https://youtu.be/KExwR09QhyY transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your video to text with Sonix.

https://youtu.be/KExwR09QhyY was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best video automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular video file formats.

Mark Wulfe:
From the Aasgaard Company studios in beautiful Wichita Falls, Texas... From the finest mind in the modern fitness industry... The one true voice in the strength and conditioning profession... The most important podcast on the internet... Ladies and gentlemen! Starting Strength Radio.

Mark Rippetoe:
Welcome back to Starting Strength Radio. It's Friday and here we are again. This week we are pleased to have company on the show. You guys get tired of just watching me, I'm sure. Even though I am funny as hell, it's just it gets old just watching the same goddamn guy every single time.

Mark Rippetoe:
So we've asked our friend Mike Israetel to be with us today. Mike is holds a PhD in sports physiology and several other fields of expertise. And you may know him from Renaissance Periodization, his company. RenaissancePeriodization.com is his website.

Mark Rippetoe:
Mike does a lot of stuff that kind of parallels some of the things we do. He specializes in in programming, but more so nutrition than we do. We don't hardly deal with nutrition because our primary emphasis is dealing with novices and people for whom nutrition is a less critical component of their training.

Mark Rippetoe:
Mike deals with more advanced lifters and athletes and bodybuilders for whom nutrition becomes very, very critical. And this is one of his fields of specialty. And we're happy to have him with us today. Thanks for joining us, Mike.

Mike Israetel:
Well, thanks for having me on the show. It's an honor.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, I appreciate that and why don't you... Let's start off by giving people a little bit of a picture of your background in terms of where you're from and your educational background and your your competitive history.

Mike Israetel:
Sure. Thanks. So I was born in Moscow, Russia in 1984 and in 1991 when I was seven years old, my family decided it was time to escape communism as fast as possible. And we came to the United States and I grew up in metro Detroit.

Mike Israetel:
And then I went to undergrad at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Master's program at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and did one year of personal training in New York City and then went and did my PhD in sports physiology and performance at East Tennessee State University under Dr. Michael Stone.

Mark Rippetoe:
So you were at A-State with with Stone at the same time, right?

Mike Israetel:
I wasn't. No, I caught him later. Oh, he was he just he'd already left a year or two before, but I heard things.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. I took my first USA...well at the time it was U.S. Weightlifting Federation USWF certification with him. At the time, those guys were doing a pretty good job. They've kind of laid down over the years. But at the time we had a week long curriculum at the Olympic Training Center. And Stone ran that program and it was quite an intense week of pretty thorough education about Olympic weightlifting.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I had met him there. I hadn't really seen him since then, but he's a very well respected guy. I respected him more as an academic because he was a lifter. And I I find it easier to listen to people tell me things that they actually know firsthand what the hell they're talking about. And lots and lots of people don't. And we'll get we'll get to that later.

Mike Israetel:
For sure. I sought him out because he he had walked the walk, was himself a lifter and had coached a ton of lifters and, you know, he had gone as far as his body was capable of going, which was really, really good. And then he, of course, took the academic route as well to out as far as that goes. And that was really cool.

Mike Israetel:
You know, people a lot of people can speak in hypotheticals. He didn't have to because he spoke from real experience with tons and tons of people, including himself. And, yeah, it was really it was pretty special to be able to learn from him. And, you know, of course, we didn't always agree on everything, but I don't think Doc's the kind of guy you always agree with on stuff. So...

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably not.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, but yeah, it was it was really neat. And I remember one of my sort of revelations came when I went over and there was the first day of the PhD program and we had a whole meeting with everyone who was in the program. And he said it's kind of a funny time to say this, but he goes, if you're here to figure out how to make people healthier, if you here for adult fitness or if you're for injury prevention, you're in the wrong place. We're here to teach you how to take good athletes and make them as good as possible. And he's like, if you're here for any other reason, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Mike Israetel:
I was like, oh, my God, I'm finally where I want to be because a lot of people in their schooling for a long time, you know, most people I think a lot of people who follow Starting Strength when they begin their education with the intent of becoming something like a strength conditioning coach or something. And that's really what they want to do, is take folks and enhance their athletic performance. But a lot of times the schooling really doesn't teach you that until way late in the game or ever so you're kind of disappointed.

Mike Israetel:
So they just teach you the basics to sort of like a premedical education. And then you're supposed to sort of know how to train people after that. And sometimes it doesn't always happen. Luckily, my PhD like my PhD was exactly specifically only to do with enhancing athletic performance. So it was really, really just a very special.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, that makes it a different type of degree than the vast majority of people walking around with ExPhys degrees. We we see people with exphys degrees all the time come through our program at the seminar. And they haven't got the slightest idea [of] what we're doing.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I mean, we've had Masters people come through with, you know - what a lot of times ends up being a terminal degree in exphys is a master's degree - and not not know anything about what we're talking about. They've had no preparation in actual, you know, barbell-type strength training. And that's what we're there to learn how to do. A

Mark Rippetoe:
And we hear all the time from people with master's degrees, "I've learned more this weekend than I have in my six years of college about what you guys are doing. And we all understand the importance of the of understanding the basic physiology of not just exercise, but of muscle contraction and all of the other things that we deal with. But they... A lot of people walking around with a masters in exphys really, honestly think they're able to coach people because they've been told that they are.

Mark Rippetoe:
But when you get them in the gym on the platform, they're helpless. They have no idea how to coach any of the basic barbell exercises. And it's it's good that we know how to show them quickly. And, you know, they leave in a in a position to actually do the job that they thought they were prepared to do when they got out of school. And they're not.

