Does Mike Mentzer Want to HIT up Your Training?
High Intensity Training's Place in Your Workouts
Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash
High-Intensity Training (HIT) is getting some attention on the socials of late. In resistance training, HIT is taking a single set to absolute muscular failure, even beyond. “Failure” is when a muscle can no longer produce sufficient force to overcome a load. That is, you can’t lift that given weight anymore. Another way to think of muscle failure is complete momentary muscular exhaustion; it’s like someone cuts the power to the muscle, and it just seems unable to function, then requiring a couple of minutes to recover before it can attempt do that same work again. Beyond failure is called doing forced reps, which is where a spotter will help you reset the weight to the starting position, and then you’ll resist it as gravity does its work.
HIT is the brainchild of Arthur Jones, who was sort of a fitness influencer and content creator in his own time—the 60s and 70s. He created and patented Nautilus exercise machines and developed HIT, which he used to promote Nautilus. Like many influencers, he was also something of a contrarian, too. The bodybuilders of the time relied on high volumes to help them achieve their results, and many felt that going to absolute failure limited their capacity to do work with sufficient loads at sufficient volumes, but Jones argued that, by going to failure with HIT, the requirements for volume were significantly reduced. Thus, a silent, cold war started: HIT versus volume.
There were a few notable bodybuilders who adopted the HIT approach to weightlifting, such as Casey Viator in the 70s, Mike Mentzer in the 70s and 80s, Tom Platz in the 80s, and Dorian Yates in the 90s, to name a few. Mike Mentzer, in particular, was a good spokesman for HIT, who evolved HIT into his own “Heavy Duty Training”. Mentzer was smart, articulate, and his physique was such that he was one of the few that seriously gave Arnold a run for his money. [1]
Like HIT, Mentzer’s popularity has recently soared. Check out Google Trends over the last five years, and you’ll see that his name was searched exponentially from December 2022 to its peak in August 2023. Several popular fitness YouTubers have recently made videos doing Mentzer-style training. By the looks of their thumbnails, they don’t seem to enjoy it.
Mentzer is what we would label today as an evidence-based bodybuilder. He was also something of a bodybuilding philosopher. There are several of his talks and interviews available on YouTube, and he speaks with a fluidity and an almost eloquence that would be persuasive on any topic. His points are rational, valid, and sound. Many of the best parts of what he says are played over some of his bodybuilding photos, again, very persuasive to hear an almost scientific examination and explanation of a concept and its application in achieving such an aesthetic physique, especially at a time when such a thing was rare.
Failure training may have its place in your own training, but, before getting into some details, there’s an important point that a large swath of the internet seems to miss on this one. All of the aforementioned bodybuilders who adopted HIT, including Mentzer, were professional competitors who used copious amounts of anabolics, which will exacerbate the results of even the worst diet and training regimen. Steroids increase work capacity and fast forward recovery ability. If anything, these athletes may have shown that HIT works great in concert with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).
Does that mean HIT is useless for the rest of us natty [2] mortals? Not at all. There’s a whole body of sports literature getting into proximity to failure and its utility for strength and muscle growth [3], and the debate rages on about how much minimum volume is needed for muscle growth and how much is too much, although some of this dust is starting to settle a bit.
Proximity to failure is directionally causal in muscle activation. That is, the closer you get to failure on any repetition, the more muscle fibers are activated and recruited in each repetition. [4] Generally, a greater activation is thought to result in a greater overall adaptation stimulus, which is what we’re seeking to get bigger and stronger. Therefore, getting closer to failure would be more stimulating compared to moving the same load but staying farther from failure. For example, one repetition from failure is more stimulating than two reps from failure, which is more stimulating than three reps from failure, and so on and so on.
Going all the way to failure is kind of like cramming high volume—that is, total work—into a short amount of time. The farther away from failure you stay, you’ll likely have to make up the difference with adding volume, that is, adding more work sets. You can essentially achieve a similar stimulus either way, but how do you want to get there? Closer to failure and less volume, or a little farther from failure with more volume?
