Volume, Maximum Adaptive Volume and Maximum Recoverable Volume. He uses these concepts to program hypertrophy training by increasing the number of sets one completes during a “mesocycle” of training, i.e. a certain period of time that comprises this cycle of training. He also proposes that things like a pump during a workout, soreness after a workout and some level of fatigue are subjective indicators that you might be on the right track in terms of how much volume you’re doing. Another of his ideas is that after pushing to the Maximum Recoverable Volume at the end of the cycle, one is to deload the training to low volumes with easier workouts which will allow fatigue to dissipate and adaptations to take place, wherein you begin another cycle with low volume that will still be effective because you’ve become “resensitized” to training.
I have considered these concepts at some length, and ultimately concluded they are more gimmick than actual productive methodology. Something to call your own, sell some books and perhaps pick up some clients. I’ll explain why.
First of all, hypertrophy is a product of mechanical tension being applied to muscle fibers, which creates a chemical signal to the body to increase protein synthesis and add new proteins to the stressed fibers. They literally grow from this response. The body has lots and lots of muscle fibers, and most don’t do much during daily activity, but will be engaged when the first fibers either can’t handle the load put upon them or fatigue as the load is repeatedly put upon them. More fibers are recruited to produce the force necessary to move the load placed upon the body. So we can cause hypertrophy by repeatedly moving a light or moderate load to the point of fatigue, or by moving a heavier load that requires the body to activate lots of muscle fibers to move it.
As the fibers adapt to the experience by adding new proteins, they are now slightly larger and capable of producing more force. This isn’t a permanent adaptation so you can’t just do some exercise, grow new muscles and be a larger version of yourself. Your body will only maintain the amount of muscle needed to accomplish its goal of eating, sleeping and procreating. In order to keep growing, or even to maintain the new levels of muscularity, you must continue to stress the muscle fibers through the same process.
Studies have shown individual responses to exercise vary quite dramatically, but we can see some trends in the literature. As one adapts to this continued form of resistance exercise, placing mechanical tension on the muscle fibers, a more concerted effort is required to fatigue the fibers further. If you could only do 10 repetitions with a certain weight when you first did an exercise, at some point your body will be able to produce those same 10 repetitions without recruiting as many fibers and without fatiguing them to the point where the chemical reactions take place. Hypertrophy stops. So you can try to move a little more weight. Or you can do more than 10 repetitions until you again reach a fatigued state. As you continue to do more work though, there’s a diminishing rate of return on the hypertrophy outcomes. One study showed that doing 10 sets of an exercise to fatigue produced 36% more hypertrophy than doing 5 sets. So double the volume of work, 36% better results. Other studies have shown no additional response as more work is done, and some have shown a decrease in results as even more work is done. There are some studies showing a dose response relationship that continues without any seeming plateau in improvement.
Studies have also shown there’s a limit to how much work can productively be done in one session. Doing more work than needed to produce the chemical reaction we’re after is not only not productive, but can be detrimental as it will impede your body’s ability to recover before you can repeat the activity.
So there’s a lot of nuance and subtlety in the literature and since we’re talking about biology here, there will never be a Truth we can point to, only things that seem likely, then probable and then more probable as we continue to study, hypothesize and experiment. Specific to Dr. Mike’s ideas, the first indication that this manipulation of volume over short time periods of 4-5 weeks should be viewed skeptically, is that expecting the body to adapt to a certain physical workload in one week doesn’t comport with the evidence. One can do 10 sets of a given exercise for quite a long time and produce results by applying the principles of fatigue that we know produce the chemical reactions to mechanical loading. We know that repetitions up to 30 in one set of an exercise will produce as much hypertrophy as loads as heavy as 3 or 4 repetitions. So if you’re doing 10 sets of a bench press, split let’s say over two training periods in a week, and you’re taking each of these sets to momentary muscle fatigue, i.e. until the set becomes difficult to continue, you will continue to elicit the hypertrophic response even if it takes 30 reps to get to the point of fatigue. Without increasing sets at all.
The second indication that ramping up training volume should be viewed skeptically is that hypertrophy is an adaptation to direct stimulus to muscle fibers. It’s not a technically complex thing to do, like say pole vaulting. The exercises that are most effective at producing hypertrophy are those that use the muscles in the way they have evolved to move. Bending the arm at the elbow for example, is something your bicep muscle does quite naturally. It doesn’t require you to learn any new skill. There’s no reason that after bending your arm for a few weeks, you need to stop bending it to allow some kind of recovery that isn’t happening on a regular basis from the activity. In other words, there’s no need to create a periodized scheme of increasing the intensity, duration and workload to build systemic fatigue, then back off to allow the underlying improvements in fitness to appear so you may then perform at an improved level. This is a common athletic practice to produce the best possible performance on a given day. Hypertrophy just happens as a side effect of producing enough mechanical tension on individual muscle fibers.
Thirdly, there’s no evidence to suggest that one can be resensitized to training by training less for a period of time. This was a popular concept called Strategic Deconditioning by Bryan Haycock in his Hypertrophy Specific Training protocol. The idea sounds good, but the evidence doesn’t back it up, and as physicist Richard Feynman famously said, if the idea disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter how elegant, how reasonable, how beautiful, how much you love it, who came up with it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
Lastly, as far as I can tell, Dr. Mike just made these ideas up and proclaimed them to be a thing that works. That’s not very scientific of him. It’s really just a guess; or a hypothesis in science lingo. He should now conduct experiments, collect data and analyze the results. It wouldn’t even be difficult to set up an experiment to test this hypothesis. Get two groups of relatively trained folks, put them on the same program, with the same exercises, training to the same relative intensity, but one group follows the ramping volume up and down protocol and one does not.
Now, since this is my personal blog, let me get personal with you Faithful Reader. I don’t care much for the way Dr. Mike presents himself. He’s gratuitously vulgar for no particular reason. I’m certainly prone to using colorful, meaningless intensives in my speech, but not every sentence benefits from the work fuck. I find it loses its power when overused, and when stuck into a sentence that doesn’t need a meaningless intensive, it just causes me to tilt my head to the side like the RCA dog and furrow my brow.
More importantly, he uses wildly exaggerated examples to try to make his points. He’ll create absurd scenarios where someone only does one set of an exercise, or conversely does 10 sets every day and then concludes brilliantly that this isn’t fucking effective. He tends to give very lengthy answers to direct questions that don’t actually have a response in them after they’re dissected. In his “debate” with Lyle McDonald on the Revive Stronger podcast he sounded much like a politician, with long-winded rambles that went nowhere and said nothing. His position was ultimately that Lyle was a big meanie and he figured he’d ride that well known trait of Lyle’s to some kind of victory.
Yesterday, a paper was produced by several gentlemen in the same field, i.e. the muscle and strength field, specifically addressing Dr. Mike’s concepts that I have tried to repudiate in this post. Science is a self-correcting beast and eventually, someone, somewhere is going to do the correcting. Greg Nukols recently did so with several colleagues as they found suspect results in another researchers conclusions. Brian Minor, Dr. Eric Helms and Jacob Schepis (the only one of the three whom I have not heard of previously) took Dr. Mike’s ideas to task and while they didn’t find his personal style as distasteful as I do, they did find his volume progression scheme to be quite suspect. I’ve read it several times and feel a sense of vindication knowing my suspicions were valid. It’s all too easy to be led astray by gurus in the fitness world. I have been more than once. But I have learned, and progress is something I can feel good about.
Take a peek at this paper and then relish in the knowledge of how much the scientific method has done for humanity.
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