Here’s a riddle for you.
If you were handed a wildly effective tool that could create muscle almost out of thin air when you used it, why would you not use it as often as possible?
Hang on to that thought for a second.
The other day I was doing my “Heavy Duty” session for the week. If you aren’t familiar with Heavy Duty, it was a big deal back in the ancient days of the 1990s when Mr. Olympia winners Mike Mentzer and Dorian Yates were preaching the gospel of a single set to gut-punching failure.
Back in the day there used to be huge flame-wars about whether this style of training to failure was better than high-volume bodybuilder splits.
The pros of Heavy Duty are pretty clear. Workouts for the whole body can be done in like half an hour. You’re meant to pick big compound moves (which is good advice anyway) and aim somewhere between 6 reps and 12 reps on your one big set. If you’re dialed in with your mental intensity, this kind of high-intensity training may be the most direct and effective path to triggering a muscle to grow. It also brings a healthy dose of strength gains in the short run.
With all those benefits, you might think it’s worth training like that all the live-long-day.
Not so.
Mike Mentzer in his later years became obsessed with minimizing the number of workouts you do. He was talking about training once every 14 days to (if memory serves) every 21 days.
That simply won’t do here in the world of Dr. Lift Every Day.
Heavy Duty requires you progressively dial back on the frequency because training like that beats the living hell out of your system. You have train less often because connective tissues in your joints, your nervous system, your hormones, immune system, and everything else takes an absolute pounding.
To make it work within my own scheme requires me to dial it back to a Lite Beer version (no squats involved, for example). Even then I’ve got one, maybe two good sessions a week like that before the joints start piping up.
If you are tight on time, hitting two or even one session like this in a week can be golden for a month or three. A couple decades ago that approach got me through a rough Alabama summer of 80-hour weeks cleaning carpets. Like everything else, your body adapts and some kind of change is necessary to break the plateau.
If only we’d realized back in the day that it’s the jump from high-volume “pump” to low-volume “intensity” training, and back, that does most of the magic, we wouldn’t have had so much to argue about…
The wise reader has already realized the answer to the riddle.
You can’t use even a brutally-effective method all the time because the upsides of using it come with serious downsides.
In exercise science they call this the fitness-fatigue model of adaptation.
Fitness means the positive gains from a workout.
Fatigue means the negative debts that your body needs to recover from.
A Heavy Duty session done right can bring enormous fitness gains, as far as triggering muscle to get larger and nervous system to get stronger.
And by doing that, you dig a deep hole of fatigue that can take some time to recover from.
Every promise has a price.
What happens is that you stack up fitness “wins” while racking up fatigue “debts”.
You can carry on that way for awhile, sometimes a real long time, before the bill comes due.
Ideally you’d tap out before the crash, but some folks (like this guy right here) are too bone-headed for that. We just go until the wheels come off and then drive on the sparking rims.
But it’s gonna happen one way or another. You may as well be strategical about it, planning your down-times to coast and relax and shift gears from time to time.
Even the most effective training method eventually loses steam, stalls out, and turns rancid. It turns out that “changing it up” to “keep the body confused” hides a pearl of truth under the layers of bro-lore.
This is just one of the high-level principles that I bring to the game for myself and my clients. If you’re interested in getting real results, instead of fooling around with this month’s shiny influencer nonsense, you might want to apply for one of my rare coaching spaces.
There’s a waitlist and spaces only go to people on it. If you’re interested, you can join the list here:
Matt Perryman