Arthur Jones remains one of the most polarizing figures in bodybuilding. An entire sub- culture developed around Jones’s unorthodox High Intensity Training methods, as did an equally vocal range of critics. When discussing HIT, there is no middle ground.
Jones’s notoriety began in the 1970s, at a time when names like Joe Weider and Vince Gironda were synonymous with bodybuilding. Stars of the Muscle Beach era include Franco Columbu, Dave Draper, Lou Ferrigno, Larry Scott, and the man who would practically become bodybuilding, Arnold Swarzenegger.
This motley crew trained according to principles of blasting and bombing, working a muscle to exhaustion with set after excruciating set, splitting up their entire body into muscle groups to be trained in total across five or six weekly workouts.
Arthur Jones didn’t agree. To Jones, spending six days in the gym, training two to three hours at a stretch, was too much time wasted on too many useless sets. It was intensity, not volume, that grew muscle.
Exercise science defines intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your one-rep maximum (1RM).
Jones used a more subjective value. In the HIT world, intensity is about effort, about pushing through pain and fatigue. The endless sets of bombing and blasting were a waste of time. There was no effort, no drive, no stimulus behind the pumping. What bodybuilders needed was focus, to dig in and maximize the stimulus placed on a muscle with the least possible amount of physical work.
Jones believed that he’d teased out the mythical Grow Button hidden away inside muscle tissue, that he’d learned how to push it with the most direct possible stimulus. What mattered was the so-called inroad, tapping the muscle’s momentary maximum ability, which we’d know today as “training to failure”. Volume was a distraction, unnecessary and even harmful as it depleted the energies needed to recover and grow.
Endorsed by bodybuilders from Jones’s protégé Mike Mentzer to six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, who used a variation of Mentzer’s Heavy Duty system to bring home his Sandows, it seems there must be something to the minimalist approach.
As I’m using the term here, minimalism is the belief that workouts must be time- efficient, that one set is as good as or better than three or more sets, and that “recovery” ― a vague term if there ever was one ― can only be maximized with ample rest between workouts. Minimalism is the belief that less is always better than more.
Even Jones’s most bitter opponents concede ― if grudgingly ― that the gruff curmudgeon raised points worthy of consideration. Jones’s central point was that people didn’t train hard enough. Going through the motions for two hour workouts, pumping away with set after set, probably isn’t the most productive use of time. There has to be some kind of push behind your training.
Many of Arthur Jones’s training recommendations aren’t so bad, viewed in hindsight. Jones promoted training a muscle 2-3 times a week, and despite the “one set to failure” perception, muscle groups were trained with more than one exercise per session. Some of the early HIT workouts are almost volume-heavy (at least compared to what would come later). Jones’s occasionally obsessive focus on machine training notwithstanding, these were not bad workouts.
As a core set of principles, “train hard and efficiently while focusing on lifting heavier weight” is a message hard to argue with. Unfortunately, those reasonable ideas weren’t the end of the minimalist trend.
The Hardgainer philosophy which grew out of HIT took the “brief and intense” idea and ran with it. While even Jones allowed for a reasonable frequency of workouts, the minimalist notion that we must aspire for less eventually overtook the more sensible view.
A hardgainer is the prototypical skinny kid that can’t gain weight. Hardgainers are at a genetic disadvantage, as they don’t respond to training “normally”, so they have to do even
less work for any hope of a strong, well-muscled physique.
HIT’s minimalist legacy remains with us today, responsible in part for the popular gym- belief that that less is always better. You train with brief, intense workouts, and follow up with lots of rest. That’s just how it’s done. Anything more is overtraining.
Whether we’re talking HIT or blasting and bombing, we’re still in the world of bodybuilding. We’re still talking about the best way to train muscles, whether that’s lots of volume and lots of workouts, or a handful of sets at nose-bleed intensity with plenty of rest time.
It’s all about muscles, not strength.
Current biological knowledge is vastly improved over the understanding of the 1960s and 70s. We know more about muscle growth and about recovery and overtraining than we did when minimalism first took shape.
Yet strength training remains in a virtual dark age when it comes to understanding what happens and why.