As for centerfolds… no comment.

Really liked the article. Just wondering about one thing though (and I’m quoting from the article here) “On the one hand, saying that you get bored with a program in which you get stronger with each and every workout is about as weird as complaining about the monotony of sleeping with Playboy centerfields night after night, when there are so many less-attractive women you could be seducing.”

Playboy centerfields? LOL…….don’t even want to ask about that one.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Its interesting to see someone else whose read/heard of Dr. Darden . I too have been kind of following a High Intensity training program for a while and read a few of his books. I’ve also looked at Mike Mentzer’s stuff too. I think I prefer Dr. Darden’s theories a bit more over Mike Mentzer.

Mentzer seemed to go a bit too-far almost? and his workouts seemed to throw in supersets, not-to-failure, failure, pre-exhaust, post-exhaust, etc. He definitely was about high intensity but this training regime seemed to eventually towards his later years become extreme intensity, extreme volume (in the way of pre-exhaust, post-exhaust, super sets).

My current routine I’ve been doing as been an attempt to balance both worlds. I’ve read a lot of articles, journals, studies, etc and a lot of studies seems to suggest that the body will adjust to workout after a six week microization period. Roughly translating to, your muscles get bored after six weeks of the exact-same-lifting-pattern. At which point, gains don’t stop but they slow significantly over time and eventually do stop and a plateau hits. This basically is the first principle in the laws I follow while working out.

I choose a workout, keep it for six weeks, then switch to something else. I find everything I switch to somehting else that muscle-soreness feeling comes back HARD. Whereas by the end of the six weeks, after a hard workout, my muscles aren’t that sore the next day. Kind of like a very mild tingling sensation.

My second principle has to do with the though that muscles respond differently to different exercises for the same body part. Especially large body parts such as the chest. You often hear comments like declined dumbell/bar presses really help the lower part of your chest, etc etc. So generally, I think that for best results, you should try to do more than 1 exercise for each body part. For chest for example I do:

Declined bench press 8-10 reps with 2 second on up, 2 seconds on down to about 3/4rd maximim high to concentrate on chest muscle rather than tricep.
15-30 seconds rest while moving to next bench in gym
Dumbell flys 8-10 reps with 2 seconds on upwards, 2 seconds on downwards(for a nice slow controlled movement, being sure to have smooth turn around without momentum).
15-30 seconds rest
Back to declined
15-30 seconds rest
Back to dumbell fly.
1 minute rest while setting up next gym machines/barbells for another body part.

Work two to three muscle groups on day 1, 3, 5 and some cardio a few hours after my workout
Work two to three muscle groups on day 2, 4, 6 and some cardio a few hours after my workout
Day 7, rest day/limited cardio

Each workout for myself needs to be under 45 minutes as a rule of thumb. Studies have shown that testostorne takes a fairly steep curve and starts to drop off after approximately 45 minutes of continuous strenuous exercise. At this point, your ability to repair your muscles in hindered by no tesostorne for signal carriers for growth to be transported on, increased risk/chance of injury and would likely lead to overtraining. Its about this time, you should strongly be thinking about your post workout shake? no?

Additionally, with this in mind, I’m coming back later in the day to do my cardio rather than trying to do 45 minutes of cardio immediately following weight lifting when my muscles are trying to repair.

In regards to my workout’s choosen exercises, after six weeks, I change out the dumbell flys for inclined chest press and changeout the declined chest press for a flat chest press. So my workout effective changes and targets different parts of my chest muscles for six more weeks before the micronization factor sets in. The soreness starts to come back and I know my muscles are still growing…viola!

So I’m effectively keeping my ‘sets’ to 2 for each exercise which I think to some extent would keep Arthur Jones and Dr. Darden happy, keeping my rest to a minimum to keep intensity high, doing relatively slow controlled movements to keep momentum low and maximize the strain on the muscles. I’m also keeping my workout times lo w to keep testostorne levels up.