Mike Israetel:
So I'm not... You know, so I've encountered what you're talking about a ton. And I think a lot of that comes down, unfortunately, just to hubris. And and I don't... So like you know, I've been a - I am a professor of exercise science and I have been for a while. And so I deal with students directly and I've gone all the way as far as school goes in this capacity.

Mike Israetel:
And, you know, I just in undergraduate programs and almost every single one of them, you learn how to actually lift weights zero times. In the occasional master's program you learn how to lift weights in a sort of like demonstrative theoretical scenario. And maybe you'll have one class where you sort of learn how the lifts are executed. And you learn a little bit about coaching.

Mike Israetel:
Our undergraduates at Temple University, where my colleague James Hoffman and I taught, he actually taught a class of like fundamentals of weight training. But like, you know, no one after that class thinks they're prepared to be coaching folks at any remotely high level. That class is designed as a beginning so that you can start exploring your own technique. And then after building up years and years of your own practice, you can really start to help others. It's a literally an introduction to the process. It's not like a stamp to say, here you go, teach other people stuff.

Mike Israetel:
So I think when people think that they've graduated from a degree in exercise science, exercise physiology or whatever, I think that's kind of like a sort of cockiness that they assume... Hubris, cockiness not sure what to call it...intellectual kind of righteousness, to think like, oh, exercise! I know this.

Mike Israetel:
But in reality, if you really come down to it, they don't actually know it. And they could have in a more honest mindset told you that they didn't know it. It's kind of like people who you know, I've had this every now and again and I'm not sure about getting too much of this, although we can, if you'd like. I I'm a big sort of dilettante in economics. Like it's a really big passion of mine to just learn a ton of economics on the side just for fun.

Mike Israetel:
And every now and again, you'll run into academic economists, so to speak, although they're not publishing the people with undergraduate degrees or master's degrees, usually undergrad degrees in economics. And they just got that degree so they could go work at a bank or they could go, well, you know, business school or something. And because they got an undergraduate degree in economics, they sort of assume they know kind of everything there is to know about economics compared to regular untrained person.

Mike Israetel:
And I'll start to engage them in a variety...maybe like this is a discussion over the internet about price controls or about labor markets or something. And I'll ask him a few questions and it'll be like, well, in my economics degree and I'll be like, okay, can you explain that? And they can't. And I'm like, So can you explain to me supply and demand are like they sort of like supply demand. They sort of remember doing the equations and demand curves and flexibility and all that stuff, but they don't really know that specific thing because they were never really taught those general concepts in a ton of specificity. They were taught a couple of skill sets that were going to be useful in business school.

Mike Israetel:
So in the same way, I think a lot of people with exercise science degrees just kind of make the assumption like, oh, it has to do with exercise. I know it, I know it. But really they don't. And if they were honest, they would say, look, I've never been taught to coach formally, and thus why would I know it? And that it'd be, well, open minded to learning.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, it's an interesting, interesting analogy because it is exactly parallel to the experience we have with people coming out of school from an exercise physiology degree. They they they have the academics and they've had the classes and they understand what ATP does. And they understand the the the economics of muscle contraction. But having never done it themselves, having never done anything that actually uses that information, they completely lack the other entire half of the equation.

Mark Rippetoe:
A bachelor's degree in economics has probably never run a business. And they don't actually know about supply, demand. They don't know about what to pay employees and how payroll affects the bottom line and all this other stuff that they think they know. And until they actually get some concrete real world experience, they don't know anything about economics.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the same is true with exphys degrees. These kids come out of school. They've been...hell, the program might even have been rigorous, but go over there and show me what is wrong with that guy's deadlift right now. And they have no idea what I'm talking about because they've never done it themselves. They've never deadlifted themselves and they've never taught anybody to do them. They've never thought about what makes a correct deadlift different from an incorrect deadlift. It's never occurred to them.

Mark Rippetoe:
And and I you know, this is kind of a teaching barbell training is most properly, an apprenticeship based program. It really is. I think that a good coach ought to have at least tried to read through Brooks and Fahey. All right...

Mike Israetel:
In school, they should be anyway.

Mark Rippetoe:
Even if they're not in school, you can read Brooks and Fahey. You can go get a general physiology text, you can read the general physiology text, and then you can get Brooks and Fahyy and you can understand the vast majority of that. And if you have that as your background, it kind of doesn't really make that much difference whether you have a piece of paper that says you've read it or not.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you've got the information and you've got a good, solid background in first, your own training and second, in applying the things you've learned under the bar yourself to clients that you're working with, you're so far ahead of a kid with a four year degree. You know, I don't care about most of the academics that are involved in an exphys degree.

Mark Rippetoe:
And exphys degree in the absence of having gone through Calc two is not a science degree. And, you know, you just can't call it science degree.

Mike Israetel:
Why not?

Mark Rippetoe:
It's because they're just most... The vast majority of these programs completely lack any academic rigor. They really do. You you've seen these before. You've been associated with better and worse programs. And if a kid is not able to work algebra problems, then he's he's not got a science degree. I'm sorry.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, there's a there's a big diversity of what qualifies as an exercise science degree and some folks coming out of some of these degree programs, gee whiz, you know, they don't know a whole lot of anything. Some coming out are pretty sharp. A lot of that depends on just the student themselves. Some students are really smart, really diligent, and everything that is told to them and that is taught to them, they absorb and integrate and think on their own. And then they really, really are super sharp and can catch on quickly. And other students just do sort of whatever it takes to coast by or they're really good at cramming for tests. And at the end of the day, they don't have any sort of integrative knowledge that they can sprawl out to other things.

