I was bitten with the HIT bug about 38 years ago after seeing one of Darden’s great books and afterwords followed the lessons of him, Jones and especially Ken Leistner to the exclusion of anything else. Jone’s advice of always looking to make your workouts harder but briefer was ingrained in my head and I trained that way all the time. Reading Leistner’s columns and especially his Steel Tip newsletters always made so much sense and got you motivated.
My ‘progression’ went from a twice a week , full body routine of maybe 12 movements down to a workout of three sets taking about 12 minutes , leaving me on the floor and useless for the rest of the evening. I remember way back Dr. Darden saying something about it being rare to see someone training too hard and not enough but very common to see someone training too much but not hard enough. I didn’t want to be one of those guys and just took it way too far. If you don’t think you can’t train too hard because of very low volume , think again.
Now 50 years later even the guys who always promoted ‘to-failure’ training are no longer doing so and are advocating staying short of failure. I wonder if Leistner was still around , how he would see this change in training attitude in the HIT people as hard core as he was about training to failure and not cycling intensity ?
I agree with this change for sure and wish I changed my approach years before I did but still after training that way for so long, stopping before failure isn’t an easy habit to break and something I have to constantly remind myself of.
What I find kind of funny is training single sets to failure was something brought to our attention by Jones / Nautilus 50 years ago when everybody was training short of failure. The ‘new’ guys who have been training in a HIT manner all along think this short-of-failure is something new when it’s the way people trained all along, with great results, way before Nautilus was introduced to the exercise industry.