Background: In the early 1970s, Arnold Schwarzenegger burst onto the bodybuilding scene. And he went public with the idea of ”volume training.” After all… if he made a champion out of Arnold, then surely lifting weights for 3 hours a day was the way to go. Good? Good?
Well… maybe not.
While many guys have tried to tackle the herculean volume training regimen that Arnold developed…it definitely didn’t work for 99.9% of trainers.
The reason? The training volume that Arnold recommended was too much for the average citizen.
Enter Mike Mentzer.
Mike Mentzer made a name for himself by saying the opposite of what everyone else in bodybuilding was saying.
While all the muscle men were telling people to work out six days a week… Mentzer talked about working out once every 14 days.
When professionals advised people to work the muscle from all different angles and perform multiple exercises for each body part, Mentzer said one exercise per body part was enough.
Where most bodybuilders recommended 15-20 sets per body part, Mentzer recommended only one set per exercise.
The Argument: While most bodybuilders believe that you have to include a variety of exercises and a high volume of sets to properly target the muscle and activate the growth mechanism, Mentzer differs.
Mentzer reasoned that if you perform a set…and you perform that set until your muscles can’t move the weight anymore…wouldn’t that be enough to activate the growth mechanism?
The Experiment: I was intrigued by Mentzer’s approach and thought the idea of a series to failure made sense. So in 1999 I hired Mike Mentzer for a series of phone consultations.
There wasn’t a lot of small talk, but I remember Mike asking me specifically about a new website that had just launched at the time. It seems that the method of getting attention was to go after Mike and try to criticize not only his theories, but also everything else about him.
Mike started me off with just two workouts a week. He also told me that the actual amount of protein, carbs, and fat he was eating per day was not important. He said that a balanced diet was fine and that I should eat frequently but not obsess over the nutritional aspect.
After a month, I had gained weight, but my strength gains were moderate at best. Mike reduced my training session to one session every seven days. Ultimately, he cut all of this down to once every nine days, but still I never really gained much strength or made much progress in the gym.
The Result: The result of this training program was a failure. I gained very little strength and my overall conditioning level actually got worse from so much inactivity.
The Good: I personally think Mike Mentzer advanced the sport of bodybuilding a lot by questioning whether or not it’s really necessary to do more than one set to failure.
This principle… and the logic behind this principle… still guides much of what I do today in my training programs.
The Bad: Unfortunately, I think Mike’s version of High Intensity Training had some serious flaws.
First of all, Mike’s thinking about nutrition was seriously flawed. Without adequate protein intake, he simply cannot gain large amounts of muscle.
Second, Mike only had one solution to every problem. You know the saying, when all you have is a hammer… the whole world looks like a nail?
Well, Mike took it seriously. For example, if progress stalled, the solution he proposed was always to train less or take more time off.
At times, he took this to extremes. For example, I told him that my calves were one of my biggest weaknesses and asked what we could do about it. His solution? Stop training calves altogether and see if they would grow with indirect work from squats and other leg workouts.
Needless to say… this approach didn’t work. Even though I’ve often wished my muscles would grow just by doing nothing… it just doesn’t happen.
Another flaw in the program is assuming that each person is capable of generating the kind of intensity needed to trigger muscle growth in a single set.
For example, it’s relatively easy to fry your biceps with a set of bicep curls. But when was the last time you saw someone actually perform a set of heavy barbell squats to COMPLETE muscle failure? Or go to complete failure with 1400 pounds on the leg press machine? Quite frankly, it just doesn’t happen because it’s incredibly taxing on both the body and the mind.
Overall: If you’ve been volume training for years and feel exhausted, you may find Mike Mentzer’s HIT a nice change of pace. He will probably experience new muscle and strength gains in the first few weeks.
But unless you address the program’s nutritional and intensity flaws, your progress will eventually stall.
White Dude’s average final rating for Mike Mentzer’s High Intensity Training: 6/10.
It’s not the worst training program, but it’s far from effective for most average guys.
