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The biggest problem with John's poor argument is that he starts by assuming his conclusion. He says Dorian trained with one working set taken beyond failure, therefore Dorian was doing HIT. He wasnt but that's not actually the debate. The debate is whether Dorian's training was the same thing as Arthur Jones' and Mike Mentzer's HIT philosophy.
Dorian himself repeatedly admitted over the years that his training evolved beyond pure HIT. He performed multiple warm up sets aka pyramid/ramp sets, often multiple exercises per body part, and his total workload was far higher than what Arthur Jones originally prescribed. By the time Dorian was at his peak, he wasn't doing "one set and go home." He was doing several exercises for each muscle group, often accumulating far more work than HIT dreamers like to admit.
John tries to dismiss warm up sets by saying they "don't count." That's convenient, but muscles don't know whether a set is labelled warm up or working set. If you're doing 10 reps with 315 before incline pressing 405, your body is still performing work. Fatigue accumulates. Training stress accumulates. To say those sets magically don't matter because they're called warm ups is a semantic trick.
Another weakness is his definition of HIT. He basically redefines HIT as "training to failure." If that's the definition, then Arnold, Ferrigno, Platz, Haney, Coleman and countless volume trainers were doing HIT whenever they pushed a set to failure. The term becomes meaningless. Historically, HIT wasn't just training to failure. It was a complete training philosophy centred around minimal volume, infrequent training and usually one all out set per exercise. That's why people debate whether Dorian was truly HIT or not, answer is he wasn't.
He also claims that multiple sets beyond failure provide no additional benefit and may even be detrimental. The problem is that bodybuilding history doesn't support such a sweeping claim. Arnold trained with high volume. Nubret trained with enormous volume. Sergio trained with high volume. Ronnie Coleman trained with high volume. Jay Cutler trained with high volume. Lee Haney trained with moderate to high volume. These men built some of the greatest physiques in history without relying on a single all out set per exercise.
Then there's the contradiction about recovery. He says Dorian's routine worked because of one all out set, but later admits enhanced bodybuilders recover differently due to drug use. That's a huge factor. Dorian wasn't just another guy training hard. He was an elite genetic outlier using pharmaceutical assistance, eating perfectly, sleeping perfectly and dedicating his life to recovery. You can't isolate one variable and claim the success came entirely from HIT.
The claim that training muscles more frequently is "dumb" is also overly simplistic. Modern research consistently shows that weekly volume is a major driver of hypertrophy. Frequency is simply a way of distributing that volume. Plenty of natural lifters make excellent gains training a muscle two or three times per week. If frequency didn't work, Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters and many successful bodybuilders would all be failing to progress.
What really happened is that Dorian created a hybrid system. He took the intensity concepts of Jones and Mentzer, combined them with more exercises, more total work and practical experience, then adapted them to his own recovery abilities and drug enhanced physiology. That's why Dorian himself has described his training as a hybrid over the years.
Ironically, John even admits this in the video, then spends the rest of the video arguing it isn't a hybrid.
The reality is that Dorian's success doesn't prove HIT is superior any more than Arnold's success proves high volume is superior. It proves that an extraordinarily gifted, drug-assisted, hyper-disciplined athlete found a system that worked for him, which wasn't that much different to how many pro's trained.
That's a very different claim from "HIT is the best way to train."
