Well, I started off liking him a lot, but then I started understanding that what he says and what works best are two different things.
This is mostly Mike Israetel/Renaissance Periodization stuff that hasn’t actually been proven - only hypothesized.
As much as they tout this drivel, go ahead and watch the videos of them training their bodybuilding competitors, and compare that to what they’re telling people to do… they always train their competitors to failure but preach to keep reps in reserve. Hmm.
Even if their model worked for those on the advanced spectrum of muscul development (it doesn’t), it would only work insofar as fatigue management from the perspective that you can perform more work… and the fatigue management side of that had been debated significantly, still without a real answer. So the only way this would work, isnt even proven (in practice or theory).
This whole theory is based on a flawed dataset, where they assume the stimulus you get from rep 8/10 is equal in stimulus to rep 10/10 (10 being failure). In reality, your failure rep has a significantly higher stimulus than any rep that precedes it. There is a meta regression to support that.
So I agree with about 80% of the stuff he says - I still watch quite a few of his videos. In fact, I like his diet advice SO much that I parroted it in a thread I made .
His diet and training advice are solid for folks ranging from newbies all the way to advanced, but this advice really starts to fall off when it comes to folks who are reaching or at the far end of muscular development and leanness.
His contributions towards the Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio stuff is top notch and accurately applies to pretty much the whole spectrum of trainees from beginners to elites. If you’re getting bad stimuli and fatiguing the hell out of yourself to do it - I don’t see a good argument to use this/these exercises at ANY point in muscular development.
For most folks, I’d say that following his advice on pretty much everything is a good idea. For those who are very close to, or beyond their natural genetic potential - I think his training and diet stuff starts to not line up as well anymore. Leaving Reps In Reserve (RIR) works fine, up to a point. Following the 1-1.5g/lb BW protein intake works fine, up to a point.
I don’t have an interest in discrediting the dude, because his advice is solid for most who will ever join this forum or stumble onto this thread. But if your FFMI is very near or beyond 30, and you can count all 6 abs without flexing/lighting? You may want to find a different guru.
FWIW, I still have a man crush on Mike Israetel. The Renaissance Diet 2.0 is still my favorite diet book, Renaissance Woman is probably the single most valuable book I could recommend to female athletes, and all the RP cook books are stellar. At the end of the day, he is a youtuber who has to make new content, and all of his biggest contributions are already out there… so he has a slight tendency to twist certain things in his free content to align with his paid content.
Mike’s training is based on mathematical estimations of a best fit balance of volume and failure training. His theories make sense by number, but he does not take people into account. People have repeatedly shown themselves to be incabable of estimating RIR. If you watched the video, Layne points this out as well.
RP Coaches say to train with RIR yet they train their clients to failure. I wonder why that is
In summary:probably because if he was truthful about this, his business would flop .
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