10 Reasons Volume is KING for Size and Strength 

BaseStrengthAI is more reliable than a coach, cheaper than an Excel template!👇👇👇 www.BaseStrength.com/the-app Bromley Merch from Barbell Apparel only available HERE! 👇👇👇 barbellapparel.com/Bromley EDIT #1 The image at :28 is Ed Corney, not Mentzer. My fault; when I proof-watched the vid, I looked at it and deadass thought "that's Mike Mentzer". EDIT #2 Not taking shots at the Bioneer, that was just a visual example of tempo work. I opted to leave the names out of who I was talking about and that caused confusion in that clip.

Heavy weights and high reps, this is where the gold is at. - Tom Platz

The great thing about not training to failure or taking sets to 0 RIR is that you can if you want/need to. If you're doing 5x5 on pullups and you're not progressing, maybe the reason isn't volume but intensity. Crank that to 8/7/6/5/5 and you might suddenly grow. Doing the opposite works too. If you're doing 8/7/6/5/5 and you're not recovering, reduce it to 5x5 and see if that helps. Intensity is just another variable you can manipulate.

Volume is so powerful you might even grow a 6th finger like the guy in the thumbnail.

I'v been doing HIT now for 2 months, results are great. No injuries no shoulder or elbow pain, feeling stronger and more rested throughout the week. Saves me time too.

"Volume is the dial that turns the smoothest" that's such an excellent distillation of the concept. Thanks Bromley, always killin it.

I’ve done years of volume training and made good gains in size and strength. Then, in a few months of HIT training my gains in size and strength come at least 5x faster. I come to the gym refreshed, energized and stronger each and every workout. With volume training I plateaued for a year straight.

I've noticed that a balance of both works perfect for me. maybe 2-3 cycles of a high volume program followed by 1-2 cycles of heavy, high intensity style programming.

My experience as a guy that's done bodybuilding without steroids for the better part of 20 years and built a pretty good physique. I did high volume training for the first 18 years. Started off working hard but using crappy form. Got alot stronger but my physique wasn't that great. I decided to put my ego aside after 10 years and lightened the weight using better form while still doing high volume. Physique got much better. Took a couple years off and got fat. Decided to get back in the gym a year and a half ago and decided to try HIT. By using HIT principles at almost 41 years old I've put on far more muscle and way faster. Also there are many ways to go about doing it. Mramericaheart is a great resource. There's more than one way to build muscle but in my experience HIT has worked for me

Can't thank you enough for your recommendation on using 'volumizing' as an approach to build muscle. Aged 46, and getting beat up from a lower volume and higher load approach for nearly a year, I copied your recommendation near verbatim. Its been only three months, and am already seeing more gains than I did previously! Thank you once again for your high quality content.

This video exactly the kind of high-quality, polished content I'd expect from someone with a wealth of information and a skillful editor to go with it. I'm glad you took the feedback to heart on the gvs vid and changed the approach to using tons of jump cuts and flashy effects; this is certainly head and shoulders above that video in production quality and makes it much more enjoyable to watch. Keep up the good work man, I'm excited to see your channel grow and reach a wider audience.

I continue to learn tons from your videos about lifting and programming! Currently running bullmastiff and loving the volume and workload. Plan on running it thru peak phase in time to mark some strength milestones for my 50th. Thanks for the great content!

The perfect balance of high intensity and volume is what causes growth. Not one extreme or the other.

This is the only weight training video anyone needs to learn from when it comes to getting it in. Thank you. I ripped my shoulder today. I wish I could have watched this video before going. Lol

I've done many types of workouts in my fitness journey. Started of with putting all the books in my school bag and doing 50 curls with each arm, to bodybuilding split, to my now hypertrophy and strength splits. I've done Hit, read Mentzers books, a lot of what he said makes sense. I got bigger and stronger doing 1 workout per week. But I got bigger and stronger still doing more volume. My take away from HIT was intensity. I thought I worked out hard, but when an empty bar can humble you it is quite the experience. Those slow concentric reps really trained me for grinding out max effort reps and absolutely got me over a few plateaus with my pressing. It also showed me the importance of recovery above all else and not to be afraid of taking a week off and to actually schedule into your training. Like you said, everyone is different, we all react differently to certain stimulus, weight training is no different. You should check out Dante Trudel and his Doggcrapp training. That was another training program I enjoyed, and actually might start incorporating some elements of it back into my current training.

