nope. most guys who do HIT are people who didnt have the drive to do real workouts and pussied out and looked for an excuse..."overtraining". Overtraining isnt a myth, but its not as easy to overtrain as many people believe...also the body can be conditioned to handle more and more volume.
and yes i tried HIT...and know alot about it and its history (jones, darden, mentzer, bryzcki)...
finally: there are many variations of HIT....and the stuff im talking about are the extreme low volume routines.
not the 6-7 working set workouts..which isnt optimal, but certainly can work.
i agree with you slaveboy in that you need to increase the load on the musculoskeletal sytem to get that real muscle fatigue.
the problem with hit is not so much the theory, but the fact that you don't spend enough time really fatigueing the muscle. most people quit when the lactic acid sets in. of course lactic acid is going to end up forcing you to end your set, that's it's job to prevent injury, but that doesn't mean the muscle is truly fatigued yet.
another problem with 1 set to failure with forced reps etc is that the trainee only gets one chance per exercise and he/she fails every time.
why is this relevant IF you have reached true failure?
well, this is my point, most people have NO IDEA where their true failure point is.
in this day and age brutally hard physical work is eschewed. from the time you're old enough to lift something people are telling you not to lift it eg. mother to son, "don't lift that johnny, it's too heavy." ; "use the fork lift for that bud, you'll hurt your back.", etc. unless you're a professional athlete what the hell would you know what your body is capable of

think about it. eg. an accountant that spends all day sitting at a desk. all of a sudden 5:00pm comes along and he's going to the gym to do some hit training with an espresso on the way.
he gets to the gym, does a warm up, gets under his 135lb bench press and ALL HE'S THINKING ABOUT IS WHEN FAILURE'S GOING TO HIT. of course once it does he stops the set and he's done. this guy believes in his mind that he reached true failure but his body's fast asleep. that's because his mind has pooped way before his body has.
how does this happen?
because every time this man goes to the gym he does 1 set of bench presses and he ALWAYS fails, so the mind tells the body, "don't stress this one, i've got it. we've seen this all before a thousand times and it don't mean shit. i'll tell him to quit right about the same point i always do."
meanwhile the guy may be going, "please don't fail at 10 again, please don't fail at 10 again, pleeeeeeease donnnn't faiiiiiiiiiii...DAMN!

i failed at 10 again."
that's what's wrong with hit. you're training your mind to fail over and over every time you work out which is exactly the opposite to the way a successful athlete conditions his mind. a successful athlete conditions his mind to
succeed (seems obvious), to
believe that he
can achieve the impossible.