Hopefully, this gives me the best of both worlds. I think though that once I get to my desired size which will be about 230 pounds as I’ve 6’2, I’m going to stop doing this pattern and concentrate on keeping my weight-constant(relatively) and just try to get the volume of reps up and add another set/two. The goal being to increase my heart rate more, burn more calories and try to build more dense, firmer muscles without increasing size more or strength more. Just endurance.

Of course, a good workout plan is wasted with poor nutrition.

My body-history consists of basically:

Growing up in a family with bad nutritional habits, drinking coke from easily available vending machines at school, getting money for the pop from my parents and eating from school cafeteria french fries everyday and somehow ending up gradulating high school at about 240 pounds. Go ‘figure’? I don’t know ‘how’ that happened. I was clearly following an excellent diet of pure-sugar, sodium, cholestrol and carbs with no protein.

At this point, I decided I wanted to change my body. Lose fat, grow muscle, etc. So I got a gym membership, cut pop out of my diet and starting using my computer skills to look up fitness information and stumbled upon High Intensity Trianing, High Volume trianing, etc and found the principles which seemed to be backed by reasonably striaght forward, rational thinking was H.I.T. I started doing a 50/30/10 ratio of carb/protein/fat, very strictly, six meals a day prepared in advance at home, drinking lots of water, taking vitamin supplements, fibre supplement and omega 3/6/9 suppement and exercising everyday for about 45 minutes as described above. 45 minuets of workout in the mornings, 35 minutes of cardio(high intensity) afternoons followed by 45-60 minutes of fat-loss target HR(lower intensity).

Within a year, I was able to successfully reach my target weight of 170 pounds which at 6’2 meant I was still a bit chubby but liveable. Since then, I’ve started following a different diet with more protein in it and keeping up the same workouts, upping my calory intake a bit and now about eight months later, I’m up to 196 lb which has been relatively lean muscle mass as my body fat percentage went down. Although, I’ve also cut back my cardio/fat loss time on the bicycle machine a lot and only within the last month started to increase it again wanting to get the more defined abs look. I attribute the lower body fat percentage to a highly daily metabolism rate from having more and more lean muscle mass.

I guess its time to start doing more cardio as I’m already eating right .

In regards to something Eli asked, “or it can be a faster pace, but that would mean that perhaps lighter weights might have to be used to be equal out to the same exertion”, I believe if you used a faster pace, you’d probably want higher weights to keep the intensity up. If you picked a faster pace and lower weights, you’d end up doing a ton of quick reps to exhaust your muscle? I think this would lead to the high volume training and depending on how light the weights you choose, no muscle growth.

For example, try wearing ankle weights. Your doing very very high reps, like 10000x throughout the day, but very very very low weight. I’ve never heard of someone improving their squat, calf raises or any other exercise with ankle weights. Similarly, I can’t help but feel that this similee is filled with an obvious overexageration. Although, if we did 10,000 steps and changed those ankle weights from a measly 5lb to 50lb or 100lb, would this improve your squat or would the constant straing on your muscle lead to over training and atrophy? This is in effect the problem I always have with high volume training. It doesn’t logically make sense to me how it would work if the body needs time to repair muscles, testostorne drops after 45 minutes of strenuous exercise, etc.

I think HVT works for people whom are …genetically blessed because their body repairs unusually fast, testostorne is high initially so the testostorne drop off might take longer to effect them since the drop off occurs on a curve and perhaps theycan go for 60-70 minutes. You know, those people such as those with long fourth fingers and short second fingers , darker skin and all the other signs. I these people can experience great results from HVT but would experience even greater results from HIT. Mind you, if your doing an HIT routine and do it for longer than six weeks without variation, you going to hit the micronization period and as time processes, a plateau. If you switched at this point from HIT to HVT, HVT being something different will jumpstart your growth as its something new to your body. I think switching to an alternate HIT pattern would jumpstart your growth even further though kind of like I outlined above.

