Fitness Weekly Discussion

That’s awesome. I hope to one day be able to run that. I can do about 3 km. Anything past that I feel like my lungs are gonna explode.

Damn, that's kinda scary. But TBH, you're probably lucky that a seemingly mild allergic reaction is all that happened considering your source for the drug, and the fact that it's still an experimental one which hasn't actually been approved for use yet. I know it might be a bit embarrassing or whatever, but please tell your Doctor the whole story so they can be fully aware of the situation, and screen you thoroughly for any other health issues it might have caused.

Well, the drama continues, and someone on /r/PhD might have called it; Solomon appears to have critiqued a draft version of Mike Isreatel's dissertation, which is ironic since Solomon even mentioned it looked like a draft version in his video. It could have been an honest mistake, but given Solomon's history of attacking Mike I wouldn't be surprised if he did it intentionally to make Mike look as bad as possible. And if it really was just a draft, I also wouldn't be surprised if Mike sues Solomon for defamation at this point.

That whole PhD critique drama is so fucking obnoxious. A dude with 35k subs and a VERY obvious penchant for stirring up fitness influencer drama, as well as a clear grudge against Mike Israetel in particular (seriously, he has a 1 hour video basically making fun of Mike and calling him "mentally ill" for getting cosmetic surgery) released a video critiquing Mike's 12 year old PhD dissertation... and now every commenter on every YouTube fitness channel won't STFU about it, and are acting as if it invalidates every bit of advice Mike has ever put out. It's so fucking dumb.

Personally, I think Greg Nuckols (from Stronger by Science) had the most well informed and level-headed response to this whole thing:

I don't like Mike, but wasn't he published multiple times? If his PhD had glaring errors idk if it invalidates the rest of his credentials

Ehh, not really. He was an author on a couple of papers from his Masters program, and a tertiary author on a study his company funded, but that's the extent of his academic output: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=israetel+ma&sort=date

But, I do generally think that a poor-quality dissertation is primarily a reflection on the program and the advisor. Graduate studies are effectively a mentorship – different fields and subdisciplines have different norms and standards, and it's generally expected that the academic advisor will ensure their students can conduct research that conforms to those norms and standards (obviously the students have agency in the process as well, but if a dissertation clears the committee, that means it met or exceeded the expectations of the advisor). I don't think a poor-quality dissertation tells you all that much about someone's knowledge or abilities 12 years later, though. I know several very good researchers who published what I (and they) would consider to be lackluster dissertations 5-10+ years ago – almost by definition, it should be some of the worst research you ever do, assuming you get better with more practice.

Fwiw, I have a bit of first-hand and quite a bit of second-hand knowledge about the program where Mike did his PhD (it's one of the places I applied to grad school, I visited and met the faculty, and I know quite a few MS and PhD graduates from that program). It's a pretty weird PhD program. The faculty there is very up front about the fact that it's a sports science program, not an exercise science program. To them, the distinction is that exercise science is supposed to equip you to do boring research on schlubs who've never lifted weights, and sports science is supposed to equip you to monitor and optimize training for elite athletes. The school has a partnership with the USA Olympic team, and most of the "research" they conduct is just case studies on Olympic hopefuls (much of which is never intended for publication).

I've heard from multiple people that the chair of the program is very fond of saying, "Pavlov only had one dog" when people prod him about his ... unique ... approach to science and mentorship. The implication is that the only way to learn about coaching elite athletes is to try to learn as much as you can from closely monitoring individual elite athletes, instead of doing standard controlled research with more reasonable sample sizes of sub-elite athletes. He's something of a legend in the strength coaching community, but he's also a dinosaur who's fairly hostile toward a lot of advances in the field that are intended improve methodological rigor. Since it's a PhD program, there is still a dissertation requirement, but the dissertation (and formal academic research more broadly) is not really the focus. It's somewhere between a terminal vocational degree (like an MD, JD, or DPT program) and a typical PhD. It’s much more focused on turning out working sport scientists (people who pro sports teams would hire to try to help them reduce injury risk and squeeze 1% better performance out of the athletes) than the next generation of academics.

[caveat – read all of that in the past tense. Mike graduated in 2013. If memory serves, I was checking out the program in 2015 or 2016. The program is actually publishing much more research, and the research they're publishing is of a considerably higher quality, now that Mizuguchi is in charge of the sports physiology program. Also, I'm speaking in generalities; I'm certainly not implying there was no good research or good researchers coming out of ETSU a decade ago. Just saying the program was quite a bit less focused on formal experimental research than you'd typically expect from a PhD program]

Basically, it is a degree that's pretty relevant to the type of influencing Mike primarily wants to do – if you want to claim expertise about how to optimize training specifically for elite athletes and bodybuilders, a PhD from ETSU is arguably a more relevant credential than a PhD from a program that's more focused on, say, clinical exercise science. But, if you know much about that PhD program (or, at least, how that PhD program operated a decade ago), you'd know that it's not a credential that necessarily implies a high degree of research acumen. Also, to be clear, I don't really consume much of Mike's content, so I don't have a strong opinion on it – just commenting on the PhD program itself.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1ntu79l/mike_israetels_phd_the_biggest_academic_sham_in/ngx3o8p/