Category Archives: Fitness

Sad but true, Mike Israetel is a sham

I watched this video doing a breakdown of Mike’s PhD thesis. His thesis is riddled with failures across every page. His research was shoddily done, with worthless statistics, and with technical errors littering every single paragraph that he wrote. The thesis proves that he cannot do research, cannot write research, and probably cannot *read* research either, since he misunderstands many of the papers and articles he actually cites.

This is sad to me, because as long-time readers know, I followed Israetel and took his advice seriously.

Why it matters: You may say that a thesis is just some bs he did in college, and has no bearing on his current position. But Mike Israetel’s entire brand is based around his PhD, that he is a sport *scientist* and not just a jacked dude. He mentions his PhD in his every ad and video, and so he wants viewers and customers to believe that he’s giving them *scientific advice*, which would be based on *research and testing* and not just vibes.

Yet Mike’s thesis is proof that not only can he not do research, nor write a research paper, he can’t even *read* a research paper as he misunderstands and misrepresents the papers he cites. He tells his readers that the science that *other people do* is saying something completely different than what it actually says, and that’s a big problem.

So Mike’s advice and supplements and apps aren’t actually based on science, they’re based on vibes just like every other gym bro on youtube.

Why else it matters: Some have said that Mike’s PhD program wasn’t like a “normal” program, and shouldn’t be held to the same standards. His program works closely with a lot of US olympic athletes, and it wasn’t focused on research that will help the broader public, but on learning the specific techniques to help the specific elite athletes that Mike worked with.

But if that’s the case then Mike has no business claiming that his PhD gives his knowledge applicable to anyone in his general audience. He isn’t giving advice that you, the listener should actually take, his supplements and programs won’t help you, specifically, instead they are tailored toward the special subset of people who are genuine olympic athletes, and who require a very different program to succeed than what an average 9-5er needs

Likewise, if Mike’s program wasn’t held to the standards of a “normal” PhD, then it should not have *awarded* him a PhD and he shouldn’t call himself doctor. The standards of a PhD, the reason it confers upon you the title of “Doctor” is supposed to be because it proves you have met the highest standards for science and scientific communication. That you are not only knowledgeable, but able to use and communicate your knowledge effectively to help the scientific community and educate the non-scientific community at large. But Mike’s thesis proves he just can’t do that.

He has not met the highest standards for science, and he has not even met a *high school level* standard for scientific communication. And yet he still trades on his title of “PhD,” using it as a crutch to gain legitimacy, and as a shield to deflect criticism. It matters that his thesis is worthless and that his PhD was substandard, because is means his crutch should be kicked out from under him, and his shield should be broken like the trash it is.

Finally some have said that many of these criticisms are “nitpicks.” But it matters because a PhD-level of research is supposed to be held to the highest standard of quality. You aren’t supposed to publish something without feeling certain that you can defend its integrity and its conclusions, and yet it is clear Mike’s thesis was written without any thought whatsoever. If he had even re-read his thesis once, he would not have typos and data-fails across whole swaths of it.

I have had many typos in my own blog, but these are streams-of-consciousness posts that I usually type up and publish without a second read, I’m not acting like these are high quality research publications. Mike *is* claiming that his thesis is high quality, that’s the whole reason he got a PhD for it, so it being as shoddily researched, as shoddily written, and as completely absent of a point as it is really proves that he should never have been given a PhD in the first place.

So is that the end for my following of Mike Israetel? Will I stop doing weight workouts and go back to running, since everything he says about “how to lose weight” is clearly wrong?

No.

Mike’s research is crap, and it always did skeeve me out that he leaned so hard on his “Dr” label. I’ve never bought his app or his supplements, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take his advice. Most of what he says is the same as what my *real* doctor has told me with regards to losing weight. And while his PhD is bogus it’s clear he’s taken a few undergraduate level science classes and is more knowledgeable than most of the gym bros with a youtube channel.

Ultimately his advice is probably fine on the whole. The low-level advice he gives is mostly the same as what you’ll hear from non-cranks, and the high-level advice he gives is mostly his personal opinions like any other influencer. He’s probably correct in the broad strokes that weight-lifting and caloric deficits are the best way to lose weight. And he’s probably correct that you should focus on exercises that improve your “strength” and ignore exercises that improve your “balance” unless you have an inherent balancing issue you need to improve on. He’s probably also right that the hysteria around Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs is overblown, and that if they help you lose weight you should go ahead and use them. As he says: it’s ok to save your willpower for other parts of your life.

But I have no reason to believe his specific advice around high level concepts like training to failure, periodization, muscle group activation, etc. If you don’t know what those are, then it’s a good idea to ignore what he says about them and just focus on lifting and (if you’re overweight), cutting calories.