You're getting so good at making videos I can't put my finger on exactly what. It's not just the new editor, you're spitting bars, making sense making sense, being relatable af all that good stuff.

love the more subtle editing approach

Also volume helps with injury prevention. You can do more work overall but each rep is less weight trying to tear your ligaments apart. Most people aren't looking to compete and shatter records and care about how their body remaining functional as they age. Volume helps build up more support in your body to prevent injuries as weight increases

Your channel as become by far my favorite no bullshit source of info over the years. Thanx for the great content

As someone who has trained for 38 years now(started at 14, I'm 52 now) this video is totally spot on. I've done all the systems at some point over the years. High volume, short of failure builds muscle, period.

After a year's good progress in the gym mainly with low reps strength work, I have now started a high volume step loading program(after following your advice). Just a couple of weeks in and my stubborn skinny arms having arms have grown 0.5 inches! The best part of this approach that I like is that I can maintain proper technique on every rep.

Intensity definetly is King and Volume is Queen. If you train 10 RIR you can do as much volume as you want with that low proximity to failure your high treshold motor units will never be activated and set under mechanical tension and therefore wont trigger MPS.

Well thought out and spoken. You are super easy to listen to. Great video.

You’re a really good communicator btw! Subscribed

Thanks for this. I’ve listened to mikes tapes and he’s so well articulated and speaks with such confidence it’s hard to think he’s wrong. I think of genetically gifted people they can train any which way and still grow.

Editing is getting so much better now, thanks for listening to the subscribers and improving bro brilliant quality Edit: Road to 1M Alex, we’re with you 😂 No because genuinely your information is THE BEST I’ve come across in this niche and the more people that watch you the better educated the world will be, so keep doing what you’re doing and we hope you keep growing ❤️

Thank you for bringing this topic to the forefront. Social media tends to morph a “my way or the highway” concept

Awesome presentation!!! Very informative, thought provoking and helpful!!

Hello, Alexander (Alex?). I really appreciate this video and the points you made here as I am approaching an interesting point in my training in regards to these two approaches. I have gone through periods of using both separately, and mixing the two. I was able to get to my strongest point in squats and deadlifts when I was alternating reverse pyramiding and high volume workouts on a weekly basis several years ago. Progress was then waylaid by some life events, and I have spent the time since trying to find that right mix of ingredients again. Most recently, I got into the Yates style of lifting, not exactly the HIIT that Mentzer proposed as I train alone and now in my basement instead of in a commercial gym. What I have found in the past few years has been that, for me, legs and back are best done together and at the beginning of the workout week so I can end on deadlifts. This approach allowed me to go all in on both squats and rows, which supercharges my deadlifts. Then a day of rest before doing chest and shoulders, and then another day of rest before doing biceps, triceps, and core. The point of overlap for me has been when I have gotten stronger on lifts. Whereas when I started, I was only able to do 3 sets including the warm up, now my strength allows me to jump in weight so significantly that it has to be spread across 4 sets or more sometimes in order to be done safely. The reason being you simply can't jump from 135 to 315, or more, safely. It must be spread out. The point I'm trying to make is that with the strength gains I saw from adopting more of the Yates style to begin with, I have been able to now lean more into higher volume by adding more sets as I get stronger.

Learned from Frank Zane's workouts easiest way to grow in size and strength is to increase volume over time, then reset volume and increase weight and with that weight increase volume over time and again reset the volume and add more weight and repeat this. So it's both, increasing load through weight and volume. I've never seen growth and progress faster than that. I think doing this allows the muscles to adapt efficiently to new weight and is good for avoiding injury. He does not advocate for failure and seemed to do fine, but I've always assumed failure really just means to the point where the weight is no longer being controlled efficiently and the mind muscle connection is beginning to fade.