Mike Israetel:
And I think that's probably the best way to use either a degree or text that you've read on your own is if you teach someone with no physiology knowledge whatsoever about the lifts, they can parrot the lifts back, they can learn the system well, but in very novel situations or where creativity is required for their own programming, or let's say an athlete starts to accumulate a lot of fatigue under their training and then course sort of not exactly sure what fatigue is, what its sources are, how to remediate it, because they don't know the physiology. They're going to get in a little bit of trouble.

Mike Israetel:
So they can be pretty decent coaches, but not creative coaches.

Mark Rippetoe:
Absolutely.

Mike Israetel:
And do you have, if you know the physiology, you're not ready to coach, but if you know the physiology and then you have lots of time being taught how to coach amounts of practice at the end of that whole process, not only can you coach very well, but you can adapt your coaching, create novel scenarios, create different programming environments. And then and then you're off to go.

Mike Israetel:
And interestingly enough... So right now, I'm teaching a graduate course in advanced strength and conditioning program design essentially for leaving college under Brad Shoenfeld. And almost the entire thing is the principles of training and how to apply them to the beginning of designing programs. And I give very few specifics and very few templates, and I almost never say this is how to design a program. What I do is say here are the principles of specificity, of overload, of fatigue management. Here's how biomechanics works in this regard. Now you go build me a program.

Mike Israetel:
And then when they start doing that, they actually have to know things. It's very easy for someone to be like duh three by five. That's what we're doing. And it's like, okay, why five and not six? Why five and not four? Why three? One not four sets. Why this? Why that? Why do we squat and deadlift this number of times a week?

Mike Israetel:
There are very good answers to those questions, but if they can't even theorise them, like, for example, someone could finish a course on some kind or some apprenticeship in designing programs to securely squat once a week. Okay what would happen if we squatted twice a week? And they just don't know the answer to that question.

Mike Israetel:
And a good answer to that question could be as long as the volume load over the week is fine, then it's OK. As long as you accommodate it, as long as you properly separate the sessions it's fine. Or they could even say, you know, I think squatting two times a week is excessively fatiguing, especially over the long term to various connective tissues and it's just not a good idea.

Mike Israetel:
Any answer that denotes a higher order of thinking about the systems involved would be amazing, but sometimes people give you no answer at all. So I think just think there is a problem in academia of producing people who don't know how to coach but think they know how to coach. There's an equal problem in coaching certifications - usually the real fast ones that you could just take online that say like, hey, you know, things. And you really you just know one way of programming and you don't understand why it's designed that way. And thus your ability to alter it or adjusted to the individual is nil.

Mike Israetel:
And then you sort of have another level of false confidence. And because some of those folks on that side don't know any physiology, when you ask them why they don't even know there was. It's like asking me about computers, like, why is Microsoft Excel crashing? I'm like, it's not my job to know that I just call the phone number and they fix it.

Mike Israetel:
So the same way I think the ultimate coach probably knows a decent amount of physiology and anatomy and so on and so forth, but must, must, must have that practical, real world. And I don't know I'd love to get your opinion on this. I think it... So something we're seeing and you might have seen this yourself, is people will be very confident in coaching relatively high level folks or everyone with a profoundly small amount of training under their belt and coaching under their belt.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes.

Mike Israetel:
And it's always kind of to me like, gee, you know, when I had so little training and coaching, I was coaching soccer moms for free and I was just trying to learn stuff and get better coach. Some folks are very confident, you know, one month after they started coaching or started training themselves, they're like, I'm taking new clients. And it's like taking them where?

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, yes, people do not understand. Because there's not just a lot of academic depth in the pedagogy of of movement science. People don't understand how very, very important is that when you are coaching an athlete and you are watching the person move in real time on the platform, that what you are essentially doing is filtering what you're seeing through the part of your brain that has done that same movement.

Mark Rippetoe:
You have a filter that is being applied to what you're seeing, and if you don't have that filter, then the thing that is, in fact, the movement error being committed in front of you doesn't register as an error.

Mike Israetel:
You have no idea.

Mark Rippetoe:
You have no idea why that's wrong. You have absolutely no idea. And I can't brag on this video enough. If you go to our website, Dr. Bradford has done a very, very important lecture at one of our previous coaching association conventions from years ago called The Coaching Eye.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I'm so proud of this damn thing. It is a completely different examination of what movement coaching actually does than has been even discussed about anywhere else. And Mike, I really invite you to go look at that. It's it takes about an hour and it's a completely different insight into what a coach is doing when he's standing there on the platform with you than has ever been discussed anywhere before. This is a...

Mark Rippetoe:
She's quite bright. And this is an excellent synthesis of all this information. And it it is a it specifically explains why someone with nothing more than a CrossFit level one certification under their belt cannot coach anything for anyone. They lack the experience. You have to have done this yourself because it literally having doing having done it literally changes the mechanism by which you watch and interpret things.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's a terribly important lecture. And I invite everyone to look that up. It's called the Coaching Eye and it's on our website at Starting Strength dot com.

Mike Israetel:
There's also like to me, there's there's another layer that we can discuss about not just the sort of at face value biomechanics of a lift conducted for several repetitions. That, of course, has its own wisdom and insight that you need to apply. But a big thing to me that's often missed by folks, especially people that are academic researchers, and their job is to collect undergraduates and do studies on them. And they sort of maybe train. And I've worked with plenty of folks like this in the past and maybe they don't train. A lot of them don't train much or at all or sort of a recreational.