That’s my two cents and theory of exercises but…what do I know :D? I’m just a fat kid who did some research, got skinny, then got a fair bit bigger and I’ve still lots of room to grow in both physique and knowledge

Yes, I completely understand and physiologically accept that we must recover 100% before going back and hitting the weights, whether it be full body or split routines, especially in this article of yours and the type of training you mentioned. There is also plateaus, change of workouts, trying something new (not letting you muscles adaptive to the workout being executed for a length of 6-8 weeks), or better yet said General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). Taken all known signs of overtraining, how can you operationalize and point out the signs of overtraining while you are training in the gym. Yes, we know that we turn on the muscle growth mechanism while in the gym, but as far as overtraining in the gym goes, what are the biological signs, or psychological signs the constitutes overtraining while training? We know from previous findings, as well as you mentioned here that volume of exercise must be inversely equally proportional to intensity of the workout, so that we know (I rather be in the gym for 30 mins to an hours and having an intense workout than a long workout with hardly any intensity involved).

Another thought: It has been found (cant thing of the exact studies here) that despite variable genetics and body types (mesomorphic, ectomorhic, esomorphic), physiologically everyone responds better with higher intensity training protocols (Menzter mentioned this in his book “Heavy Duty: The Mike Mentzer Way). Is there confusion in the pool of training or do we still follow what has been known nowadays and the popular method high volume training/high frequency training since Arnold Sw………. promoted as well as his supporter Joe Weider back in the late 70s and early 80s. The notion was to focus and to emphasized individual muscles by isolating them with more reps and more sets. Now we are getting into the quality versus quantity of the workout. Man my head hurts now . Its kind of like nature vs. nurture kind of deal back in my psych 1301 course back in college, its both. So do we focus on both, quality and quantity, or can we have both? I answered this question by having both, but I think quantity is more of a subjective use rather than being absolute. Quantity in a sense would be duration of the workout and number of reps and sets one does, but at the same time, not sacrificing strict form for weight. The cadence of the workout (how slow a rep is done) would fall under intensity, which will fall under quality of the workout, or it can be a faster pace, but that would mean that perhaps lighter weights might have to be used to be equal out to the same exertion as using heaver weight with a slower cadence for the reps, right?

Well, those are the lingering and perplexing thoughts that I have going on right now, and what better to give them a try and find out, but honestly, why re-create the wheel of found and applied knowledge, so I ask you Doc., what are your thought on this discussion?
Thanks for getting back to me. I am 25 years old, been training for about 6 years now. I started back in 2003 and been hitting it ever since. I started with 163lbs and reached a max weight of 273 by using both bodybuilding and powerlifting techniques. Current weight is 245lbs. I guess why go through the “already been found questions and trenches” if that has already been done. The goal here is what has been placed ever since, “the goal is to find what is more efficient that will produce faster results.” I think of it as Newton’s Law of Force, math equation, or chemistry class, when you add something in, you got to take something out to balance out the equation or do the same calculation on the other side of the equal sign to balance out the equation. Trial and error I guess, the trial is finding efficient calculations (training protocols), and the error is that the calculation did not balance out efficiently to the other side of the equal sign, or vice versa…
Eli Vera

So, Dr Darden says to never train with high volume and to never do split training. Well, Dr Hyght (that makes me sound old, let’s go with Dr Clay) says that those are silly rules. And I’m bigger than Dr Darden so…

You answered your own question in your last sentence, “…incorporate both methods with some tweaks.”

No single training method is best. The best is an intelligent combination of various training methods.

So, although I think a type of HIT is probably the single best way to train… that’s only if I could pick one best method. As my clients will attest to, I don’t have just one method. I integrate the best of the best at just the right time to achieve the desired result.

For example, the best leg training program I’ve ever done (in terms of results) was 10 x 10 on squats. While you can’t get any farther from HIT, my legs grew like never before!

Stick around and through this site (http://www.DrClay.com), my show (http://www.TheDrClayShow.com), articles I write (which I’ll alert you to here), videos I make, and books I publish, I promise you’ll learn a lot! And it’s all as accurate and unbiased as can be.

Meanwhile, train hard and expect success!

Dr Clay