One issue with going to failure is that it can be a little risky in terms of injury. If a muscle fails, you can’t control the load safely, and that’s when stuff gets real. Another issue is that the closer to failure you get, the more compromised subsequent work sets become. That is, you greatly fatigue the muscle the closer you get to failure, and it will not recover 100% in that work session. To be fair, each set generates muscular fatigue, whether you go to failure or not, and your muscles will never fully recover between sets. That’s the whole point. Each work set should be just a bit more difficult with the same load. It’s kind of like a battery that becomes depleted and cannot fully recharge fully between sets. However, the closer to failure you get, the more you drain that battery, and the less you’ll be able to do in the following work sets.
So, what do we do? Should we keep volume low and do a few sets to failure? Or should we stay farther from failure and increase the number of work sets? Which generates more fatigue? Which takes longer to recover from, both in that session and between workouts? Thus, the debates rage on.
And this debate’s tentatacles reach into other areas, such as how much volume we really need. On the one side is the minimum effective dose—the minimum someone can do to stimulate the growth they want, either muscle growth or strength gains. Dr. Androulakis-Korakakis—colloquially known as Dr. Pak—has been a recent leading voice in this area and wrote his dissertation on a minimum effective dose for one-rep max work for powerlifters. As his website says, the work is to understand “what the least a powerlifter can do is and still get stronger”—which he has observed is something one the order of one to four work sets a week, which, probably depends on training age. Newbies need less work to stimulate growth compared to advanced lifters. (A work set is really anything that’s not a warmup and gets reasonably close, within a few repetitions, to failure.) By virtue of using near maximal loads, powerlifters work close to failure, and although Dr. Pak was focusing on developing strength for powerlifters, these principles can also be applied to standard resistance training for hypertrophy work, that is, muscle-building.
There’s also the recent high-volume study [5] that seemed to fall out of the sky and crash on everyone. Participants were randomized into one of three groups, a control group or one of two others with each progressively adding a fixed number of sets every two weeks of the study; the control held stable at ten work sets a week; one group progressively added four sets, and the other group added six sets. The six-set group worked their way up to 52 work sets those last two weeks. Yes, 52 work sets for one muscle in a single week, and it showed that that was still effective in promoting muscle growth. To be clear, these work sets were not to muscular failure, which is why they were able to get to such high work volumes.
This point is a good time to note a distinction between the words “effective” and “optimal”. Likewise, you could effectively lose some scale weight by not eating for a week, but we’d be hard pressed to think that that approach would be optimal, especially if you were hoping to, I don’t know, maybe be feel any semblance of being a normal human during that period.
HIT would be more akin to a minimum effective dose, that is, one work set to failure for a muscle group, which may be effective to stimulate growth, albeit probably less growth than you would stimulate by doing a bit more work volume. And sure, you could stay farther from failure and do 52 work sets a week, but would that be any better than doing half or a quarter of that? The key is to find what works well for you at a given point in your training AND what you like to do.
I won’t say it’s impossible that anyone could do 52 work sets to failure for a single muscle in a given week, but that’s a tall order. Really, it’s working at one end of the spectrum or the other. Frankly, attempting even a half dozen work sets to failure in a week for a single muscle group would be torturous, especially if we’re talking about the larger, compound lifts, like a squat, bench, or deadlift; even if it were a calculated choice, I’m pretty sure your muscle would rip apart even approaching double digit work sets to failure—probably a great way to get rhabdo. Even if you felt like you could recover from it physically, there’s also a bit of a psychological toll in terms of the amount of effort and exertion required to reach that level of muscular exhaustion. [6, 7] And there’s a debate online about whether HIT is a superior training approach compared to training close-to-but-not-all-the-way to failure, even though this doesn’t seem to be the case empirically. [8] Most of this discussion is all in good fun, but there are some important lessons to be gleaned from it all.
First, here are some things that you can put into your gym bag: training to failure is a tool that you can use in the pursuit of your goals. It’s not a universal philosophy you must subscribe to or swear off. Training to failure on dumbbell curls: not a huge deal and good for a pump. Training to failure on deadlifts or squats? Maybe not. The risk-to-reward ratio on the former is small; on the latter, it’s akin to Inquisition-level torture. And we’re not talking about one-rep max failure here or a heavy single as in powerlifting training. Work sets are often in the area of 70 to 85% of a one rep max, meaning you can do several repetitions before the onset of failure.
Work volume should be scaled to where you are in your training, your goals, your availability to train, you know, the context of your whole situation. It might even depend on the context of your schedule. If other obligations are usurping the time you usually dedicate to working out, you might go to the gym and do a couple of exercises to failure because its utility for time-efficiency.
