I’ve been taking some heat for espousing the ideas of Mike Mentzer and HIT training. This is the place to trash me or discuss it intelligently. Confusion
High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way was Mentzer’s final work. In it, he detailed the principles of high intensity weight training. Weight training, he insisted, had to be brief, infrequent, and intense, to attain the best results in the shortest amount of time. Heavy Duty II also espouses critical thinking. In this book, Mentzer shows why people need to use their reasoning ability to live happy, mature, adult lives, and he shows readers how to go about doing so. Bodybuilding was endorsed as only one potential component of an individual’s existence, encouraging many other worthwhile pursuits through his books
Diet has always been as important, if not more, as weight-training for bodybuilders. However, in his book Heavy Duty Nutrition, Mentzer demonstrated that nutrition for athletes did not need to be nearly as extreme as the bodybuilding industry would lead one to believe. His recommended diets were well balanced, and he espoused eating from all four food groups, totaling four servings each of high-quality grains and fruits, and two each of dairy and protein daily, all year-round.[4]
Mentzer believed that carbohydrates should make up the bulk of the caloric intake, 50-60%, rather than protein as others preferred. Mentzer’s reasoning was simple: to build 10 pounds of muscle in a year, a total of 6000 extra calories needed to be ingested throughout the year, because one pound of muscle contains 600 calories. That averages 16 extra calories per day, and only four of them needed to be from protein?because muscle is 22% protein, about one quarter.[
According to Mentzer, biologists and physiologists since the nineteenth century have known that hypertrophy is directly related to intensity, not duration, of effort (Mentzer 2003;39). Most bodybuilding and weightlifting authorities do not take into account the severe nature of the stress imposed by heavy, strenuous resistance exercise carried to the point of positive muscular failure.[2]
The last 3 posts are from Wikipedia
How big and strong have you become using these methods?
I don’t know much about Mentzer but I know that he was a big influence on Dorian Yates. I have to say that watching Dorian Yates’ Heavy Duty training which was based on Mentzer’s HIT has been one of the things that totally transformed my training. In seeing this, I understood what real intensity and real failure was. Before that I’d been doing my three sets of 10 reps and going home with a mild pump, thinking that I’d achieved something. I think the principles have value and can be incorporated into a training programme. Whether a purist’s form of Mentzer (or even Yates’) training would deliver the same results for everyone is up for discussion. I would suspect not.
I think HIT is good for short periods of time.
But even Arthur Jones said later in his life that you can not train like that forever.
You only train using any method as long as it works.
I agree that older drug free lifters need to lift less often.
Everyone needs to find what works for themselves.
[quote]T3hPwnisher wrote:
How big and strong have you become using these methods?[/quote]
I have only in the past few months been winning my battle with alcoholism,so,my body and strength levels aren’t what they could/will be. I’m not doing too badly tho. I was keeping a log in the over 35 lifter that has some recent pics and workouts.
Who …WHO is hating on my brother Confusion for espousing his misguided methods? 
I for one anxiously look forward to eating my own hat when he proves I’ve been wasting my life staring at the same four walls of my gym six times per week, lol
Carry on my friend … Better you experiment on YOU (for the benefit of us all) than for me to be ravaged by the scourge of atrophy, lol
As I’ve said before, I disagree with the method, but I root for your success …
Consistency trumps all
[quote]tom1961 wrote:
I think HIT is good for short periods of time.
But even Arthur Jones said later in his life that you can not train like that forever.
You only train using any method as long as it works.
I agree that older drug free lifters need to lift less often.
Everyone needs to find what works for themselves.[/quote]
I agree with this.
[quote]TheNWhiter wrote:
I don’t know much about Mentzer but I know that he was a big influence on Dorian Yates. I have to say that watching Dorian Yates’ Heavy Duty training which was based on Mentzer’s HIT has been one of the things that totally transformed my training. In seeing this, I understood what real intensity and real failure was. Before that I’d been doing my three sets of 10 reps and going home with a mild pump, thinking that I’d achieved something. I think the principles have value and can be incorporated into a training programme. Whether a purist’s form of Mentzer (or even Yates’) training would deliver the same results for everyone is up for discussion. I would suspect not.[/quote]
And this
[quote]Velvet Elvis wrote:
Who …WHO is hating on my brother Confusion for espousing his misguided methods?