Mike Israetel:
They end up finding something that only really applies to untrained individuals and try to generalize it to train populations where they would immediately regard what they're generalizing as absurd on a trained level.

Mike Israetel:
So, for example, there are folks that are saying every now and again that, you know, due to the following X, Y, Z studies, deadlifts are no more fatiguing than squats or benches or something like that, or no more fatiguing than any other lifts. Or they'll say things like, you know, if you're if you're recovering at a muscular level, your nervous system recovery - measured in whatever capacity - is never the limiting factor for lifters.

Mike Israetel:
So it's not like, you know, people say, oh, my CNS is fatigued, which has its own problems. As you say, my nervous system is fatigued. They say that it's really not a thing that's more a thing for endurance runners and lifters shouldn't run into that. Well, you know, I don't think those folks ever tried - and I have tried it a few times - to do a mesocycle of five to six weeks of accumulating load, sometimes accumulating volume twice a week, hard deadlifting sets of five to ten. It's going to fatigue you in a way that is qualitatively different than anything else.

Mark Rippetoe:
Absolutely. And and if you haven't experienced that, you just... Again, if it's everything you know is on paper, then you don't really know anything.

Mike Israetel:
Very little.

Mark Rippetoe:
And and those of us that have actually the it's been my experience that the best coaches are mediocre physical specimens that tried really, really, really hard to get...

Mike Israetel:
Struggled for years.

Mark Rippetoe:
Struggled and learned from the struggle. The easiest people to coach are obviously genetic freak, talented athletes. You know, the guys with thirty eight inch verticals, you know, they're not hard to coach. And furthermore, guys like that are not going to have to learn to solve the problems that guys like me, extremely average people that wanted it real, real bad and just were hard headed and kept fighting and learning and fighting and learning, end up knowing.

Mark Rippetoe:
The harder it is to learn something. The more trouble it is to learn something, the more you learn about it and the better it sticks.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah. And the more you have an ability to help people that are also having trouble.

Mark Rippetoe:
Absolutely.

Mike Israetel:
You know, and someone who learns everything like a sponge, you're like you're not really teaching, you're just saying stuff. Teaching is an art form.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. You're just you're giving them something to copy. Right. You're not teaching them anything. They can learn very well visually. And the the easiest the easiest job - and we say this all the time - easiest job in strength and conditioning is on the strength of listening staffs at D1 and pro teams because they're not dealing with anybody except freaks who learn visually.

Mark Rippetoe:
They don't have to know their jobs. They don't know those guys are already strong. They're already explosive and fast. They already learned visually. You don't... And by extension, if if the general public judges your ability as a strength coach from the performance of these guys, you're going to look like a genius every single time.

Mike Israetel:
Lot of prestige.

Mark Rippetoe:
Every single time. That's where the money comes from you know.

Mike Israetel:
My experience was... I have an interesting story about this exact thing. So when I was a sports scientist at ETSU getting my PhD, we were all strength coaches as well. And ETSU is D1. So this one particular girl that I was coaching, she was a volleyball player on scholarship. She had also gotten tons of full ride scholarships to go play basketball at a ton of schools. She just chose volleyball because it was the best deal and she liked it.

Mike Israetel:
So this is a person that was good at pretty much every single physical task she had ever had to do her entire life. And I don't just mean good - like all county in everything. Just about.

Mark Rippetoe:
She's a physical genius as we say.

Mike Israetel:
So I remember one time I was trying to teach her how to do a stiff-legged deadlift properly. And I'm a huge stickler on technique. You know, if your back's rounding or your knees are coming forward, it's no bueno and all this other stuff. And I taught her to do the perfect stiff-legged deadlift in one repetition. She looked at me doing it once and then she just did it.

Mike Israetel:
And, you know, it's rare for us as coaches... What do we do as coaches? When an athlete does something we kind of like secretly want to have some corrections like, oh, that's really good, but what you need to do. ...

Mike Israetel:
Imagine how kind of stupid you look as a coach - or brilliant - if like the athlete does it, you're like, that's it. Like, I literally have nothing to tell you, that was flawless. And then, that same person who is actually a really great student as well, she ended up going and coaching volleyball players in strength and conditioning later as part of an internship. But she went to an NAIA school.

Mike Israetel:
And she came to me at one point it was like, I have no idea...I'm struggling to teach these girls how to do the movements and I had no idea you're able to screw up a movement this bad. And I was like aha!

Mark Rippetoe:
She didn't know there was a problem to solve because she'd never had a problem. This is such a big, gigantic problem in modern strength and conditioning. Coaching staffs at these high level schools, they they've got two problems -- either they themselves are extremely good athletes and have never had problems to solve, or they themselves don't have any experience dealing with people who have problems to solve and have never learned to solve them.

Mark Rippetoe:
The people that know the most about coaching barbell training are the people that coach 45 year old real estate brokers. People of average physical capacity. Because these are the problems... These are the people with the problems that you as the coach have to learn how to solve.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if you've never learned how to solve them, you just don't know. If you rely on the expertise of the recruiter to put 55 physical freaks in the locker room, there is hardly any way that after you having dealt with these people for three years, doing everything wrong, they're going to be better anyway. Because they went from 18 years old to 21 years old, and they worked hard and they got stronger.

Mike Israetel:
They just grew up.

Mark Rippetoe:
And they're they're they're they're geniuses anyway. And this is what is wrong with modern strength and conditioning being predicated on on all this... All these different physical movements that are merely displays of athletic ability. Those kids don't develop athletic ability. They've already got athletic ability or they wouldn't be in the program.

