Mike Mentzer’s High-Intensity Training (Brilliance or Madness?)

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Mike Mentzer has made a permanent mark on the fitness community, especially with his high-intensity training system called heavy-duty training.

Today, we’ll look at how he developed this system, as he didn’t always train this way. He first started training at the age of 11, working out 3 times a week, probably full body workouts as that’s what was typical back then.

Once he was old enough, he joined the Air Force; it was here that he started training 3 hours a day, 6 days a week, nothing like a high-intensity program. It was in 1971 that his thinking on the best way to train started to change.

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https://archive.org/details/hight-intensity-training-the-mike-mentzer-way-with-john-little/page/n217/mode/2up?view=theater
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305455324_Dose-response_relationship_between_weekly_resistance_training_volume_and_increases_in_muscle_mass_A_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis
https://www.facebook.com/116733248412758/photos/a.758901990862544/2420562384696488/?type=3
http://www.caseyviator.com/flexarticle.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mentzer#:~:text=It%20was%20during%20this%20time,won%20the%20Mr.%20Lancaster%20contest.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068575/
https://physicalculturestudy.com/2014/12/29/how-to-gain-63-pounds-of-muscle-in-28-days-the-infamous-colorado-experiment/
https://houseofhypertrophy.com/high-intensity-training/

It was at the AAU Mr. America competition where Mike suffered his worst defeat ever, finishing 10th. The event was won by none other than Casey Viator who, a few years later, would be part of the famed Colorado experiment.

Mike met Casey and learned how he was training with these very high-intensity workouts that were only 20 to 40 minutes long—training almost exclusively on Nautilus equipment designed by Arthur Jones, who’s the originator of this training style.

I want to comment briefly on the Colorado experiment conducted by Arthur Jones in 1973, where they took a detrained and dieted-down version of Casey Viator. According to Bill Pearl, Casey weighed 218 lbs at the Mr. America contest in 1971.

Casey said in a Flex magazine article, “ I really had to diet hard to get my body weight down to 168 pounds before the Colorado experiment, but when we finished it 28 days later, I gained 45 pounds of muscle; we calculated that my diet before the experiment was less than 800 cal per day.”

The claim was made that while he had gained 45.28 pounds of body weight, he also lost 17.93 pounds of body fat, making the muscle gain 63.21 pounds—an insane amount for only one month of brief, intense training.

Casey had incredible genetics along with muscle memory aiding him in this feat; it was stated he didn’t do steroids during this month. But I have no idea how past steroid use would have affected this result.

All of this brings into question how well it would work for the average guy, but Mike Mentzer saw something in this training style and worked to perfect it.

One of the big things about this program and Mike’s heavy-duty training is intensity, and I’ve often said volume without intensity is a waste of time.

High-intensity training is one set to failure, usually with a couple of warm-up sets done first.

They did a meta-analysis on the “ effects of resistance training performed to repetition failure or non-failure on muscular strength and hypertrophy,” finding “ there was no significant difference between resistance training to Failure versus non-failure on strength and hypertrophy.”

Many of the studies in this analysis had the non-failure training done within one to three reps of failure.

Even if you choose not to train to failure, you still need to train close to failure within 1 to 3 reps, and how would you know how close to you are if you have never trained to failure?

There’s merit to training to failure, at least some of the time
There’s a meta-analysis focusing on weekly training volume where 14 of the 15 studies compared doing one set to three.

Finding “a graded dose-response relationship whereby increases in resistance training volume produce greater gains in muscle hypertrophy.”

The reality is the more frequently you can train a muscle and fully recover between sessions, the quicker you’ll build muscle.