I wonder if he lived longer if he would’ve brought some of his suggestions back to his earlier ideals, as those seemed to work better for most people. I got great results with the Heavy Duty I and II routines. I’ll bet his 70s routine would work even better for me! It’s surprising how minimal he was advocating at the end. I have several booklets of his from the 70s and it’s very different from what he recommended at the end and still very applicable for most people I feel.
There was a guy name Val (last name slips me) who was working with Mentzer near the end. Val posted on another forum some time after Mentzer’s death that Mike was considering something more like HDI again, but shying back from failure as he was supposedly seeing the failed results of ultra consolidation. However, he had felt he painted himself into a corner. Who knows if this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I don’t think many (if any) natural trainees can tolerate going to failure 100% of the time on his older routines…at least consistently. Mike by his own admission to me was on high doses of roids at that time (as was everyone else). Going sub-failure might make them tolerable.
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Yeah, Dave — we Regularos need to cycle intensity, if we hope to have any longevity with this thing. Sometimes I like to do some of his old stuff (2 cycles of pre-fatigue) for specific muscles for a few weeks at a time. BUT, I am not doing full failure on that first cycle!
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I cannot even tell you the last time I went to “true” positive failure. I get within 1-2 reps at most. If I am doing something like CTF/Gironda, I get close through sheer fatigue. This morning, I trained legs a little heavier with about 5 sets (3 on leg press, 2 on lunge/split DB squat) for about 7-10 reps on each…about a minute (or a bit longer) or so rest between sets. Stayed at least 2 reps back…maybe even 3. Not an easy workout, but felt pretty good and good effect on my legs. Finished with calves and abs in similar fashion. But this is the way my training has shifted for a long time now and I recover so much better this way.
I think his last name was Seagull. I am not sure about the spelling. I spoke to Val once. He may have filled in for MIke that day.
He sent me a bunch of Twin Lab Creatine fuel plus for free. It may have had a similar name. It was the type that was a protien powder with creatine added. I think they were in a packet.
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What kind of Split and Frequency are you doing?
Monday - Legs and Abs (Lower back every other week)
Wed - Back, Rear delts, Biceps
Friday - Chest, Delts, Triceps
(Cardio on non-weight days).
I read the same thing on the Heavy Duty message board that Val ran back in the mid-2000s. Joanne posted something alluding to this on one of her last updates to mikementzer.com about 4 years ago that said it wasn’t true. Who knows what the truth is at this point, because I don’t think Joanne herself was any authority on Heavy Duty aside from the business end of things for Mike. Maybe Mike would have eventually pushed something along the lines of not to failure workouts like Ellington does, but he was very dogmatic about Heavy Duty/HIT and what it meant. He would have had to eat a lot of crow to backtrack from consolidation training.
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Yeah who knows what he privately said. But Mentzer always talked in such absolute, black and white, “unequivocal” (as he often put it) terms. So many of his “logical” arguments were around going to failure 100% of the time and only using a few compound moves several years up to his passing. It would have been a very hard walk back for him. However, if he had been monitoring his clients’ progress as he claimed, the lack of real progress (hypertrophy) on ultra consolidated training would have been apparent. The sheer number of anecdotal reports of people on forums over the years looking worse training on two compound exercises every 7-10+ days is overwhelming - my own experience showed that as well.
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The first time I spoke with Mike it had a big impact on me. I also went down the extreme consolidation rabbit hole. Oh well.
I can’t forget Ray as well. It was great talking with him. I know he thought HD2 was the way to go. But he thought more rest days as well.
One thing I learned throughout all of that is I know what is too much. I know what is not enough. As I age that changes.
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John Heart has said on Ellington’s old forum that Mike mistakenly with his trainees attributed bodyweight gain to muscle gain and the few consolidation trainees he saw didn’t look like bodybuilders. I think Brian Johnston said something similar and even pressed Mike to use client records in the Heavy Duty Bulletin that came out in the late 90s but Mike never did because he didn’t keep much in the way of client records. I saw the Master Trainer article once with the guy Mike says doubled his bodyweight on consolidation and he just looked like a normal chubby guy you see at any gym. It seems to me towards the end Mike was more interested in taking the “theory” of HIT to its logical conclusion on what an ideal routine would look like and less what produced the best results.
