Notwithstanding the fact that you are getting used to these unrelenting workouts, since you are doing two of them a week, are you possibly noticing a cumulative fatigue effect because of the heightened intensity? Do you get a good night's sleep after these workouts?
Good questions. In regards to the two workouts per week, I have not been able to actually achieve that so far. On every workout with him to date, he wanted to me to do more exercises but I just didn't have the wind to pull them off. So my next workout at home in a given week was actually just finishing what I started with him, plus I experimented on a couple of my own exercises as well using the same technique he taught me for that week. So I have yet to pull off two full HIT workouts per week. I've just been too damn sore. I must build up a tolerance to this type of strain if I'm going to go through it twice per week. But at this point, to go through it once on Wednesday and turn around and do it again on Saturday seems ludicrous. It's Thursday evening as I type this, and I'm just now starting to feel the soreness from yesterday's workout setting in. In regards to sleep, I've noticed two things: An almost unstoppable desire to sleep immediately after the workout, somewhere in the range of an hour to an hour and a half. Excellent sleep quality throughout the night. Some of the best I've had in a long time, that's for sure. I'm talking about putting your head on the pillow at 11PM and you feel like all you did was blink and it's all of a sudden 8AM the next day. Also, he asked me what I weighed yesterday and I just regurgitated what I always weigh, which is 180lbs, because that's what I figured it was. But I weighed this morning on an empty stomach and it was 184 lbs. Hmmm... Maybe there's something to method this after all, or maybe I just got fat. We'll see.
Pure water for repair. No time for gains or for fat increase. I never saw a ditch digger with impressive muscles. IMO you are working too hard, and not allowing recovery. Did the hired trainer give you a diet and recovery anabolic program?. I enjoy beating a dead horse... or zebra.
I guess we'll find out in time. In the meantime, I wonder what the difference in outcome would be if you performed the same exercises at full intensity as you do but took a couple of minutes or so of rest between exercises. It would increase the workout duration by several minutes, but it might be more sustainable in the longer run (at least for me). Plus, when you consider the duration and intensity of any single exercise in the routine, your HIT workout would certainly also qualify as HIIT. Have you discussed that at all with Darden? And, perhaps more specifically, what is the principal objective of the workout and what is the secondary objective. Also, is Darden focusing mostly or exclusively on compounds?
Update Okay, so I began the 3 times every 2 week regimen a little over a month ago, together with the marginal post-failure work as I had described in my earlier post, and ran into a bit of trouble. Whereas I would normally work out on a Monday and Friday of one week and then the Wednesday of the following week, it turned out that I was not able to do a workout on a recent Friday as scheduled, and so I did one a day earlier on the Thursday. This was with the post-failure work. I could not sleep well at all for the next 2 nights, and I could attribute it to nothing other than the all-out workouts spaced closely together. (I should point out that when I was going simply to full concentric failure and not beyond, I would normally work out twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.) I realized that even at 3 times every 2 weeks, I was spacing the workouts very close in the recovery cycle for this level of intensity. Truth be told, I really do like the level of intensity that is just a bit past concentric failure as I had described in my earlier post. It really feels like I did something. And so, although I wrote earlier that if things did not go as expected that I would reduce the intensity and up the frequency, in fact, I will do the opposite. I will be keeping this level of intensity and reducing the frequency to only once a week for resistance training. I will continue to do 2 HIIT workouts each week, one right after the RT and one on the weekend a few days later. Inspired by other independent research and what Doug McGuff wrote in his book and said in his various talks, I decided that I didn't want to spend all of my time in recovery and virtually none of it above baseline, where actual overcompensation and adaptation normally occurs. I tried this 1x/wk frequency about a year ago but switched back to a higher frequency after a couple of months. I did not notice a change in strength or body composition during that time, but just felt a bit antsy to get back to the gym more often. However, I wasn't going past failure then, so it wasn't quite the same. Who knows, maybe this time the results will be a little different.
I've been out of the country for the past week with very limited phone and internet access. I will be returning on Saturday, June 17th, and will resume the discussion after I return.
I did a replica of the last workout I posted just to stay consistent while I was on vacation. My next workout with Ellington will be next Wednesday, just FYI.
According to most of the latest research I've read, the key metric that the body uses, especially when it comes to HIT, is the rate at which system resources are being depleted. In other words, your body knows when the shit is hitting the fan quick. When you keep the rest to a minimum and you continue to push the body into more intense exercise, the body can tell that system resources are depleting quickly. This rate of depletion seems to be a key factor in kickstarting the body's ability to repair itself better than it was before. This is an analogy that I thought up this past week while I was on vacation: Imagine if you had a house that was subject to various weather conditions. If your house was only subjected to long sessions of light rain, which you can associate with an hour or more of walking or light jogging in body terms, then your house (or body) would suffer little to no damage, and therefore would be in need of virtually no repair. In other words, it's totally capable of handling the load that was put upon it. If your house (or body) was subject to something more vigorous, like an intense 30-minute thunderstorm (i.e. 15 minutes on the stair stepper combined with 15 more minutes of moderate weight training) then there may be some damage that occurs to the house like some missing roof shingles or rain water that came in through the garage that requires that the house or landscape be repaired in a way that makes it resistant to that same damage ever happening again. In the body, this level of stress would manifest itself as light soreness a day or two after the workout. But what happens to your house if a fucking tornado comes? You know, the equivalent of 5 minutes of intense terror? The winds are hundreds of miles per hour, and the house feels like it's going to lift off of it's foundation any second. And we aren't even counting the threat posed by all the heavy rain and dangerous lightning. In a nutshell, we're talking about a force that will totally break your home (and body) completely down. The tornado equivalent in workout terms simply means that ALL sets are done to NEGATIVE failure, with virtually no rest in between. The stimulus is so great in both cases that there nothing left in the tank by the end of the workout. There is no home left, only a pile of crumbled building material. And there's no ability for the body to do anything else beyond the workout. It's totally depleted. That only means one thing: True destructive inroads like that require a rebuild from the ground up, and not just a rebuild, but a rebuild that creates a house (or body) that is much stronger than it was before. Out goes the wood frame construction and in comes the concrete and cinder block. There is no choice but to build better and stronger than before if the objective is survival. That's the nature of HIT training. You are trying to create a brief and ultra-intense tornado of activity within the body that forces itself into rebuilding a new version from the ground up that is more resilient and stronger than it ever was before.
Your reasoning makes some intuitive sense, although I've not come across such research. If you could post a link or two it would be much appreciated. I've only ever come across intensity as being the single most important consideration in the studies I've reviewed, as defined by training to failure, with rest between sets not being an important consideration. I acknowledge that Arthur Jones, Ellington Darden and even Doug McGuff favor no rest between sets, but I am not aware of any controlled studies that support that practice for strength or hypertrophy training. My guess is that it would certainly enhance fitness. That is why I asked what was the principle objective of the workout. Also, and I'm not sure if this is a good counterargument and whether (or how exactly) Henneman's size principle of motor unit recruitment would factor into it, I would think that if you do not rest between sets, then the further along you go into the workout, the less justice you will be able to do to the muscle groups that follow. The tornado analogy notwithstanding, are you sure you're not sacrificing mass for general fitness?