All opinions are subjective..."objective opinions" are known as facts, I believe....
It's not necessarily training harder, but smarter. I worked with Ms. New Jersey (figure) for the last 8 weeks of her prep...I cut her time in the gym from 5 days to four, and from an hour and a half each session to 45 minutes...I halved her training time, and she took first place in her contest!
From my article on her:
It was also at week eight that I took over writing her workouts, and began taking more of a heavy hand in helping her. Her five weekly hour and a half weight training sessions were changed to four weekly sessions, each lasting no more than forty-five minutes. Lower body was trained two times a week as was upper body, and I replaced all of her machine movements with free weights. We stopped thinking "bodybuilder" on lower body days and started thinking "rap video."
(Full article about her and her training:
http://www.t-nation.com/portal_includes/articles/2006/06-104-feature.html)
She worked out smarter, not harder.
On the other hand, I'm of the staunch opinion that if you have been lifting/training/playing for years and never been injured, you're a total pussy.
And how stupid are the workouts I see on the internet? Basically, I could write a better workout using a Ouija Board or flipping a fucking coin.