little chris said:
I would have to say Mentzer for several reasons, having the intelligence to realize less is better in a time where 6 days of 2-3 hour training was the norm and secondly having the balls to speak his mind, not in a crude or idiotic fashion but by fact and research. Damn the bastards that condem a man for his difference in opinion or should I say fact. Of course no one could argue with arnold's results but I've read that Mentzer did very little juice where as Arnold was taking 30-50 dbol PD and around 600mg of Primo. I got noting against Arnold He changed the world of bodybulding but the question was who's the most intelligent not the most popular.
You're right.
As a man, Schwarzenegger seems quite intelligent. He's an accomplised businessman, something that, IMO, takes more intellect than succeding in bodybuilding (genetics and drugs won't carry you very far; neither will charisma). And of course, I love Arnold. He was awesome, even if his training was whack. (In truth, he did train pretty hard. Most of his volume sets were just warm-ups/not even close to failure anyway, but for some reason he thought the amount of overall work was the key.)
As a bodybuilder, Mentzer was definitely a forward thinker. He might've lifted lots of ideas from Art Jones, but Arthur was obsessed more with bodybuilding minutia--how to measure strength accurately, how to devise the "perfect" exercise to isolate a bodypart, and so on. At least until the mid to late 90's, Mike was trying to see the big picture, and was willing to recognize that, if something did not work (Jones' 3x weekly full body Nautilus circuit, all exercises done to failure, week after week after week), it needed to be changed!
When I knew Mike, he succumbed to some of the same problems Jones did and started to leave assumptions unchecked; e.g., the idea that if someone was training to failure, overtraining was always the reason they weren't progressing.
In light of very low-volume, frequent training protocals like Doggcrapp's, Mike was half-right: we should find out the
bare minimum amount of work required to stimulate growth, and that can be interpreted as one very hard set. But Mike committed a fallacy he oft spoke of, context-dropping.
What I mean is, Mike had people training 3x weekly on a three-way split, doing maybe 2-3 sets per bodypart or so (and oftentimes forced reps). When someone stalled on that program, he had them start resting more between each workout. I did that. You would gain a little size, and a lot of strength, but the less frequent routine was far less effective at adding size overall.
Rather than keep the volume at 2-3 sets to failure per bodypart, why not reduce it to one set? He decided that, but still thought more rest was required; only trouble is, people were stalling on 2-3 sets, NOT one. Thus, they could train
more frequently, or at least could still train each bodypart once a week long-term.
That's an important point: short vs. long-term. Mike thought training should *always* be hard, and never looked beyond the long-term. But you can do more frequent work for short periods and gain like crazy...Louden, Debaser, Fatty 4 You, and Dogg himself have demonstrated that I think. But after a training cycle, you back off for awhile, then do it again.
Why he didn't try this, I do not know...he himself said that progress should be "immediate and dramatic"; therefore, it
is a short-term phenomenon. Training should be constructed around
that and that alone.
You do have to give Mike props for his contributions, though...he was the first to do away with that weird "you always have to train the entire body at once" idea, and he
did first suggest that people should reduce their training volume to a single set.
Just from talking to him, it's obvious he was smart. He wouldn't have been able to do what he did (but never finished) at the University of Maryland if he was dense!
As far as Mike's juice goes, he and Ray
did take very conservative cycles. They were both insanely strong, too--Ray especially, who did squats slightly past parallel with over 800!
God bless them both. I miss Mike. He was funny as hell.
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