I don’t think Mike is a complete idiot who should be ignored entirely. I think he’s a hustler like any other influencer and if the things he says work for you, then do them. But he’s not backed by science like he claims he is, so ignore any of his ramblings if they don’t work for you. Talk to your doctor instead, or an *actual* exercise scientist, although if Mike’s PhD thesis is “the norm” for that discipline, then most exercise scientists aren’t really scientists at all.

I’ve long lamented that the fitness and sports landscape is overrun by bro-science and dude-logic. It’s ruled by the kinds of shoddy science and appeals to tradition that we would normally call “old wives’ tales.” But when a jacked dude says something crazy, like “you should lie upside down to regain your breath so that your blood rushes to your lungs,” a lot of people might say “well he’s jacked, he must know *something*.”

I had thought Mike Isratel was an escape from the wider landscape, and that he was perhaps a trendsetter for actual science to creep into this mess. But it seems he’s just another grifter trying to get rich. Ah well, such is life.

“I hate them, their antibodies are bull****”

I want to tell two stories today, they may mean nothing individually but I hope they’ll mean something together. Or they’ll mean nothing together, I don’t know. I’ve gotten really into personal fitness and am writing this in between sets of various exercises I can do in my own house.

The first story is from before the pandemic. I used to be a biochemist (still am, but I used to too). During that time I went to a lot of conferences and heard a lot of talks by the Latest and Greatest. One of the most fascinating talks was by a group out of Sweden who were preparing what they called a “cell atlas,” a complete map that could pinpoint the locations of every protein that would be in healthy human cells.

The science behind the cell atlas was pretty sweet. We know that the physical location of proteins in the body really matters, the proteins that transcribe DNA into RNA are only found in the nucleus because DNA itself is only found in the nucleus. Physical location is very important so that every protein in the body is doing only the job it’s assigned, and not either slacking off or accidentally doing something it isn’t supposed to. The first gives you a wasting disease and the latter may cause cancer.

So knowing the location of these proteins on a subcellular level is actually pretty important. But how can we even determine that? We can’t really zoom into a cells and walk around checking off proteins, can we?

The key was that this group was also really into making their own fluorescent antibodies. They could make antibodies for any human protein and then stick on a fluorescent tag that lights up under the right conditions. Then it was just a task of sticking the antibodies into cells and seeing which part lights up, that tells you where the protein is.

There was a bit more to it of course, I should do a post about how all this relates to Eve Online, but that was the gist of it: put antibodies in cells and see where the cell lights up. Use that to build an atlas of the subcellular locations of the human proteome.

It was some cool science and a nice talk. A few months later I was at another conference and the discussion came up of if conferences ever really have “good” talks or if scientists are incapable of anything above “serviceable.” I proffered the cell atlas talk as one I thought was actually “good,” it was good science explained well. The response I got from one professor stunned me: “oh I hate those people, their antibodies are bullshit.”

I don’t know how or why, but somehow this professor had decided that the in-house antibodies which underpinned the cell atlas project were all poorly made and inaccurate. That then undercut the validity of the entire project. I didn’t press further for this professor’s reasoning or evidence, I could tell he was a bit heated (and drunk) and left it at that. But while I never got any evidence against the cell atlas antibodies, I also never heard much in their favor. They seemed like a big project that just never got much recognition in the circles I ran in.

So was the cell atlas project a triumph of niche science, or a big scam? Well I don’t know, but it reminds me of another story.

As I said above, I’m much more into personal fitness these days. The Almighty Algorithm knows this, and so youtube serves me up a steady stream of fitness influencer content. I still stay away from anything that isn’t Mike Israetel or a few other “evidence based” youtubers, but even this small circle has served up its own helping of scientific slapfights.

In this case the slapfight is about “training to failure.” Most fitness influencers agree that you have to train hard if you want results. What exactly counts as “hard” though, that is where the controversy lies.

First of all, what is “training to failure?” Well unfortunately that too is controversial, because everyone has a different definition of what “failure” actually means. But generally, failure is when you are doing some exercise (a pushup, a pullup, a bench press) and you cannot complete the movement. Say you’ve done 5 pullups and you can’t do another, that’s “failure.”

Mike Israetel shows off example workouts of himself training hard, and he claims he’s training with “0 to 1 reps in reserve,” that’s a fancy way of saying he is training very near failure. If he does 5 pullups and claims he has 0 to 1 RIR (reps in reserve), then he is saying he could do AT MOST 1 more pullup, but he might actually fail if he even tried. He does this for almost every movement: bench presses, leg presses, squats, deadlifts, his claim of 0 to 1 RIR means he is doing the exercise until he can either no longer do it, or do it at most 1 more time before failure.

