Not only that, but without the use of chemical assistance, the average person couldn't train at that intensity level for 3 hours per week if he wanted to. After I got a true dose of that training style by being worked over by Ellington Darden, there's no way in hell I could have done that for 3 hours a week. After the first 20 or 30 minutes of it, I was lying on my stomach on the floor breathing out of a paper bag for God's sake. The oxygen required by your system for this type of training is through the roof, but as I've stated in the past, it's not the type of training you can do by yourself because you really can't take yourself to negative failure on your own. It would be cool if they had some AI-controlled machines that would act as "virtual training assistants" that you could step in and do negative-centric training without the need for another human or multiple humans being present to spot you and guide you.
I was doing 2x trainings per day, 32 days in the row, without chemicals or any suplements. ~ 700 reps per day. On the morning of 33 day, when i woke up, the whole body was is a such, unusual pain, like nothing before. Had even thoughts about calling the ambulance. Gladly, it went away the same day. Actually, few hours later, after i woke up (...?) Heard somewhere that it could have been brain & nervous system related. Overburn. Would end up in a similar way, probably, with an average person, if using his system, in few months or less.
I'm just wondering if going to that extreme might be overkill. Not that I know; I don't think anyone knows that definitively, even the researchers. Even some people in the HIT community question whether the threshold for adaptation is MMF or something just short of it. So to cover the bases, the general conclusion is that it's a safer bet to take it to MMF to ensure that the threshold is crossed. But as for going beyond MMF, there appears to be less agreement even among HIT proponents. And as McGuff wrote in Body By Science, "It doesn't follow that if something is true, then having even more of it makes it truer. You can't go down that slippery slope." Here's an brief and interesting discussion on the subject by an exercise researcher whose work I follow: So while Darden, and Arthur Jones before him, may have put their clients through the wringer, taking them beyond MMF, I'm not fully convinced that it was necessary. And certainly not in every workout. But it does make for good press, and justifies the need for having a trainer. Baron, here's a question for you. When you trained with Ellington, did you work each muscle group to completion, or did you do super sets of sorts, working opposing muscle groups one after the other? Just curious, because I gave the latter a go a couple weeks back and I'd like to know the sequence that he put you through.
Thanks. Yes, I remember our exchange about your sessions with Darden, but I didn't recall the details. I guess the combination of SS reps at the beginning and end of each set with no rest between sets could kill a horse if kept up. Which do you think was the more taxing of the two, the SS part or the no-rest part? Presently, I take about a minute rest between sets after going to full MMF, and I work each major muscle group to conclusion before going to the next one. So, after legs, I do all the pulling movements followed by all the pushing movements. About a couple of weeks ago, I tried alternating between pull and push exercises, thereby reducing my rest between sets to about 30 seconds. It was harder, although I'm not sure it was necessarily better. As for the idea of taking no rest between sets after going to full MMF, it is just too sinister for me to even contemplate. I can't imagine that Darden holds on to very many clients for any length of time if that is what he regularly puts them through. And I'm not convinced it is necessarily superior to, say, a minute's rest. (ATP, and all that.) One thing I found curious about the sequence you mentioned in the post you linked is that he had you do chin-ups after bicep curls. That seems counterintuitive, don't you think?