Hopefully, Donkey Kong will understand that there is no direct personal malice intended here... but his response is a textbook example of the faulty reasoning I decry at every opportunity...
I think that ALL kinds of training are great, if they SHOCK the muscle. You say, for a natural at the end of the line some kind of 'heretic' training may be necessary.
...simply wrong, wrong, wrong!
The bullshit two hour sessions, twice a day, six days a week high volume shite regimens espoused (but not necessarily adhered to) by every Weider athlete from Arnold to Lee Haney and promulgated as de facto bodybuilding orthodoxy for nearly thirty years... never built any muscle for anyone... ever!
Somehow, the PC brainwashing endemic in modern society encourages even bodybuilders to affirm the equal validity of any and all training regimens... can't we simply admit that certain inefficient training regimes were foisted upon naive yet eager teenage boys by a bodybuilding media dependent on snake-oil hucksterism?
I believe that all kinds of training have a value, but not for everyone.
...the religous overtones are obvious here. Respect and equality of reverence for all ideologies irregardless of scientific truth.
Not exactly conducive to progress is it?
I have seen naturals who got a good built and a good conditioning by training 10 month a year with merely their bodyweight (pushups, chinups etc) and 2 months weights and doing beach volleyball, basketball and swimming for cardio (this obviously trains legs and back as well). These guys got bigger than some naturals who WO 3 times a week HIT style will ever get.
On the other hand, there are some naturals training HIT 3 times a week who dwarf them.
...and I once met an avid hillwalker who carried a solid 240 lbs (20% bf) replete with 18'' arms and baffling 19'' calves, who, at 53 years of age, felt he might like to start doing some light bench presses and dumbbell curls for "better health".
None of this really matters... as all it does is justify obfuscation and hands-off bafflement.
The question should be one of consistent progress and the efficiency; universality and reproductivity of such progress... and on those accounts the case is already settled: the result? Low volume Arthur Jones-style HIT training (whole body workouts of compound movements) is, and has repeatedly been shown to be, THE MOST EFFECTIVE AND BEST form of bodybuilding training.
If you don't believe this, see the sterling work and consistent success Dr Ellington Darden has had working with genetically typical and natural trainees.
ANYONE doing ANYTHING else (no matter what progress they are making) would do BETTER with HIT.
There is no perfect training, i think we agree on that. There may be some training whivh is better than the other, but the body adapts very fast, so changing your training style constantly will lead to the best results IMO.
...bodyparts don't adapt. It's a bodybuilding myth.
OVERTRAINED bodybuilders can sometimes (accidentally) surpass the neurological limitations put on their strained muscular systems due to their overtrained state by changing exercises.
In layman's terms this means...
If you are overtrained you train at a lessened capacity due to the metabolic stress of overtraining itself... that's why changing exercises causes some form of shock (DOMS; muscular soreness) as the body is tricked into working beyond that lessened capacity.
If you were to avoid the overtraining altogether then you can continue to progress doing the same exercises ad infinitum...
I've become so good at doing squats that I don't do anything else for legs (that's just one set for quads, hams or calves)... I've become so good at doing bent over rows that I rarely (if ever) do anything else for my back... I've become so good at doing flyes that a set of flat-bench dumbbell flyes can easily constitute a productive chest workout.
As you progress you should be doing less and less... not doing Swiss-ball one-legged kettle bell squats with your fingers crossed looking to "shock" your muscles.
Sorry for the rant.
The Luke