Excellent work! Very well made video. The effort you put into making high quality informative as well as entertaining content is highly commendable. 💪👍

I follow your minimalist hypertrophy program. It works for now

This is why I hate the term "junk volume". Is it really junk volume when, at the very least, you're burning more calories? Many of the people concerned about "over-training" have never approached anything close to overtraining.

This dropped at the perfect time. I'm on week 2 of 70s PL and did the squat day yesterday. It almost took me out and I questioned continuing, but I'm going to keep at it and adapt to this crazy volume. Thanks Bromley

Hi, this is the first video I saw from you and I just wanted to say that it was perfect. Everything is so well said that you just had my attention the whole time

Awesome video brother 👊

@0:23 that is Ed Corney

I have a powerlifting coach and he's worked well for me, he said our main goal is getting bigger, period. I've never gotten stronger without getting bigger and vice versa. I do think there is skill involved in strength but more important than that is leverages

Love all the weightlifting clips !

I completely agree with the volume approach 👍💪

Currently doing high-intensity. Growing like never before. Plus all the issues with tendonitis and chronic fatigue I was having with volume are gone. Will go back to volume in a bit to mix things up, but HI is giving me way better results with a small fraction of the time investment. Always have at least 1, often 2, rest days between workouts. Needed too. Have a spotter take me way past failure, then a couple rounds of waiting 10 secs to get 1-2 more reps in with very slow eccentrics. Additional sets really do seem pointless after that level of muscle shock.

0:21 Mike Mentzer is Ed Horney suddenly

A focused discussion, raising some good points and funny at times too!

Great video, lot's of valid points - Recently I've been experimenting with a combination of volume and hit ... Figuring out the correct amount of intensity seems to be the key... If you push the intensity too high and with high volume... Then it can be more difficult to recover from.

My main takeaway is that they both work, it just depends on your primary goals, and ultimately you'll need to incorporate both. Changing the training stimulus once your body is adapted to a particular volume or intensity is key.

This is the point in your lifting career where you will have to experiment. No matter how many videos I see on the subject, there never seems to be enough custom tailoring to the individual or the time/context of when to implement intensity techniques or to back off. This is the most challenging thing to communicate. There needs to, eventually, be a level of lifter’s intelligence that needs to be EXPERIENCED so that you intelligently move forward in your lifting journey. HIT, high volume, somewhere in between, Rep ranges, lifting tempo, rest times…it doesn’t matter what you can think of there is someone out there claiming one thing or another is definitively better. Research proves that it’s so highly variable in the differences we see participants responding to different stimuli (some better to volume others to intensity). I think more people should choose something (probably HIT first because it teaches you how to lift intensely and you can always add volume later when necessary) and stick with the program in a caloric surplus to see how they respond. I have tried so many programs over the years in different time periods and one thing I can say is that every program will teach you a valuable truth of your own body. Taking these bits and pieces of information will guide you in the right direction to your own customized plan that will work for you and while you can teach the things you learn it may not work for others. I only do 4 sets for hamstrings because this is what is optimal for me, but perhaps someone else may need something like 12+ sets to see a response. I never train over 10-12 sets per bp a week ever anymore, but others might thrive off 18 or 20 sets a week. Failure is what has worked best for me. I don’t feel fatigued as some information out there claims, but I’m also smart about what I do take to failure. Training a squat to failure is one of the dumbest ideas you can do, but a pendulum squat or hack squat is more than ok for me due to the targeted stimulus to the quads. It’s superfluous how much people argue over intensity and volume when the simple fact is that we are all different and we will absolutely respond differently to training depending on training age, the lifts being performed, genetics, or how long you’ve had that lift in your routine.

Brother that was ed corney on the start of your video. High volume trainer a great legend

This is a beast of a video! Couldn't have put it any better. 👍

On gear volume is absolutely key

The photo of the bodybuilder that you put with Dorian at the beguining is not Mike Mentzer. Thats Ed Courney fellow bodybuilder of Arnold and Franco Columbo.

Great info.. subbed

Excellent and well thought out.

Good video Alex. 6:30 I think much of this is justifying laziness. This is what I've seen, people like to hear good things about their bad habits.

I'm one of the folks who does what works for him & currently uses two sets on nearly everything. It's like being politically homeless, the volumeers don't want me, the HITTERS won't take me!

