High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way

Use these suggestions if you buy this book!

The plan given in this book is really quite simple. Do as little warmup as possible, only do one set per exercise to complete exhaustion, and rest for 4-7 days between workouts.

I have tried the 4-7 days between workouts plan and found I was getting fat because the workouts became so sparse. My body relied on the frequent workouts I previously did to burn calories, so I would not recommend doing this. Also, the 4-7 days he recommends is for each workout, not for a certain body part workout, which means that you could end up not working a certain body part for several weeks if you do follow this plan. This simply is not frequent enough for muscle growth, in fact, I believe that it will not lead to any substantial muscle growth.

Personally, I think this 4-7 day between workouts plan is an excellent idea if you use it for a certain body part workout, and work other muscle groups in-between, being careful to plan your workouts so you don't work the same muscle groups before they have received adequate rest (for example, working your chest and the next day working your shoulders you will end up working your upper chest, deltoids and triceps two days in both workouts).

For example, here is an example of a workout plan that allows your muscle groups adequate rest:

1. Back, Traps
2. Calves, Hams, Forearms
3. Quadriceps, Abs
4. Chest, Delts
5. Calves, Hams, Forearms,
6. Quadriceps, Abs
7. Rest

You could easily eliminate workouts five and six, and end the plan at workout four, but I believe the additional workouts for the quadriceps and calves, hams and forearms are not wasted and you will find that the additional work for these muscles is not overtraining because these muscle groups seem to respond better when worked more frequently, even Mentzer has you working the Legs twice although he does not explain why, I found that it really helps your muscle growth in these muscle groups to train them more frequently.

With the "one set is all you need" mindset, I believe that this idea is valid for isolation exercises, but for compound multi-joint exercises where a lot of different muscles come into play (for example, squats, deadlifts, bench press, upright rows) one set is simply not sufficient to exhaust the many muscles involved. I think two sets is sufficient for those using reps of 10-15, and three sets is better if you stick to Mentzer's low rep range of 6-10.

Mentzer gets around this problem by using the principle of preexhaustion where you do an isolation exercise before a compound exercise. I don't know about you, but I do not want to be tired before I start a major compund exercise like squats where I have a lot of potential to build muscle if I am fresh, and when you are tired from preexhaustion you are also much more likely to risk injury especially when doing high intensity training. Yes preexhaustion is necessary if you are to follow Mentzer's plan, but who wants to do leg extensions before doing squats?

Another problem I encountered was counting reps. If you are doing an exercise to muscle failure, you will end up doing partial reps at the end of your set most of the time. I solved this problem by counting all partial reps and all full reps until I completely stopped the exercise. This means that for most exercises where I can do 8 full reps, I can do at least another five partial reps for a total of 13 reps or more on most exercises (excluding those where partial reps are impossible, like squats and deadlifts). I don't count full reps versus partial reps, although this can be done but is more confusing and complicated.

Well, it seems as if I am doing this article backwards, because the only thing left to talk about is the warm-up. I don't believe it is safe for some exercises to do as little warm-up as possible (for example, squats and deadlifts could be extremely dangerous if you don't warm-up thoroughly beforehand). A proper and thorough warm-up doesn't need to be anything more than simply using lighter weights with each exercise for the first two or three sets before starting your "working sets." Do as much warm-up as necessary, when in doubt, do another warm-up set. It is better than risking injury in your "working sets".

All in all, I do not regret buying this book just for the valuable education it taught me about how my high volume workouts with many many sets were hurting me and unnecessary. I think that with the revisions which I have stated above, the book could be useful for motivation and education about how the high frequency, high volume workouts hurt us more than they help us. I would not follow Mentzer's plan verbatim, but use the suggestions above along with your own common sense and research to guide you in your path to attaining more muscle.