If you’re new to training, you’ll likely need a couple of months to work up to doing even ten work sets a week. If you’re advanced, your muscles will be conditioned to doing and needing a lot of work to create the necessary stimulus to force further adaptation. However, at that point, you’ll likely need to have training blocks (a period of weeks or months) where you prioritize and focus on one or two muscle groups because it’s just not practical to do maximum work volumes for all muscle groups simultaneously, either from a time and scheduling perspective and from a recovery one.
As your situation changes, your goals, your time availability and so on, your tools should also change. Whatever training variable you implement, it’s a variable to be used for a limited time. Even if you want to train to or past failure, that’s not something you would do for every rep of every set of every exercise for the rest of your life.
And there’s a parallel with nutrition here. Many dieting strategies are also tools to help you achieve an energy deficit so that you can lose some weight, but those tools are not meant to be lifelong dietary patterns. Your lifelong dietary pattern is the healthy and balanced baseline that you return to after a slight deviation for dieting purposes. The real trick with dieting is to find a way that you can eat that doesn’t feel too restrictive and helps you create that necessary energy deficit. Your baseline, by contrast, should not feel restrictive at all. Layne Norton, a guy who’s got a PhD in nutrition and who’s also a champion powerlifter and bodybuilder, often says that we have to find the dieting strategy that feels the least restrictive to us.
Sometimes, people will confuse a “diet” with a dietary pattern. And even if one can supplant the other, we still have to consider how healthy it is. Some “diets” can be maintained for an indefinite amount of time and can help people maintain a healthy or healthier-than-what-they-were bodyweight, but we also can’t conflate a body weight or a body composition with metabolic and cardiovascular health, such as eating almost a carton of eggs daily in order to reach a subjective protein target.
Dieting and training principles, nutritional recommendations, and even supplementation strategies are all things that have evolved over time, and they will continue evolving as the scientific literature expands.
Mike Mentzer passed away in 2001 at the age of 49, and even though his popularity has soared in the last couple of years with our omnipresent social media, the problem is that his premature death fossilized his ideas and perspectives to the writings, sound bites, and recordings he made in the decade preceding his departure. He was not afforded the opportunity to evolve those ideas and perspectives. To think that he would still and only be a staunch proselytizer of HIT is, frankly, a little silly. He was an intelligent guy, and I for one would have loved to hear his take on the state of training and nutrition today, and like all of us, his opinions and perspectives on things would have likely evolved; maybe they would not have changed completely but most certainly evolved.
To argue about whether what he said in 1997 is absolutely right or wrong today is missing the greater points. It’s missing the forest for the trees and the dumbbell rack for the dumbbells.
First, if we’re all still doing the exact same things in 30 years that we’re doing right now, that should call into question if that was time well spent. Second, whether it’s a strategy for maintaining a healthy dietary pattern, a strategy for achieving an energy deficit (a “diet”), or a strategy for developing your physique, that’s all they are—tools to help us achieve a goal or maintain one. No one thing is uniquely essential, the secret you’ve been missing, or the one true hack to get you there. It’s a combo of doing most of the right things consistently.
Depending on where we are at any given moment, the goals we’re working towards, the external pressures coming down on us, the context and the environments we find ourselves in, so too should the strategies we use evolve and change.
Check out the 1979 and 1980 Olympias.
“Natty”: industry slang for “natural”; that is, someone who abstains from anabolics and PEDS (performance enhancing drugs).
A very comprehensive article that covers proximity-to-failure training while looking at it through the lens of repetitions-in-reserve (RIR), for hypertrophy, strength, and muscular endurance: Helms, Eric R. MS, CSCS1; Cronin, John PhD, CSCS1,2; Storey, Adam PhD1; Zourdos, Michael C. PhD, CSCS3. Application of the Repetitions in Reserve-Based Rating of Perceived Exertion Scale for Resistance Training. Strength and Conditioning Journal 38(4): p 42-49, August 2016. | DOI: 10.1519/SSC.0000000000000218
This is known as Henneman’s Size Principle.
Tom Platz, literally nicknamed “The Quadfather” for his exceptional quad (thigh) growth, often did HIT and has said that he only did squats twice a month for these reasons.