Mark Rippetoe:
What you don't know how to do is make this genetic freak stronger by lifting heavier weights because you don't know how to teach them how to lift heavier weights. You don't know how to program that stuff. And it's much easier to show them a new exercise today with a one pound or the five pound dumbbell on an unstable surface than it is to spend the time getting these kids from a 275 deadlift to a 495 deadlift.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, there's another problem there as well that compounds the issue I think. There is another type of coach that is maybe one of the best types of coaches and knows the most specifically in this area. It is a coach in a barbell-specific sport that deals with what I would describe as free agent athletes. Like a powerlifting coach, something someone like one of my friends, Chad Wesley Smith.

Mike Israetel:
So someone like that people... Is very, very high, highly regarded coach. He's coached a ton of world team members, world record holders, et cetera, et cetera, in powerlifting specifically, and his colleague Max ADA as coached them in weightlifting. And what ends up happening with these guys is, they're the guys you come to when you're already really good, but you're not the best and you want to be the best.

Mike Israetel:
And they have an incredible challenge because anyone can take on an real talented athlete and just sort of like like you sort of intimated watch them blossom into what they would be anyway. But when everyone around you is a talented athlete and they're competing against each other, it just being amazing doesn't quite cut it. So then that coach has to take amazing and take it to the next level.

Mike Israetel:
At that point, not everything works. You can't take talent for granted because talent isn't good enough. What ends up happening, unfortunately... So in the private arena that tends to happen in coaches like that tend to rise to the top.

Mike Israetel:
Unfortunately, in strength and conditioning coaching.... And you have at least two things - formal. Let's just talk about formal football strength and conditioning in the United States, I'm sure you're quite familiar with it. There are two additional problems that I can foresee. One is there's a huge incentive. I would say in some cases disincentive because it goes out of whack to just don't get them hurt. Just don't get them hurt. And the risk to reward goes out the window. Why are we going to push these guys in the gym if I can just rely on them being awesome already, not get them hurt because a coach will fire me.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're describing a pro coach. You're describing S&C at the professional level. It's babysitting.

Mike Israetel:
100 percent.

Mike Israetel:
And then in addition to that, you have a misunderstanding of the role of strength development at the very top of athletic directors and sport coaches that hire these coaches. And a lot of times they'll hire coaches for really not great reasons. Like this isn't a guy that can get my guys violently strong while keeping them reasonably safe, this is a guy that I knew in my undergrad program, or this is a guy that's a great motivator or this is a guy that's a great team kind of guy. Or they'll listen to the coach and so on and so forth.

Mike Israetel:
And a lot of times you get this old boys club mentality where there's neither the incentive to push the guys hard and trying to really figure out how to make people strong. Nor is there nor is that reflected in hiring, because you could if you could imagine if you are hiring a weightlifting coach for the United States of America, a real barbell sport where free agent athletes come and try to get as strong as possible, you're hiring that coach.

Mike Israetel:
You would probably -- like if you were the President of the United States or something, who ostensibly hires these people, you would be like, OK, I've got a bunch of coaches which one of these guys has the track record that actually has made amazing athletes even more amazing? That's what I want. But when you look at football strength and conditioning, that's not what you're looking at. You're not even looking at like how the athletes begin and end in their program.

Mike Israetel:
Mark, who the fuck...can I swear in here?

Mark Rippetoe:
I hope you do. God Almighty. Just who the fuck thinks that just because you have got great athletes in your locker room, that the guy that is standing there while these great athletes are wandering through the locker room is responsible for them being a great athlete?

Mike Israetel:
There's also the question of when has there been a demonstration among these coaches you're hiring of.... Here's some science, take their athletes out freshman year, take their athletes at senior year or when they go do the combine and see what the change in rate of strength gain is.

Mark Rippetoe:
What is the change relative to what would have changed anyway just due to four years of maturation? We could take we could take a kid with a that walks in the gym with... Let's say he's five ten, and he weighs one hundred and eighty five pounds with a thirty-six inch vertical. And he's going to show me on day one, untrained, a 275 deadlift. Because guys with big verticals walk in stronger for obvious reasons. And every single time I can have that guy at a five plate deadlift in six months.

Mike Israetel:
Sure.

Mark Rippetoe:
How often? And that's not... That's baseline. That's baseline. But how often is that demonstrated at the D1 and pro level? This... You've got that kind of genetics and you absolutely refuse to develop that kid from 275 to 495 because you don't think it's necessary.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah. And there are really...

Mark Rippetoe:
It's inexcusable.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah. There are some really, really good coaches at that level, but they don't rise to the top because the people hiring those coaches, they're not looking for those good coaches. They're looking at a lot of times for sort of old boys club type of stuff. That just don't get them hurt kind of crowd.

Mike Israetel:
I mean, if if I was hiring anyone for anything, I would be curious: how do your results compare to those of your competitors that I could hire? Do you get the job done in a more impressive fashion? I would look at two things easy if I was an athletic director. When you were at your school earlier, let's say I'm interviewing a coach, OK. All of your athletes that you had at your school, what were their starting numbers for lifts? What were their ending numbers for lifts? And I would ask the all the coaches that I interviewed the same questions and I would expect data and they would have to prove to me, like, how much better they made their athletes.

Mark Rippetoe:
Absolutely.

Mike Israetel:
And the second thing...

Mark Rippetoe:
The weight on the bar doesn't lie, does it?