I for one anxiously look forward to eating my own hat when he proves I’ve been wasting my life staring at the same four walls of my gym six times per week, lol
Carry on my friend … Better you experiment on YOU (for the benefit of us all) than for me to be ravaged by the scourge of atrophy, lol
As I’ve said before, I disagree with the method, but I root for your success …
Consistency trumps all [/quote]
I love this guy. We’ve had friendly debates and I’ve included some of his suggestions in my workouts.
[quote]confusion wrote:
[quote]T3hPwnisher wrote:
How big and strong have you become using these methods?[/quote]
I have only in the past few months been winning my battle with alcoholism,so,my body and strength levels aren’t what they could/will be. I’m not doing too badly tho. I was keeping a log in the over 35 lifter that has some recent pics and workouts.[/quote]
With this evidence, I am unconvinced on the method. If you achieve more, let me know.
Many many moons ago ie when Lee Haney was the top man I followed the Dorian Yates style of training ie I used to do a couple of warm up sets followed by one set to failure.
At first I made some small gains but then after a while it got to be that I would hit failure on the same number of reps time and time again although back then I struggled to gain much weight, then enter Stuart McRoberts hardgainer mag which advocated start light and add weight at each work out, all I can say is that I broke past all my sticking points and was a happy man.
I have now made a come back at the young age 47 and by starting light and adding weight at each session I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been so personally I’m a big fan of cycle training especially if your training drug free.
Have you ever suspected what Dorian and Mike called a warm up would be a work set for most? If dorian did 4-5 warm ups each exercise and did 1-2 working sets that could easily be 12-20 sets in a day. For mike’s whole body routine that’s a ton of volume per day, even if you only work out 2-3 times a week. Dorian also worked out 4 times a week and did several exercises per body part.
This is what Jamie Lewis of Chaos Pain thinks about HIT. I’m inclined to agree with him.
Why HIT Is Total Fucking Horseshit, Part 1
To begin, I believe that everyone is a highly unique individual, with varying work capacities and biological composition. This belief is founded in a great deal of science, ranging from the work of Roger Williams in Biochemical Individuality to a variety of other authors and anecdotal evidence, including my own experience. Mike Mentzer, however, thought that every single person is like a cog in some massive machine, and that human beings are essentially mass-produced organic machines, with interchangeable parts and identical biological functions and structures.
He was dead fucking wrong.
Everyone starts out with a VERY DIFFERENT work capacity based on a combination of nature and nurture, namely, how good their genetics are and how useful their parents were in raising a young Teddy Roosevelt. Your genetic capacity is based on a variety of things (don’t even come at me with the fucking somatotypes horseshit, as bodybuilders are the only ones who think that theory holds any stock whatsoever anymore) ranging from the size and arrangement of your internal organs to the composition of your muscle fibers.
Now, before you consign yourself to “hardgainer” status, note that you can change your body’s ability to metabolize both nutrients and wastes, in addition to the number of mitochondria in your muscle cells, the thickness of the muscle fibers, and the thickness of your muscle attachments through a combination of good diet and extremely hard training.
Additionally, one’s capacity to handle hard exercise actually improves over time, so the more you do, the more you’ll be able to do in the future.
Want proof? How about the fact that Lance Armstrong is able to still draw breath? By HIT’s concepts, he should be dead by now. In fact, he should be deader than Mentzer’s dumb ass.
Amazingly, he?s still healthy enough to compete in multiple endurance sports AND bang busloads of hot sluts with Matt McConaughey. I fail to recall any tales of any such exploits by Mentzer. Hell, I fail to recall any tales of Mentzer either getting ass or being pleasant to anyone around him.
So, what was the nonsense Mentzer preached?
Mike Mentzer, for those of you who don’t know, was a bodybuilder in the 1970s and 1980s who pimped Arthur Jones’s Nautilus equipment and trained according to Jones’s philosophies of tremendously short, brutally hard workouts. Jones himself was a tiny guy, with no appreciable muscle mass and no definable reason for believing that his system was the best, save for the fact that he apparently hated working out.
Jones took under his wing two up-and-coming bodybuilders, Casey Viator and Mike Mentzer. Viator won the Teen USA, Junior America, and Mr. America all in the same year, 1971, and later went on to take 3rd in the 1982 Mr. Olympia, his crowning achievement. For those of you who don’t know, 1981-1983 were some of the sorriest years of the Olympia’s existence, seeing the crowning of three fairly unimpressive Olympians amid a field of virtual nobodies (though Franco was kind of the shit, he beat a pack of nobodies). Mentzer came up around the same time, and was notable for simultaneously being a speed freak who rarely slept, a genetic freak, and one of the biggest fucking crybabies in any sport ever, while at the same time hilariously espousing a drug-free lifestyle. After losing the 1980 Olympia to Arnold, he quit the sport and began misinterpreting Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and applying his inane, drug-crazed ramblings to bodybuilding.