Failure itself is hard to measure, and sometimes you don’t know you’ll fail a move until you try. I once was doing pushups and just suddenly collapsed on my chest, not even knowing what happened. A quick assessment showed my shoulders gave out, and since pushups are supposed to be a chest exercise this implies I was doing them wrong, but that was a case where I clearly trained to failure since I tried to do the motion and failed.

But other fitness influencers have called Mike out on his 0 to 1 RIR claim, they think he isn’t training anywhere close to failure. The claims and counterclaims go back and forth, and unfortunately the namecalling does as well. I’ve kinda lost respect for the youtubers on all sides of this argument because of it.

But it gets back to the same point as the antibody story up above: a scientist is making a claim that they think is well-founded and backed by evidence, other scientists claim it’s all bullshit.

We think of science as very high minded and such, that science is conducted through solemn papers submitted to austere journals. I don’t think that’s ever been the case, science is conducted as much through catty bickering and backbiting as it is in the peer-reviewed literature. Scientists are still people, I’m sure a lot of us will be happy to take our cues from people we respect without spending the time to go diving into the literature. The literature is long and dense, and you may not even be the right kind of expert to evaluate it. So when someone you respect says a claim is bullshit, I’m sure a lot of people accept that and don’t pay the claim any additional mind.

So is the cell atlas actually good? Is Mike Israetel actually training to failure? I don’t know. I’m not the right kind of scientist to evaluate those claims. The catty backbiting has reduced my opinion of all the scientists involved in these controversies, although I understand that drunk scientists are only human and youtubers need to make a living through drama, so I try not to be too unkind to them.

Still, it’s a reminder that “the science” isn’t a thing that’s set in stone, and “scientists” are not all steely-eyed savants searching dispassionately for Truth. I don’t have any good recommendations from this unfortunately, the only thing I can think of is the bland “don’t believe scientists unquestioningly,” but that’s hardly novel. I guess just realize that scientists can disagree as childishly and churlishly as anyone else.

“I go with the athletes, not the science”

Sorry I haven’t written about finance in a while, I know science+finance (SciFi, if you will) was kinda my niche, but since I got serious about my fitness I’ve been recommended a lot of fitness content by the Almighty Algorithm, and it’s gotten me thinking.

Today’s topic requires just a tiny bit of background. As I wrote about, I’ve been following the advice of Dr Mike Israetel in part because he says all the right science-y shibboleths to make me believe he knows what he’s talking about. But I’ve also gotten recommended content from many other lifters who push back against some of his claims.

To an extent their pushbacks pass the smell test as well, they reference the same concepts that Dr Mike (and others) discuss, but they interpret those concepts differently. So the disagreement between Dr Mike’s “science-based” advice and other people’s advice seems to be a legitimate disagreement over the science, rather than a denial of science and the substitution of personal preference in its stead.

But other parts of this disagreement strike me as more… thoughtless. I watched a video critiquing some of the science-based conclusions, and it stated (paraphrased) “people say this move is terrible, but then you see world record power lifters doing it and you think hmmm, maybe it’s not so terrible after all.”

I think this appeal to authority has no place in a science-based discussion. Now yes, every scientific theory on exercise must be tested and proven *outside* the lab as well as in the lab. If a conclusion only works in a controlled lab environment then it isn’t necessarily best in the “real world.” But saying “well the best power lifters do this so the science must be wrong” is kind of absurd, because maybe they could be *better* if they actually listened to the science.

It reminds me of a story about Pliny the Elder. Pliny was a wealth Roman politician, whose wealth was derived mainly from vast agricultural estates. Not only that, he had extensive sources of the best knowledge available in the Roman world. So in his book Natural History, he draws upon his knowledge and experience to categorically state that *if you do not honor the gods, you will not be successful in agriculture*. And if you asked any of the Roman agriculturalists of his era, they’d probably give you the same answer.

Is the science on agriculture wrong? If all the best farmers honor the Gods, is that the only way to succeed?

No.

So if the best power lifters in the world are doing a certain move that science says is terrible, maybe the science is actually right and the power lifters are succeeding due to their own innate abilities combined with all their other training. I’d hazard a guess that a single move isn’t make or break to their training at all, and defending a move with this appeal to authority doesn’t really seem logical. It seems more like casting about for evidence to support an idea that you’d like to be true.

Science must be refuted with science. You have to be able to use real-world data and say “lab results say this move is bad but here’s all the evidence showing that people who eschew the move generally fail and people who use the move generally succeed.” You can’t point to a single piece of anecdote and say “well some people who use it succeed,” because then you’d be pointing to Pliny the Elder and saying “well I guess honoring the gods does improve your farm, because this guy was a really successful farmer and that’s what he did.”

Anyway, exercise science still seems to be in its infancy. I hope it gets more rigorous and comprehensive in the future, but it still seems to need some time before we can believe its claims as much as we can believe virology or chemistry.