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, 100 percent. And then the second thing I would ask is what... Let me see the injury statistics on all those folks as well. The person with the best ratio of getting athletes to improve versus injury rates relatively low. Fast that motherfucker. I'm probably going to look at, you know, top three candidates.

Mark Rippetoe:
Of course.

Mike Israetel:
Then, we'll see who I get along with the best. But I'm hiring you for a result. And a lot of times the result really like, oh, everyone getting strength conditioning in the football world. A lot of times people sort of assume like, oh, yeah, no, you know, you've been around weight room. You've trained with good guys. You sort of know how this works. Now, let's talk about the team building aspect...

Mark Rippetoe:
A bunch of sports psychology shit.

Mark Rippetoe:
So, yeah, if you don't or if you're asked that question and your response to it is, well, you know, we didn't try to make their deadlift go up. We didn't try to make the squat go up. We're trying to improve their rate to force development.

Mike Israetel:
Show me some numbers on that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Fire him. Get him out of the interview. It's no... You don't understand anything about this. And, you know, that's a that's an excellent, that's an excellent point.

Mark Rippetoe:
If if you're trying to hire strength and conditioning coach, can he demonstrate to you that he actually knows how to make the kid stronger? And if he can't demonstrate it, then he doesn't know. Because he hasn't assigned any importance to having done so.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, and there's another level to that. So I've been privy to many, many conversations where people have said that, like, I've been in weight rooms where they're like, you know, we're not trying to make powerlifters here, we're trying to make athletes. We care about their vertical jump. We care about the rate of force development.

Mark Rippetoe:
How many thousands of times I've heard that over the past 40 years. You have you have no idea.

Mike Israetel:
Oh, I'm sure.

Mike Israetel:
So to me, two questions immediately come up in my head. One, do you have good data to show you're actually making people more explosive? Because fucking around on a Bosu ball doesn't actually make them more explosive. And then two, have you not seen the forty year literature, that's for athletes of an intermediate to advanced training age or early advanced making them - especially ones that are relatively weak compared to what their genetic potential is - that making them stronger is perhaps the biggest factor in making them more explosive?

Mark Rippetoe:
And that's just arithmetic. That's just arithmetic. And it's it's so easy to demonstrate that this is nothing, but a... If I take a kid with a twenty two inch vertical and I take his squat from one fifty five to 405, what have I done to his power, having made him no more explosive? I have increased his power significantly, significantly.

Mark Rippetoe:
I can't make him - I can't take a 22 inch vertical and turn it into a thirty two inch vertical, that can't be done. But I can take a weak 22 and make a strong 22 and improve his power.

Mike Israetel:
And also, I mean, you know, if you make that big of an enhancement in his lifting ability, assuming that... So let's assume it's a little bit of a physics conundrum, but he's putting force into the ground for a certain amount of time in the phase of the jump in which you actually get propelled. He's going to be putting so much more force, he's probably going to have an higher exit velocity, assuming he didn't just gain 80 pounds of bodyfat in addition to that. So...

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, I don't I don't understand how these people can be this bad at their jobs. You know, if I was as bad at my job of educating people about this shit as these guys are. They are quite effectively avoiding the one thing, the most important variable they have influence over force, force production. The most important variable they have influence over. And they're over here messing around with the one that is the least trainable.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, but it's sexy.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, it is.

Mike Israetel:
It's not going to get them hurt. It looks cool for the coach. It doesn't...

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, the athletic director comes down and he sees him doing athletic looking shit in a weight room and he thinks, man, we hired the right guy.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah, 100%.

Mark Rippetoe:
We've got athletes. Well, the goddamn recruiter put the athletes there.

Mike Israetel:
For sure. For sure.

Mark Rippetoe:
And all you guys are doing is demonstrating the talent that the recruiter saw.

Mike Israetel:
There's a there's a bit of nuance there at the very edges where just to make sure we steelman the alternate position. Yes. When athletes get exceptionally strong, close to their genetic potential after three or four years of training or whatever. Not that the two are the same - close to whatever potentially had in three or four years of training - When they get very strong. Let's say you have an athlete that's now a six hundred pound to depth squatter. Which, as you and I know, is much rarer than people think.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, God, yes.

Mike Israetel:
Everyone and their mom supposedly squats six hundred at a D1 school. I've been a strength coach at plenty of D1 schools, I saw the shit like one or two times, right from honest people.

Mike Israetel:
So a true 600 pound squatter, let's say now they're adding very small amounts of weight to their squat. And you have to go to strategies like teaching them to really reinforce their bracing, starting to get away from the athletic stance of squatting and modifying their stance just so that they can squat more. Now we're talking about trade offs and maybe for those people starting to get roughly stable, still increasing squat strength, but more slowly and prioritizing more towards explosive drills, towards plyometrics, towards other modalities in order to take that raw strength and milk it out as much as possible with more power, more power training, not exclusively. There's absolutely an argument for that. And that's a totally great point.

Mike Israetel:
The problem is motherfuckers pretend that the asshole squatting three fifteen are the ones that are ready for this plyometric power type shit.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Exactly.

Mike Israetel:
You're ready for that shit when you're brutally strong, but until you get brutally strong, you just get better at the explosiveness, if you get stronger. And a lot of people want to pretend it's the other way around.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, it's... Because it's easier because it's easier to come up with drills, with foot drills for the players than it is to say, I need five more pounds today on the squat than you gave me Monday.

Mike Israetel:
The players also don't bitch about it as much. The players bitch less.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, the players bitch less. But, you know, look, we'll find somebody else that wants a scholarship.

