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Men with mustaches are Mike's biggest nemesis.

Unfortunately, Mike is un-coachable. He already knows how to do everything better…

I don't know why YouTube recommended Omni-man critiquing Mr Mike, but I'm all for it.

Faz man, you're forgetting he's bigger and stronger than Mike Mentzer.

A few thoughts.

First, this is why anyone who has followed Mike for a while knows that he talks about his weight ALL the time.  "I'm 250 with ab veins so things are pretty crazy, hahaha". But with this system, you do get a lot of vascularity and fullness, but as you say, it's just fake leanness, with little separation. I don't know if he's delusional or if he just doesn't care. Maybe he has some kind of reverse body dysmorphia where he genuinely thinks he's in stage condition. This also explains why so many top pros use synthol...if you're already blurry, who cares?

Second, he rarely talks about strength progression. In the recent navy seals test, after he got 10 bodyweight pullups (pretty sure he kipped as well, though his lower body wasn't filmed, they know by now not to show that), the SEAL guy said "so, you don't do pullups?" to which Mike replied "all the time". It's not about performance. It's about doing work to get the drugs to where they need to be, along with that depletion effect. On a lot of movements he's using baby weights and nowhere near failure, it's actually a joke that some of his audience has yet to realize. Going from 285x8 OHP to 240x2 bench while taking tons of steroids...well....that says a lot. He could have been so much more.

Third, head growth is pretty common, and I do think this alone can ruin a physique in day to day life more than most people realize. People naturally compare head to shoulders and arms, top pros can get away with it because they're all playing the same game. If you shrank his head down to normal size, his arms would look way better, especially in a front double. Waist growth and head growth are the two worse aspects of this system.

Fourth, these IFBB pros and Mike have massive followings and there must be millions of guys who have tried to copy their training systems and failed, then either blamed their genetics or turned to drugs themselves. It was never going to work. It wasn't you, it was a truly terrible system that requires the drugs to work.

Fifth, this explains the Gatorade and cereal diet. You're basically just trying to stuff as much bloat and glycogen in yourself as possible. Every week is peak week.

Sixth, Mike has been transparent with his audience about a lot of things, but not about how what he's doing will probably do next to nothing for his average viewer.

Seventh, yea this is terrible for health. It's a dangerous game and playing it when you don't immediately clearly have the genetics for it (Dorian, Lunsford, Ronnie, etc) is very ill-advised.

Eighth, I blame the judges. They could have course corrected at so, so many points from the early 1990s till today, but keep rewarding these bloated monstrosities.

Finally, while this is what Mike needs to hear, I doubt he'll listen to you or anyone! He knows best as he's the smartest coach out there!

Crazy seeing the old clip of Mike hitting the 285 OHP for eight reps and comparing to his recent bench performance.

All i feel is rage mmmmmm

Mike doing that SEAL fitness test was a far bigger eye opener on him than any discussion about his PhD.

As Lyle MacDonald said, Mr. Mike is nowhere close to failure b/c the concentric never slows down.

Gonna have to disagree about Dorian being anything but freakishly grainy, thin-skinned, and peeled. There have always been huge guys, but Dorian was the first guy to be huge and shredded. He admitted that his waist didn't really grow until he introduced insulin in the last couple of years.

Thank god you're not becoming a drama channel. Schoolteacher Faz modeling good behavior for the students as always.

175-180 lbs 😭 after being on bucketloads of drugs for a decade

Mike's on record saying that he's on gear because he wants to prove his training methods work (Solomon Nelson has a video of him looking into Mike's justifications for taking steroids). I think what we're seeing is him clinging to this notion rather than accepting that his 160 IQ has led him astray - he has an emotional attachment to his programme.

The method itself is volume cycling in addition to RIR progressions, and all his programmes sold by RP (and which were no doubt their largest revenue stream pre app / youtube blowing up) followed this progression model. As he's become more successful - and following Eric Helms, Brian Minor and Jacob Schepis's criticism of it back in 2020 (in a letter to the editor of 'Strength and Conditioning Journal') - his recommendations became slightly less dogmatic, but for a good 5+ years that's what he was primarily known for.

The irony is, the man was significantly stronger before all of this nonsense (as the 285lb OHP for reps video shows), a phenomenon many of us who tried his methods also experienced - including, notably, Jordan Peters (who gave it a go, and got smaller and weaker doing it).

In my opinion, when it comes to bodybuilding there is nothing more beautiful than the Frank Zane vacuum pose at the 1979 Mr. Olympia. Bring back bodybuilding as an artform, doubles etc, like figure skating in the Olympics.

My god that video of him doing leg curls was a hard watch. I was embarrassed for him

I was shocked by that Navy SEAL challenge where Israetel could barely bench 245 when he used to able to press more than that for reps on the standing OHP.

At this point YouTube should just rename the ‘fitness’ category as ‘Mike Israetel Takedown’

This needs a subtitle. Who cares about Mr Mike; explaining the change in bodybuilding is much more interesting.

Dr Mike should have stuck with powerlifting or maybe tried strongman. He was a crazy strong presser. He doesn't have the genetics for bodybuilding.