 Next question is from Justin Lee. What are your thoughts of Mike Menser's heavy-duty training change change your life? Well, it actually was it was a very profound book for me, but it was Just generally in the whole muscle-building world. So he's the intensity one, right? Is that right? Yeah So a little background, right? So Mike Menser was a bodybuilder in the 70s early 80s And he was you know, he never won mr. Olympia, but he had a very Commanding physique on stage very smart kind of cerebral guy very different and during that time the bodybuilding training was all about volume and Frequency and angles Arnold dominated bodybuilding at the time. So everything was about 20-something sets per body part double split routines and Mike Menser comes out and says no in order to trigger muscle growth you just need to do one all out high-intensity set of weights or resistance training Send the signal leave it alone, right? And he got this from Arthur Jones. Arthur Jones was the inventor of Nautilus equipment You know the famous, you know experiment he did with Casey Viatter that we've talked about on the podcast And so Mike Menser employed some of these techniques and built a great physique He just he took it too far, you know on the one hand you have the volume is king on the other hand You have know it's all about intensity and they are inversely related, right? The harder you work out the less volume you could do and vice versa But neither one of them is the full answer and I I learned this through trial and error and through I even did this on my clients I actually would have clients do heavy-duty workouts because I because I was going through the period of kind of like Experimenting and you'll see them progress and then stop just like with almost any other viable training That's the real magic behind all of these books all of these methods of training is that if you've never trained this way Before and then you go do it you may see incredible results like you've never seen before but it's not That method of training why it's because the novelty of that and if you go do that Forever and consistent and then read a different book that has competing type of theories or ideas around training You're gonna see incredible results again And that was it took me over a decade to piece that together right because I was I fell into that trap try something Oh high reps. Oh, it's oh low reps. Oh, it's going to failure Oh, it's like it's like oh, maybe what it is is that I've been doing this all the time And this is so different than that so my body adapts and responds. Okay now I've been doing that for a long time so damn near anything else But that is gonna show me and so that's the real lesson is and understanding human behavior How we get caught into doing this trap of the same stuff all the time It definitely ups the risk and the risk reward so it's sort of you know balance with that and You do see like success from that, but then there's that thin line of like, you know, now I'm flirting with like a risky You know type of a method where you see this sort of resurface. I don't know if you guys are familiar with those like ARX machines So it's like basically like a mechanized resistance. And so they try to like really like Intensify one rep so you do each phase of the contraction. They like add, you know more to the strength curve Within those so it's like basically it's like cables You're like pushing as hard as you can you're holding for as hard as you can and then you're coming back in Descent as hard as possible. It's just like the whole thing is like all intensity like short amount of reps but they're trying to sort of solve the Issue of it being such a riskier type of modality, but again, it only lasts for so long You know before we're gonna need to expose the body something else it oversimplifies Muscle adaptation or the adaptation of building strength and muscle they say it's all about intensity And so if you just go intense enough For one set the trigger or the the wheels are set in motion Then you just step away Allow your body to recover and you should be able to build muscle up until you reach your genetic potential It doesn't work this way you can over apply intensity as well And by the way volume and frequency also contribute to muscle otherwise you wouldn't see mechanics with muscular forearms Why do mechanics typically have muscular forms? They never go to failure. It's a lot of volume a lot of frequency, right? Now I'm not saying that's the only answer either It's a combination of them and you have to kind of move in and out of each of them to get your body to Continue to respond, but look if you were to look even if we were to use bodybuilders as the example the vast majority of bodybuilders out there trained with More volume and don't go to failure all the time There are a few that do like during eights kind of trained this way, right? Mike Menser trained this way There's a couple others. There was something called DC training that kind of was similar I mean Mike Menser went so crazy with this at one point that he would train people with his typical style Which was one all-out set to failure Per body part and people would his he would have people work out two or three days a week That was it then when they would stop responding. You know what his answer was less frequency Okay, then it means you need more recovery So now I'm gonna give you ten days between body parts and then 14 days between and it just it didn't work It stops working now Do you and I don't I don't believe that any of these guys that wrote any of these books only trained that way either Right, do you think Mike Menser only trained that way that he wrote in the book? Or that was like a phase or a thing that he did or that he talked about it because he was marketing You know what I but then he probably actually trained a lot of different ways. I think it's sustainable. Yeah Yeah, I don't think so either I think a lot. I think that happens still today You see somebody mark it an idea and it's like oh, it's brilliant But I don't think they they they do that either they use it Oh, I've got this incredible physique that I've built Now let's write a book around these few things and it's like they are not just doing those few things You know, I used to think that and I think to some extent that's true but then there's this other side that You know when you when you read about these people you see me in interviews like Dorian Yates did train The way that he said he did for all of his mr. Olympia wins and he would literally do a few exercises per body part One all-out set to failure and that's it per exercise. So for back he'd do like three exercise So three sets of failure and that was it which for pro bodybuilding terms is super low volume now Here's my explanation. I think that there's genetic variances between individuals That sometimes makes people respond exceptionally well to intensity so they can cut their volume way down Use intensity and it just works really well for them And then I think there's people on the other end of the spectrum and I think I think there's people with Frequency that are like that as well. So I think that there's general truths But your individual variance might make you work a little better one way or the other And I also don't think it's permanent I think is your body changes and you age and circumstances change Then what works for you before may not work for you as well as it did before But this particular theory at the time or this book It came out and it was so different and so radical against You know in comparison to what everybody else was saying that it didn't gain popularity And it's probably because people all did high volume and so they said let me try this out and then oh my god It totally works. Yeah, so it kind of you know, it kind of blew up But I do think there's some truth in what he says I just don't think it's the it's the all-out answer and by the way The best studies on resistance training and building muscle shows That going to failure is too much intensity most of the time And that one set to failure or one hard set versus three hard sets For beginners is usually this just is fine But as they get more advanced more volume tends to produce better results And so we do have these general truths that we've already shown in studies and and this heavy duty style training Is probably not best for most people You like the information in this clip you guys are going to love the information in this full episode Make sure you subscribe and check it out