Mike Israetel:
You know, you can tell people when they're the expensive players... Man, I tell you what, I've seen all kinds of stuff. I've seen a star quarterback being trained only by the head strength and conditioning coach and training meant that he was doing bullshit Bosu ball crap just because the S&C coach didn't want him to complain, didn't want to get him hurt. It was just like this prize pony, that little..

Mark Rippetoe:
Halter horse. He's a halter horse.

Mike Israetel:
One hundred percent. And it was it was one of those things where it's like, OK, look, it's nice that this guy feels like he's getting the royal treatment, but if maybe someone else was in that position of strength and conditioning coach... This is a guy that was going to go pro ,had a good chance at going pro, but based on how he turned out at the end of his collegiate career, he was either going to go pro-pro or like, you know, one season on the, you know, the practice squad with the Seahawks and then you're out.

Mike Israetel:
So when that kid is in that position, I think it's worth for a strength and conditioning coach, because it's I'll tell you this, the pro team, different discussion, but collegiate, if you're dealing with real good talent that has the ability to go pro and you milk them out for your own purposes. You say, OK, I'm as a coach, it's no good for me to this person to get injured ever, but but they are already good enough to perform to my ends. So I'm just going to sort of fucking injury manage them and make sure not to fuck them up. And be real nice about him.

Mike Israetel:
So I use them for the best. It's almost like a parent milking out their kid for to be the best little leaguer ever. And then because they don't care about the long term development. And so what? Their elbow's completely dilapidated by the time that they're nine. Who cares?

Mike Israetel:
It's selfish and it's fucked up. If you're a good strength and conditioning coach at the collegiate level, you sit that football player down. You say, listen here, motherfucker. Maybe you don't swear at them because I don't know if that's allowed anymore at Universities. You say, do you want to be the best possible football player at the end of this four years to give you the best shot of going pro?

Mike Israetel:
And they'll say, of course they'll be like, yes, be like we're going to have to fucking suffer. Because in the pro ranks, they're giant motherfuckers out there on the field. They're going to try to kill you and end your career. You've got to be as strong as possible. Now it's time to suffer. And that person could be if informed, make the right decision. But a lot of times they're never informed. They think that the bullshit froufrou stuff is the stuff.

Mark Rippetoe:
The people whose responsibility it is to inform them have never familiarized themselves with the simple process of adding five pounds to the deadlift. Now, is.. as obvious is this is, you don't see it in D1 schools, you don't see it in D2 schools, you certainly don't see it in the Pros

Mike Israetel:
Rarely enough.

Mark Rippetoe:
You just - very seldom do you have a guy in a position of authority in the weight room that says your technique is fine, but you've been doing the same weight for six weeks. You - I've got I've got to see you working harder or I'm going to replace you. All right. You're not showing me that you want to be here enough. Put five more pounds on than you did last time and do the set of five and shut up and get it done. And then do it again next time and do it again next time.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's it's it's elegantly simple. But simplicity often eludes people who are trying to impress other people because people are impressed with complexity. And if that if they if the AD wants to come downstairs and go to the weight room, he wants to see complex looking shit because because that - he didn't know anything about this. And he you know, you're going to try to impress him with his hire.

Mark Rippetoe:
And and, you know, it's going to be hard to explain. But I mean, he's doing the same thing as he was as he did last time I was down here. Yeah. Yeah. Doctor, but let me point out that he's doing it with 25 extra pounds on the bar.

Mike Israetel:
Right. Right. It's almost like saying, oh, they're just doing the same football drills as always. Yeah. We're trying to get good at football, goddammit. What do you think we're going to be doing? Soccer or basketball?

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. We're not doing we're not doing badminton drills here, you know, we're doing them over and over and over again because that's what makes us good at doing them.

Mike Israetel:
Yeah. One hundred percent. Surprise. Right? When I was at ETSU, we had the opportunity to coach a bunch of athletes in the weight room. And one thing we used to do that - so my colleague Ashley and I, we were like a team and we would coach a couple of teams together. She was another she's a PhD as well. And what we used to do was let the athletes choose their own weights carte blanche. Like they would just choose their own weights and this sort of thing where they were taught the basic progression. And, you know, when they felt like it, they kind of go up.

Mike Israetel:
And what we noticed was that a lot of people, some people were just great by themselves. Right. We all know those lifters that they just want more. And but some of them just were perfectly fine, sloughing off, and especially in-season for volleyball or the preseason when you're practicing a lot or something like that, or for women's soccer, I mean, you're kind of beat up, psychologically more than anything.

Mike Israetel:
And you may not be prone to putting the weight on the bar, but what we did is we stopped that. And we started writing in their weights for them. Simple, like 2 and a half or 5 pounds a week progression.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right now we're now we're training. Yeah. Previously where we were fucking around in the weight room and now we're training.

Mike Israetel:
Right and if they couldn't do it. If so, if they said the weights too heavy, two things would happen. Maybe sometimes just one. Thing one would always happen first. We'd go, OK, we walk over with them, we'd say, OK, rest another two minutes and then we'll take this weight again for your set of five that you were supposed to be doing. And I want you to do asgood as you can. I think you got this. And they go, OK. They just claimed it was too heavy.

Mike Israetel:
Usually when they got a couple of strength coaches looking at them and a couple of teammates, they get under it and it just boom, boom, boom, boom. And that's it.And we're like, OK, you're doing great. And then they believe in themselves more. Everything's fine.