Excellent discussion! There is more than one path in a attempt to reach the summit.

I'm so glad I found your channel.

I always wondered if the issue was that the big guys essentially forgot what they had to do to get that big so they swear by very little volume because they have to do so little to keep the gains they currently have🤔

Lee Priest always said if you wanted to bring up a body part you had to murder it! He was a huge volume guy! More and more sets even if it was a smaller muscle like biceps 💪

This makes a lot of sense. Thank you, sir.

Nicely spoken rant - well done, thank you🖖

I'll just add my 2 cents here. I was a die hard HIT guy back in my 20s. For a full five years I actually documented my progress in a notebook that I don't possess anymore for which I will go into. One of the things that really struck me about Mike Mentzer was his ability to articulate well. His principles certain made sense, but as with a lot of things (and as you point out in the video) having good principles doesn't necessarily translate into good practices. I stopped training HIT at the age of 28 because I had become so disgruntled by the program I was even going to quit training altogether because I just didn't find progress, enjoyment or satisfaction in it. I remember watching a training video of Markus Ruhl and thinking to myself "This is not how I train." Not that Markus was a big Volume guy or anything, but his reps weren't 10 seconds long and he wasn't in the gym for 15 minutes. I essentially became an contrarian overnight and started training much more sets and much quicker reps. Now I'm not going to shit on High Intensity Training because I do believe it has some good things about it. It's just too much in one direction and it's very formulaic where I feel program and training flexibility would be better served. It does teach about proper caidence and form, not neglecting the static and/or negative portions of the rep and more abstractly one of the core tenants of HIT being that you don't have an infinite supply of recovery resources it indeed very true. It is kind of obvious however that you don't have an infinite supply of anything; recovery or not. HIT just takes these things too far into the extreme to be viable and I just didn't get any decnet progress out of it in the end. HIT is a boring, miserable and unstimulating form of training and again it was almost enough to put me off training forever. I was blindly moving forward completely uninterested in trying other methods because I believed so much in the program. I do still do HIT occationally, but it is now a part of a wide range of techniues at my disposal. It's good for a short sharp workout if I'm in a rush and can't train very long that day. There's just too many variables on a daily basis that go into how you feel and function to adhere to one very strict protocol. Sometimes I go to failure, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I take a cold shower and sometimes I don't. The feeling of freedom and agency from choosing how I approach a session is something that will always trump strict adherance from me and it's actually paid off in terms of progress. I'm not stressed out pushing a weight too quickly or not reaching failure on a given set. I love supersets, forced reps, partials and all other manner of things that all add to my list of tools to achieve my goals. So in conclusion I think HIT and Mike Mentzer had some good principles, but again they just take them too far. He's not a scientist (even though in his talks he'll mention exercise science quite a lot), he's an idea guy. Ideas need to be tested and ironically put through the scientific method and I don't think HIT really was. AND it's boring as fuck. Enjoy your workouts for god sack. It's not a sin.

once i stopped training like a mad man doing all the reps high volume and went to training till failure with heavy ass weight on 1 - 2 sets per exercise then resting for 4 or 5 days before back in has been a massive game changer for me muscle wise. depends what your goals are i guess. the bare minimum and a log book has been gold for me. and i just eat normal now no supplements, making the most gains ive ever made

wow, information and nice editing :) I can watch this for hours

I enjoyed what you said it made sense, I've tried different types of training and I found that high intensity with volume works good for me the key for me is making sure I rest and recover before the next session

I personally like the old Soviet training cycle for strength and endurance. Only add weight if the last set is easy to finish. Week 1. 3x5 to 5x5, high weight. Week 2. 8x8 to 10x10, medium weight. Week 3. 20x10 to 25x10, light weight. Week 4. Active recovery and cardio. And repeat.

Like everything, there is a balance. The biggest thing I’ve taken from Mentzer, Yates, and Haney is the importance of rest. Haney calls them “growth days” which when stated that way, allows a person with a high drive to actually take a day of rest instead of trying to squeeze another workout day into their schedule. In my younger Army days all I did was workout seven days a week. Now in my older days I see more progress after taking days off.

