I hear you,
There is a lot of confusion regarding what HIT is, many people confuse what Mentzer was doing later on for HIT taught by Art Jones. Jones tended to advocate higher sets for muscle groups, particualry when a muscle group was being specialized on, up to 5-6 sets. HIT means...brief, brutal, intense, to failure training done infrequently.
If you read Yates original book "Blood and Guts" you'll see that he was heavily influenced by Arthur Jones, Ellington Darden and Mentzer, as he committed a whole month to the study of their material before he started working out.
His first training program was a whole body three time a week program, 1 exercise per muscle group, 3 sets per exercise, definitely HIT training (compare to Art Jones Nautillus Bulletins).
Yates then used a split program alternating legs and arms with torso muscles, 3 times a week alternating, he used this program to build most of his mass, real basic, about 5 sets for big muscles and about 2-3 for smaller muscle groups, to failure; still definitely HIT.
Yates then went to a 3 way split, then eventually a 4 way split, to specialize on more muscle groups and perfect his form. The bulk of his muscle was built with the infrequent training methods, aka. HIT; similiar to what Mentzer was orignially doing.
Despite his hybrid training style Yates can still be regarded as more HIT than not. His training is not the same as Colemans.
lets see their actual lifting schedules first. yates was supposedly HIT but in blood and guts he was doing a 2-on 2-off schedule (too high frequency for HIT), and he pyramided everything up to a heaviest set. hell that's how ronnie lifts if you ignore the few pump-out sets he'll do on a few lifts.
and most of those guys didn't turn to HIT until way late in their careers. on mentzer's end he was evolving his theory of how it should work as he went. it wasn't until he was almost finished that he was down to 2-3 workouts a week that were so short.
if you loosen the definition of HIT to be "any training that involves working up to a max effort set" then if you pyramid you do HIT, and then lots of people do. but i'd bet most anything that IF any of those guys actually did the 2-3 workouts a week that never go over 45 minutes, they built themselves on volume and later switched.