Mike Israetel:
Now, if they have reached their, you know what I would term maximum recoverable volume or something like that, or they're just way too fatigued. It is clearly, you know, it's possible just by addition of five pounds to exceed the athlete's physiological ability to adapt. Sometimes it's just too much. It really is.

Mark Rippetoe:
And obviously more of a problem the more the advanced the athlete is.

Mike Israetel:
Exactly. So when they do do that set and they are actually overreached. They get three grinder and then dump it. They're supposed to get five. We go, OK, no big deal. And then we start the fatigue management process, giving them a nice, easy few days and then start building back up. But you've got to prove to us that you're not just at the end of your rope psychologically. You've got to prove to us that, like physiologically something's happening.

Mike Israetel:
They don't know, that they just think they're on the spot and nine times out of ten, they perform and it's no big deal.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're going to have to demonstrate to us that it's not just because you don't want to.

Mike Israetel:
Because that's unacceptable at a divisional 1 level We literally tell them that.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is your job.

Mike Israetel:
You are trying to become a dangerous, wild animal. You're trying to become an inconvenience to people. People don't want you to be strong.

Mike Israetel:
We had a lot of the girls on the team towards the end of our time with them, when they would hit the ball it would sound like like a boom instead of like a slap. Like when you hear that boom in women's volleyball, everyone else is like, what the fuck is going on? I don't want to get hit by that. I can't return that ball.

Mike Israetel:
Strength is amazing, but it's it's a tough road. And it's a simple road. And it's it's simple and it's fucking monotony and brutality. But the people that get the strongest of the most out of it, they're the ones that can commit to the two and a half pounds, to the five pounds.

Mike Israetel:
That's another thing in my own training, because I do bodybuilding training, sometimes like a couple of days ago, my training partner and I did Smith machine squats. We had the two and a halfs on top of hundreds and hundreds of pounds. And no doubt people on the internet are like, why the two and a half, bro?

Mike Israetel:
Because, mother fucker, we did two and a half plus pounds last week and now we're doing two and a half more. How the fuck you think you go up to twenty six hours some day? Just like I'm done doing five plates, I'm going to do six. That's ridiculous.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, it is. And it's such a simple, obvious thing that I'm going to argue that the vast majority of the people in strength and conditioning have not learned. They've either not learned it or they don't like it, or for some reason they're not using this simple thing that has to be kept in mind. If you are stronger, you are better.

Mark Rippetoe:
And stronger means nothing more than two and a half, five more pounds. That's all it means. Not that easy.... The the longer you've been training, the harder it is to add that. But you still have to figure out how to do it or you're stuck.

Mike Israetel:
And it's crazy too, because people will pretend that there are some sort of mystical qualities. You know, power, training, plyometrics and stuff aside, that's really good stuff. But they'll say, well, you know, so I'm not adding any more weight on the squat, but I feel like it's feeling better. Like maybe that's the case. Maybe maybe that's the good. But maybe it's not that case.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's probably not the case.

Mike Israetel:
It's probably not the case.

Mike Israetel:
If I if my objective metrics of just being able to do more weight, more reps or whatever the sport demands, isn't there, I'm starting to be concerned about what the fuck I'm doing. And a lot of times and this is made for another discussion, but I coach or program for a lot of folks doing hypertrophy training. And there people will ask me, like, how do I get a big back? And I'm like, what is your current best, you know, top set or top three sets of weighted pull ups and/or barbell bent rows done strict? And they say it. And I'm like, if you put twenty five pounds on both of those lifts, slowly over time, you can't escape having a big back.

Mike Israetel:
But they're looking for another answer. They're looking for like, yeah, it's my technique.

Mark Rippetoe:
They want something easier see.

Mike Israetel:
For sure.

Mike Israetel:
And some of those things play a role. But at the end of the day if you're barbell moves up by twenty five, fifty pounds over several years, you can't there's no way to get out of that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, you and I can have a discussion about hypertrophy training some time. I think hypertrophy is often gets thrown into some kind of little special category all by itself. But it's been my observation that if you take a guy from a 185 deadlift to a 495 deadlift, his back got bigger.

Mike Israetel:
Surprise, right?

Mark Rippetoe:
Isn't that shocking? And we're talking about sets of five. We're not talking about eight to eight to ten, twelve reps of five to six different exercises. We're just talking about getting stronger because bigger is how you get stronger. And at first, that's all you need to do.

Mike Israetel:
100%

Mark Rippetoe:
And it's it's absolutely it's absolutely a big, good place to do our next little conversation about.

Mark Rippetoe:
Mike, I appreciate you being with us today. You're busy, guy, and I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us. And stay in touch. And we will pick up on this conversation later on.

Mike Israetel:
Sure. Thank you so much for having me on.

Mark Rippetoe:
We appreciate your being here on Starting Strength Radio. Bye.

Automatically convert your video files to text with Sonix. Sonix is the best online, automated transcription service.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your KExwR09QhyY files to text.

Create and share better video content with Sonix. Easily transcribe your UberConference meetings with Sonix. Sonix provides services for better captioning video files. Create subtitles and closed captions in minutes with automated transcription. Transcribing your video files will make them more accessible. Researchers constantly record video footage of their interviews. Accurately transcribe your research interviews with Sonix. Create better subtitles with automated transcription for your video files. Record and automatically transcribe your RingCentral meeting so you can have easy and accurate meeting notes.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your KExwR09QhyY files to text.

Sonix is the best online video transcription software in 2020—it's fast, easy, and affordable.

For your video files, use Sonix to easily convert KExwR09QhyY files to srt for better subtitles. If you are looking for a great way to convert your video to text, try Sonix today.