Everyone Misunderstands Why Mike Mentzer Was Right About Bodybuilding

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:19 Scientific approach to bodybuilding

01:34 Optimal dose

02:17 History

03:25 Training volume & frequency

05:17 Training to failure

08:42 Hypertrophy rep range

09:25 Tempo

11:02 Yielding eccentrics

12:42 Conclusion

Transcript:

Mike Mentzer not only had one of the greatest physiques to ever grace the earth, he was also right about the best method to build muscle mass. It’s no surprise, then, that his methods have experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years. However, this is for entirely the wrong reasons.

Mike Mentzer was one of the first bodybuilders to explicitly follow a scientific approach. He likened bodybuilding to medicine and he considered the bodybuilding practices of the time very dogmatic and unscientific. Many fans of Mike Mentzer like to cite his physique as evidence that his training methods were optimal. Mike Mentzer himself, however, ridiculed this exact line of thinking. In his book “Heavy Duty II” he criticized another bodybuilder for saying: “If 20 sets was good enough for Arnold, it’s good enough for me.”

Philosophically, Mentzer was a rationalist and an objectivist, and he considered bodybuilding a path to his personal development and self-actualization. One of my favorite quotes of his is: “I don’t care what others think, I care what is true.” I also highly respect that Mentzer was candid about doping. In one of his Ironman interviews he said: “I never hid the fact that I took steroids. It wasn’t a secret. In fact, I had a column in Muscle Builder (now Muscle & Fitness) years ago wherein I talked about the use of drugs.”

Also that stache. I tried rocking a mustache like that and I just ended up looking like a French pedo. This already illustrates a central principle: even if you do exactly what he did, your mileage may vary. But enough with the glazing and history lessons, let’s get into his most famous positions on how to build muscle, and evaluate them in light of modern science.

Mentzer is famous for his positions on training volume, frequency and intensity. As a science, he considered that there was an optimal dose for bodybuilding to build muscle, just like there is an optimal dose in medicine for many medications. His most famous works on these dose come from Heavy Duty II and his Consolidation routine. In these programs he recommends training a muscle group with as little as 1 set to failure every 7 to 21 days. So that’s in some cases, literally one set to failure every 3 weeks.

However, when we actually look at the history of Mike Mentzer, what he has written, what he has done, and when he achieved his peak physique, we see that the methods that he is famous for are very different from the methods that he actually used to build his physique in his prime. Mentzer’s competitive bodybuilding record peaked in 1979, when he won the heavyweight division of the Mr. Olympia. In 1978, he won the Mr. Universe, allegedly with a perfect score. He came back in 1980 and got a highly controversial 5th place, after which he was so mad that he retired from bodybuilding.

His most popular book, Heavy Duty II was published in 1996, 16 years after retirement. That means that almost all of the photos you see of Mike Mentzer in his prime at the Olympia, at the Mr. Universe, all of those were taken way before he was actually using the methods that he was later famous for.

Worth noting as well is that in the late 80s to 90s Mike Mentzer went through a bit of a rough patch, to put it mildly. He got addicted to drugs, he had financial issues, and he was even admitted to a psych ward. And there are stories of him running around naked on the streets and claiming the world was ending. His personal life absolutely should not detract from his legendary achievements in bodybuilding, but it might be good to consider when you consider his stances from his books and the positions he is famous for now, versus the training and what he actually believed when he was in his prime.

If we look at the methods that he actually employed to get his prime physique, he trained with considerably higher training volumes. The gravitation towards extreme training minimalism only occurred way after retirement. In his natural days, he actually employed a lot of full body training three times a week, which was the standard at the time. Most natural bodybuilders up until about the 50s trained with full body routines.

In an Ironman interview Mentzer said: “I was training on that kind of routine; that is, the full-body three-days-a-week routine performed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, when I was at college.” His early heavy duty training routines had around 4 to 6 sets per muscle group to failure every 4 to 7 days, again substantially higher volume than his later work in Heavy Duty II and his Consolidation routine, when he was doing only one set per muscle group to failure. So the training that produced his prime physique mostly consisted of 10+ sets per muscle group per week, which is in line with modern meta analyses.

