It's a shame many champions never taped their workouts for posterity. I'd pay good money for footage of Platz training in his prime, for example.
Even a modern bb like Yates only left 1 workout tape. A shame.
i will believe unbiased reports from several witnesses of a truly high intensity workout. he's been mentioned on this thread but i have no doubt the account of casey viator's hit session where he performed non-stop, leg extensions with entire nautilus stack - 750lb leg presses (approx 25 reps) - 500 + lb ass to the grass squats 11 reps. the reason i can believe it is because so many unbiased people witnessed it eg, arnold and sergio were both there and gave the exact same account as arthur jones and others. thing is, it was not in sergio or arnold's interest to give an account of a man that completely annihilated anything they had ever been able to do in the gym. the fact that sergio did the same workout but much less weight and actually passed out by the time he got to the squats and couldn't complete the reps, even when the weight was reduced to 135lbs (in fairness, this was very early on in oliva's time spent with jones.
i also believe it because casey only had to do this giant set
once which makes perfect sense ie knowing that he only had to do one set of each and with his intensity and energy fresh (he was also fond of pre workout methamphetamines as most hit guys were back then) he trained like an animal going absolutely balls out ie you can train long or hard, you can't do both (despite what Milos says
).
the weights casey was using for the reps (and we're not talking 1" rom like so many of these 'hard trainers' have proven on youtube - evidence is a beautiful tool for the deluded), the sequence and zero rest in between (apparently he was carried to each apparatus with jones yelling his ear off the whole time) pushed casey's heart rate up to 250 bpm by the end of the sequence (recorded by jones for posterity) which would indicate that he truly was going balls out and it wouldn't have been possible to do another giant set, never mind 50 more.
arthur jones belaboured the point that if you had enough energy to do a second set, you didn't train hard enough in the first and imo he was dead right.
probably the easiest way of explaining this is to look at running sprints. i could have a top flight competitor train sprints with brief rests in between, say 1 minute, hell make it 2, for 10 100 metre intervals.
i could scream at this man at the top of my lungs and make threats, etc and, there is no doubt, the man will be absolutely convinced he's training balls out. i could even be convinced, but i guarantee you 100% that come race day against the top competitors in the world, that man will run the 100 much faster than he did during any one of those 10 intervals (including the 1st). why? because he knows conciously and subconciously he only has one sprint to run and he must do his
best. not what he or i absolutely
believes is his best, but his
B E S T.
ever seen a reporter try to talk to a maurice green after the gold medal race at the olympics? try not even being able to form a sentence for about 10 minutes. then ask him to run it again in under 10 seconds. he'll tell you to go take a flying fuck. now hold a gun to his head and tell him to do it or him and his family are dead. guess what? you still won't get your sub 10 seconds. why? refer above.
you see, this is a physiological fact and one that i still can't believe i was arguing with Milos about around the time of his first seminar. the 'mind' was telling me that it
was possible to sprint a marathon and that i was simply 'weak minded' not to believe him. all i can say is, just as well for Milos he and his boys take a lot of drugs, because his training theories are seriously flawed.
this is also why i take the michaliks, milos' and defendis' of the world with a grain of salt. there's one and only one only thing that correlates between their machismo fuelled insanity sessions and their results and that's the sign on the wall that says, 'up the dosage'.