14:18 Laird Ross is the reason I started adding more volume and AMRAP sets to my programs. Dudes a beast. And then I found you!

Thank you for this insight. 🙌🏻

Been hitting high volume training for a while but after a couple of HIT Mike mentzer vids, my timeline became flooded with HIT videos and I’ve been really unsure if I should be trying HIT. This video couldn’t come at a better time and breaks down everything in great detail. Thanks!

For hypertrophy and for my body, intensity >>>>>>>> volume. I used to be in the gym for 2-3 hours before doing lots of volume for each muscle group. But since 2023 I have been doing supersets, giant sets and drop sets while significantly dropping the volume. Grew a lot due to this

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention - Plato I agree wholeheartedly with your content in this video. But I also agree wholeheartedly with HIT style training and many other styles of cyclic training methods too. Absorb What Is Necessary, Discard What Is Not - Bruce Lee All styles, methods of a well thought out program have their place in a persons life. Can’t We All Just Get Along - Rodney King

nah mate you're bang on in fact I think you're doing Gods work with this information.

Intensity and not overtraining and recovering is king

There will be always high volume vs high intensity discussions, both styles brought out some well known men, so both can work. I think it depends a lot on your type of body, style and how your muscles are built of (slow, fast muscle fibers). I can build up my technique better with lower reps, but each rep better focused. It also depends an the goal, mass or strength, I generally always was hit fan or at least more intensity focused. I'm still more fan of it. Especially natty tend to say that. I did your bullmastiff program almost to the finish (before I got sick), my strength was pretty bad after that, I was more or less at the same level as in the beginning or even more weak. On the other side my mass increased a lot, especially it was a completely different look compared to what I was before. My problem simply was, that eg 5x5 at 70% (last set is 5+) that 4x5 is actually pretty simple, easy to do. But it is still heavy enough to destroy yourself, and in last amrap set, the power is missing, I end up at 6-7 reps, but until that 5 reps it was quite simple again, so I probably could do 10x5 with that weight, but not many reps more per set. But just 6 or 7 reps isn't enough to really make strength progression at that 70%. It was too slow progress because all the high volume killed my amrap sets, but was also not enough to getting stronger, and since I never reached heavy range near of 1rm (both real 1rm but also calculated based on the amrap sets, eg 70% should be 11 reps to hit rpe 9,5-10, but I failed way before every single workout. On the opposite site, 70% at only 7 reps is only rpe 6 or maybe 6,5 so I never was any close at a heavy set, because that 4 sets before killed all my strength, I'm simply not made to make progress in strength with high volume, that is a fact and there are others as well) At the end, my strength but also my technique for heavy weights has completely gone. Difficult to describe what I mean, but I think you can follow. Compared to a hit workout which I did before, I could easy hit 10 or 12 reps with that same (70%) weight. Then a backoff with 20% less weight but 14 to 16 reps set to really burn the muscle out and to get a good amount of volume. But in summary of course you are right, volume itself is needed for programming, you have 3 parameters, volume, intensity and frequency, you need to find a combination of them to reach your goals. You need a minimum amount of volume of course, but especially for nattys, it is better to reach it with higher frequency and intensity but less volume per workout (both reps and amount of exercises) but do the important stuff more often and heavy. But also high(er) volume can work, after bullmastiff I did smolov Jr bench, the number of sets and rep ranges are pretty similar, but with more intensity, meaning you are really finished after 7x5 but not with 70 % but with 80%. This built up more strength (closer at rpe 10), and doesn't require amrap sets (but for that the power is missing as described before) Just my 2 cents :)

Bad Ass brother. Great information, thank you!

great video my man

Great content. I actually agree with your perspective 100%. Us humans like to make everything some kind of a religion. I'm not a powerlifter nor a body builder. I'm just mid 50s dude that wants to stay in shape. So I switch it up so that way it doesn't get boring. Different paths to the mountain top .

That’s not Mentzer in the opening picture. It’s Ed Corney

Bromley never misses, singlehandedly making my lats bigger and bigger

So much terminology thrown around here that went over my head 😅 definitely feel like a kid at the grown folks table

Mike literally said to do as little training as possible.....because you could always add more if it wasn't enough. Kinda like the actual stuff he said, and I sometimes wonder if his "successors" even actually listen to his stuff.