Modern meta analyses show that pretty much more volume seems to be better without a very clear cut off point, but there are very sharp diminishing returns once you go well past 10 sets per week. However, his later positions on doing just 1 set to failure once a week, if that, that is more in line with maintenance volume. Research has confirmed that maintenance volume is very, very low. If you have a lot of muscle memory, it’s very easy to maintain your muscle mass if you train with very high effort. You don’t need to do a lot of volume at all. There is a huge gap between doing enough training to maintain your physique, and doing enough training to build your physique to the next level.

In practice, what I teach my students about optimal training volume is that you should estimate your recovery capacity. Multiple factors determine what training volume is optimal for you at this moment in time. This includes your energy balance, whether you’re cutting, whether you’re bulking, your sleep, your stress level, and your training advancement. If you want an estimate of your optimal training volume, you can get an estimate from my MH Physique App for free with the link in the description.

A related pillar of Mentzer’s training techniques was training to failure, and by failure I mean absolute and utter failure. Often, in fact, training beyond failure and using pre fatigue and post exhaust techniques. Mentzer was way ahead of the curve in defining failure as momentary muscle failure – the absolute inability to produce enough force to lift the weight another time. This is very different from volitional failure. Volitional failure just means that you gave up.

Many exercise scientists still fail to make the distinction between momentary muscle failure and volitional failure. It is often hard, and a little bit subjective, but it makes a very big difference. Multiple repetitions for many individuals.

In his second Heavy Duty book Mentzer states that: “A high intensity training stress, i.e. training to points of momentary muscle failure, is an absolute, objective requirement for inducing growth stimulation.” There is some practical truth to this in that people that train harder, in my experience with over 15 years of coaching, definitely get better results than people that don’t train as hard. However, as an absolute empirical truth, the way he literally formulated it, and as a requirement and a pillar of his training, it is indisputably wrong.

There is now a very large literature of research that shows training to failure is absolutely not required to build muscle. It does increase muscle growth, but ironically, it increases muscle growth not via intensity or reaching failure itself, but via the addition of additional volume. So when you train to failure and you more repetitions as a result, you get more muscle growth. However, in studies where they equate the total training volume by, for example, doing more sets away from failure versus fewer sets to failure, you can get an equivalent growth stimulus. So Mentzer’s ideas that there was one optimal training method and that this method included training to failure is definitely wrong.

Mentzer couldn’t have known this because he didn’t have access to the 30 plus years of scientific research that we now have that is of substantially higher quality than anything that was available in his time. Nevertheless, the insistence on training to absolute failure, or even beyond, probably greatly limited his ability to find the optimal other training parameters. Research is now clear that training to failure has a very poor stimulus to fatigue ratio. If you train to absolute failure, it greatly extends your recovery times. This probably part of the reason why Mentzer concluded that he needed a lot of recovery time in between his workouts, and he couldn’t do a lot of sets.

In my experience of coaching clients many people have kind of a natural set point, if you will, or a natural motivation point for how hard they train. Some individuals have difficulty stopping ahead of failure. They just naturally want to train to absolute failure, and they really hate leaving any reps in the tank. Other individuals have difficulty pushing themselves and they are best off being told just go to failure because they naturally never do so anyway. So his views on training frequency and training volume should be considered. In light of the view that training to failure was essential. It is not, and it opens up a whole avenue of new ways to gain muscle mass, which include much higher training frequencies and higher training volumes that you otherwise couldn’t handle when training with such an intensity as he did.

A good general guideline based on modern science, which is also the default recommendation in my MH Physique App is to do as many reps as you can, but not to intentionally fail any reps. That last rep which you fail is not even a complete rep, so it doesn’t add that much in terms of mechanical tension, and it adds a lot of fatigue, so it’s usually not worth it unless you’re doing a very minimalist routine and you’re doing it on the last set of an exercise so that the fatigue is not really relevant regarding how many reps you should do for maximum muscle growth, Mike Mentzer recommended 6 to 10.

This is in line with the old view of the 6 to 12 rep hypertrophy zone, but it has now been widely debunked by science. 6 to 10 reps is an absolutely fine rep range to build muscle in, but you can go much lower and you can also go much higher. Research is now very clear that between about 4 to 30 reps, potentially even higher, if you go to failure in particular, muscle hypertrophy will be similar on a set to set basis.

So you can do very high reps, very low reps, and actually that has a lot of applications. For example, if you have an exercise that is very injury sensitive you can go higher in reps. Anecdotally, evidence is very strong that this triggers a lot less pain, and it’s probably also easier to sustain for that reason.