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I still think IMHO, Mentzers best routine was full body nautilus 3x/week when he was preparing for the Olympia
It’s too bad he did not promote that routine without going to failure
Which is essentially what Ellington has said to do going back many years. I think Ell is the much better HIT coach than Mike because he wasn’t so tied in dogmatically into a strict set of what had to be in a routine and more about what worked to produce the best results.
Hi @heavyhitter32 , thank you for this overview. Do you recall the specifics of the “one compound exercise a workout every 5-6” routine that Mentzer recommended to you? Would you mind posting the exercises involved?
Thank you,
yoshi50
Agreed. I think A LOT of people gained neurological strength and gained bodyfat probably losing or worsening their body comp using the extra calorie, ultra-infrequent approach. It’s pretty easy to get really good at demonstrating strength for one set on a few moves.
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Basically the idea was to train once every 5-6 days using one compound movement (one set), but cycling through a handful of them. So, one workout it might be the pulldown…then 5-6 days later…the squat…then 5-6 days later maybe Dips, etc. I never tried this as I had enough experience with 2-3 sets every 10+ days to know it wasn’t going to work. My direction in training turned shortly after that as I had enough of the Heavy Duty/Ultra-Consolidation Kool-Aid.
I did a sub-failure full body workout routine 3X a week last summer while boosting my calories. I did one set of 6-7 exercises (rotating moves each session)…it worked pretty decently.
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I’m not so sure that is what Mike really thought. Not at least when I spoke to him about it. He ask me if I would be complaining if “some” of that weighted turned out to be muscle.
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For me personally, the 3 set consolidation routine. Gained in strength but not size. That’s the best I got. After finding my testosterone was low, and after replacement ( a year ago ), I went from 201 pounds to 247. But I noticed training hit style 2 times a week, or even once a week, I suffered some terrible workouts. Its weird. Recently I started ntf training, more structured with a modified Doug Hepburn version, and my bench went from 225, to 315 in 7 months. I still do some exercises to failure, but things like benches and Overhead presses I keep my reps in the 1 to 3 range for 5 to 10 sets, depending on what reps I’m doing on my program. . Best gains of my life. I do remember one gain though, muscle wise. It was a noticeable chest size gain 5 days after my workout. From a truly intense superset of flyes/machine bench.
My friend Seefeldt, went from 160 pounds to 183 in just over a month. When he started this intense once a week routine, he had upper abs visible. Around day 33, weighing 183, he had his lower abs visible, was noticeable bigger, as noticed by everyone in the gym, and his arms actually dwarfed his chest. He looked spectacular, while on a similar once a week heavy duty routine, I gained a little strength but thats it. Of course, my test was low back then. After our little once a week experiment, we trained once a week for months on Mike’s consolidation 3 set routine. While John ( Seefeldt ) thrived on it, and was weighing in the 190s now, I couldn’t get past 188, though my deadlift did go from 225x10 to 335x15. Shrugs went up alot too. Made me jealous to see him growing, while i wasn’t. I trained very very hard, but even great nutrition and rest didn’t do much for me.
Once after completing a set of squats to failure then immediately Deadlifting the same weight to failure, i could barely move or breath, and a big lifter, who was not on any drugs, asked me " why do you train so hard? ". I was thinking in my head " why don’t you? ", but what can I say to someone twice my size and 3 times my strength? He didn’t train to failure but was huge, naturally.
I wish I could have been trained by Mike Mentzer. Maybe he could have dialed in the proper routine for me, but as I said, I’m gaining better on my current program. I personally think my body is just garbage inside lol, and I sadly don’t have the proper genetics to gain from hit training on a regular basis. Aside from training my Benches and Presses ntf, I am going to try different exercises to failure and see what happens.
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Mentzer was an inspiratoon and led me down the path to Arthur Jones and Dr. Ellington Darden and I found full body routines, which I believe has gotten me back in shape from being a 225 fat slob…down to 200 and striving to get between 180 to 190…I love Dr. Dardens metabolic 30-10-30 program 3x/week
His split routine was too infrequent and led me to be fat…I was strong as an ox, but had no conditioning
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