Let us examine hypertrophy methods. Which method is the best to quickly add muscle on a person who has lifted weights for years and has some results? Well, a philosopher would require a test for the truth of any competing theory. In bodybuilding that test is quite simple. Does the method yield rapid, sustained muscular growth? If you give any method a fair go you should be growing. If you have stopped growing then something must be wrong with what you are doing or your theory is false.
Because most bodybuilders have obtained some results they use this experience to gauge methods, etc., concerning bodybuilding. What confuses so many is that the growth obtained was not rapid and after a while those gains came slowly and often unpredictably. When you cannot measure your growth you become a religious person because you then rely on mysterious forces and faith. You have to believe all that you do is going to result in growth, eventually. Ah, what a joke bodybuilding has become. We have the knowledge, experience and tools to obtain rapid, sustained growth. Most trainees believe that rapid growth occurs only for beginners and those using anabolic drugs. The vast majority of trainees have to blast away and hope for the best. Growth is usually nonexistent or imperceptible. How on earth did things deteriorate in the century? That is not anywhere near good enough.
The test of truth is the results you get from your training. If you stop growing you have to change something. It might be an exercise, volume, resistance or frequency. Heaven help those who try to eat 'healthily' because most of those people do not have enough fuel to grow. That is really sad that so many are so confused about so little.
If someone assumes they have the best and truest method and then proceeds when do they abandon that method? With HIT training any failure can be 'explained' by suggesting the person wasn't training hard enough or perhaps was training too frequently. How would that person know what went wrong? What most bodybuilders do is listen to others. Today that includes reading forums on the internet. The muscle magazines don't seem to have the best minds writing for them. Oh, dear, I will never get another article published by them! Not to worry, there are more important things in life than building muscles.
You don't need an open mind for bodybuilding but you do need a good brain. If you are not intelligent then make sure you follow someone's advice that is. That is why Arthur Jones was effective in getting Sergio Oliva to grow bigger under his supervision. Most people do not have the capacity to do sufficiently progressive workouts that will stimulate additional hypertrophy. In other words, most of us are truly limited well below whatever hypertrophy might be possible in our muscles. If you doubt that then research Larry Scott. That man had very ordinary potential when he arrived in California. He was intelligent and found ways to generate more hypertrophy in his frame and eventually won the Mr Olympia and other top titles. His methods were absolutely brutal yet he became an excellent technologist of exercise performance. It wasn't sufficient to merely train hard; one had to do the right thing as well.
Another person who did his own thing was Bruce Randall. He won the Mr Universe way back in the late fifties. He evolved progressive training accompanied with forced progressive eating. When he shed his extra fat he displayed an amazing physique. He devised a program and then carried it out and was rewarded for that enterprise.
I wonder if any of the current champions have had to labour as hard as those two champions did? I doubt anyone won the Mr Olympia just by going through the motions and taking heaps of drugs.