Another training parameter that Mike Mentzer had a very specific view on was training tempo. Mike recommended training with a 4s concentric, a 4s eccentric, and a 2s pause in the middle in his most famous positions. That is a very, very slow tempo of 10s per repetition. Modern research has found that such a slow tempo does not improve muscle growth. Absolutely not. In fact, there is a trend in the research for super slow training with like 10s+ per repetition, as Mike famously recommended, to actually reduce muscle growth.

The upside is that it seems to be very easy on your joints. It’s extremely bad for strength development, but Mike Mentzer didn’t care about strength development he was a bodybuilder, so that’s fine.

Personally, I think a very slow tempo like that is very impractical. Even people that want to use a tempo like that, they don’t actually do it. If you put a metronome next to them, or you try to use your phone to actually time how long your repetitions last, almost nobody will actually do 10s repetitions. It feels like an absolute eternity, especially when you do an exercise like squats. So it’s also very impractical just in terms of effort and in terms of tracking, and I think this is something that people probably should not try to replicate.

The general recommendation that I give in my App is that your concentric, the upward phase of most free weight movements should be explosive. This at a minimum improves strength development, and in the long term that might slightly boost muscle growth, although our research doesn’t find any direct benefits of this. Your eccentric doesn’t have to be slowed down. It should be controlled, probably, so you shouldn’t have a free fall because then there’s no eccentric muscle action, and the eccentric phase of the movement is actually very important for muscle growth, as we’ll go into in more detail in a bit. But actually slowing it down further doesn’t improve muscle growth based on numerous studies at this point.

Speaking of eccentric muscle actions, which is the lowering phase of most free weight movements, it’s when the muscle is lengthening and when bodybuilders often call “the negative”. This is a phase that is particularly important for muscle growth, and Mike Mentzer was very early to recognize this. He cited with the research and the stances of Arthur Jones and Nautilus that the eccentric is particularly important for muscle growth. This part has been confirmed by research.

However, he didn’t have special machines to implement this, so what he did is a 1 rep yielding isometric or a yielding eccentric technically, where you just hold the weight in position as long as you can, and it’s dragging you down. So if you do a barbell curl, you’re literally doing one repetition basically, and it’s only the weight going down as slowly as you can make it go. This has actually been studied in a recent study, and funny enough, everyone on the comments was like: “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s stupid.” But I think when you say it’s Mike Mentzer’s idea, people are a lot more amenable to it. However, in a study, it didn’t actually result in more muscle growth.

After eight and a half weeks, the traditional training group had 6.7% muscle growth, as opposed to 4% with the yielding isometric, and biceps curls 1RM strength gains were also better in the group with traditional training.

Nevertheless, Mike Mentzer was definitely onto something with the idea that the eccentric is important. I think the best way to implement this is with eccentric overloading. Certain exercises allow you to do this with momentum or with biomechanics. For example, in my App, you’ll see exercises like calf jumps that naturally have an eccentric overloading component. Research is not entirely clear that this improves muscle growth, but theoretically it should. It should increase muscle tension. It just allows you to do more work per repetition, and therefore it should result in more muscle growth per repetition, as Mentzer predicted.

In conclusion, we can learn a lot from Mike Mentzer, and it would be a disrespect to Mike Mentzer to simplify things to – he had a great physique, therefore his training methods were optimal. His training methods differed from when he actually published his most famous works, versus the training that he did to actually get his prime physique.

Based on modern science most of his methods were an absolutely viable, but not necessarily optimal and probably overly restrictive version of how you can train for maximum muscle growth. If you combine that with high consistency and very high effort, good genes and copious amounts of anabolics, you can get a world class physique. However, if Mentzer had been born today, he would likely have come to very different conclusions on the optimal way to train. He didn’t have access to 30 plus years of additional, much higher quality research that we do now.

Mentzer explicitly considered bodybuilding a science and likened it to medicine. This is exactly the essence of evidence based lifting. It comes from evidence based medicine. You apply the scientific method to find the ideal way to stimulate your body to create a desired adaptation. Mentzer himself ridiculed people who look at someone else and say: “Oh, they have a great physique, therefore, their training methods must be the best.” And that, I think, is what makes Mentzer one of the true goats. Mentzer was one of the first self-professed science based lifters.

So, to Mike Mentzer.

Rest in peace, legend.