Why HIT IS Total Fucking Horseshit, Part 2
So, Mentzer was a fucking whackjob, which we know right off the bat. But how whacked?
He applied Ayn Rand’s “Art of Non-Contradictory Identification” (i.e. logic) to weightlifting. This theory hold that contradictions cannot exist in objective reality. Thus, there can only be ONE best system of weight training. Somehow, in Mentzer’s drug-fueled ramblings, he failed to notice that the “best” is an entirely subjective determination. He believed, as an extension, that a contradiction is mistaken reasoning, which is amusing, because the fact that he lost to many, many bodybuilders who followed training regimes that were the total obverse of his own should have tipped him off to the fact that his conceptions of proper training and nutrition were retarded.
Mentzer believed:
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That heavier training through progression took more of a toll on the body as one progressed. (Little 50) He apparently failed algebra, as had he done the math, he’d have recognized that 90% of a 1RM is still 90% of a 1RM, even when the RM increases drastically, and that training at that intensity takes the same toll on the body, no matter how low or high the RM (rep max).
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That the more intense the workout, the shorter it should be. “For every slight increase in intensity, there has to be a disproportionate decrease in volume.” (Ibid.) At the time, the Bulgarians were drastically increasing the volume of their programs, and began training up to 8 hours a day. Elite athletes found that the stronger they became, the more they needed to train in order to get results, rather than less, as Mentzer believed.
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Mentzer believed that “intensity” was defined as “how hard you train”, a completely subjective concept. Everyone else in strength training and physical culture knew (and know) that “intensity” describes the amount of weight used in relation to one’s limit lift. Thus, 90% of one’s 1RM (one rep max), is a far greater intensity than 60% 1RM.
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“The full completion of the recovery process may take anywhere from one day to a couple of weeks.” (Little 53) Sport science would disagree, claiming that individuals’ training capacities may vary widely, but that most trainees recover in between 6 and 72 hours, depending on the volume and intensity of one’s workout. He also thought that “up to 3 months might be required in order to recover from a high intensity workout for the biceps”(Little 54) in spite of the fact that BROKEN BONES HEAL FASTER THAN THAT.
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“Anatomically and physiologically, every human being is essentially the same” (Mentzer 33), in spite of the fact that he believed in somatotyping, and the fact that it’s been widely demonstrated that no two people are “essentially the same”, exhibiting widely varying metabolisms, enzymatic processes, organ location and sizes, and muscle fiber compositions.
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That one should consume massive amounts of carbs, and no more than 100g of protein a day! HAHAHAHAHA.
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That one needs only to do one set for each bodypart to total failure every week and a half, though he regularly exceeded this volume by an order of magnitude.
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Lastly, Mentzer believed that "the mind can alter any physiological system (Mentzer 200). This is hilarious, given the fact that he didn’t believe that one’s recovery EVER adapted to training.
The verdict? Mentzer was a fucking retard, and I’m glad he’s dead. With any luck, his legions of HIT jedi will fade into obscurity (rot in hell Ellington Darden and Stuart McRobert), and we can all train like fucking animals without hearing about “overtraining” and “hardgaining” ever again.
The only thing I disagreed with was the infrequency. My best gains have come from short, intense and frequent bodypart hits.
I think most of Mentzer’s success with his clients came from lifters that needed a short term deload period as anyone who trains hard and long will at some point.
I made the mistake of thinking my new success was due to his routine. It was really just recovering from all the volume I had been doing before.
Thanks for the replies. I decided before I started this thread to keep my input short. I enjoyed it. I won’t be on the site anymore. Good luck with your training. Confusion
[quote]confusion wrote:
Thanks for the replies. I decided before I started this thread to keep my input short. I enjoyed it. I won’t be on the site anymore. Good luck with your training. Confusion[/quote]
This seemed rather dramatic.
[quote]Turkus Maximus wrote:
This is what Jamie Lewis of Chaos Pain thinks about HIT. I’m inclined to agree with him.
The verdict? Mentzer was a fucking retard, and I’m glad he’s dead. With any luck, his legions of HIT jedi will fade into obscurity (rot in hell Ellington Darden and Stuart McRobert), and we can all train like fucking animals without hearing about “overtraining” and “hardgaining” ever again.[/quote]
As was this.