Great Video. Someone had to articulate this as comprehensively as you've done. I love olympic weightlifting and I am all up for 1 Rep/ 2 Rep max sets. But hypertrophy and volume go together like peanut butter and jelly. Thanks for the video brother.

this video was fantastic

Great video. Also dig the shiny thing behind you.

I tend to do well with one or two heavy sets 3-5 reps, then backing off to three to four sets of 6-12

I think this is the information I needed to hear. I'm a 6'6" lifter who's been struggling to put on lean mass for the past year. I don't think nutrition is the problem because I track my macros. I think it's my training. I've been following 5/3/1 for 2-3 years and I've been on a plateau for 6 months. I think my skill/technique has definitely improved, but overall I'm hitting walls.

I switched from Mentzer low volume back to high volume. So before I would have been against this, now I love this video.

Editing on point, extra cred for skipping background music

I don't necessarily disagree with what you said. On a side note, however, if a person has done 30/40 reps of strict pull ups in say 5 sets, does he really need to then do 3/4 sets of chest supported rows and lat pull downs and again pile on 3/4 sets of one arm Db row. Can't the volume be restricted to 2 hard sets of each exercise after pull ups. After all he is training his back muscles in all the exercises.

High Intensity Low Volume works for me. I just do less free weights so skill isn’t much of a factor. However, I was already a very good athlete from basketball and sprinting in track and field. So high intensity was always my strong suit. I think high intensity works because by high intensity, it most truly means reaching muscular failure. However possible. Whether through yes one all out balls to the wall set, or 2-5 sets of lighter weight and the muscular failure spread out that way. You said for example, children causing you to lose sleep (I would know) can be an external factor that affects one’s ability to solely aim for high intensity. But in my opinion that isn’t true. You may not be able to do your heaviest weight for more reps sure, but you can do a lighter weight done more times over a however many more sets it takes within reason and using common sense about it, and still reach muscular failure. For example if you are running a high intensity program and need to do 4 plates for 10 reps as your new pr, and your kids kept you up the night before, maybe go for a 20 rep max which will obviously be a lighter weight(s), but break it up over 4 sets of 5 and manipulate other variables like tempo and ROM to best achieve muscular failure safely that it going to going to actually contribute to your hypertrophy goals. I hope this made sense. But it’s best learned through experience.

Thank you my back grow with volume. I was thinking doing the same to the other muscle. Thanks brotha

Your knowledge is freaking bad ass.!

you can do both, people pretend like doing every set to *actual* failure takes you out for a week but it doesn't, you really just need to build the correct conditioning and tolerance so you can hit muscles hard AND often, there are cases where you prob shouldn't take things to failure like squats or deadlifts because you get enough stimulus by approaching the line, but your isolations 100% need to be taken very seriously

Back when I was a young bloke when we had pet dinosaurs, I was doing a power lifting program with a bit of overall body building thrown in, but training the bodybuilding movements in a power lifting style, low reps, heavy weights. I had been pretty much stuck with not much progress for 6 months, so I tried something radical. I switched to 20 reps for all exercises. God those squats were hard, I used to lay on the floor for 5 mins after a set waiting for my heart to explode. When I first started, I increased the weight on my 20 rep sets pretty quickly, and when I hit the wall, and dropped to 15 reps in increased the weight a bit then dragged out whatever quick gains I could from that. Then I dropped to 12 reps, then eight, then 5 reps. By the time I was back on 5 reps, this took about 4 months, my bench, which was previously 280lbs for 5 reps had gone up to 350lbs for 5 reps. My squat went from 330lbs for 5, to 470lbs for 5. I added 10lbs of pure muscle and looked leaner then when I started. I was however, back to being stuck at my new size and strength, with repeated cycles of same approach delivering minor improvements. So, I got another maniacal idea. After reading Johnny Fuller's 10 sets of 32 reps insane workout, I decided to give it a try. I went on 4 weeks annual leave from work, and I devoted it all to training. Every exercise at ten sets of 30 reps. I had to break my workouts into 3 workouts per day, each over an hour long. By the time my four weeks leave was over, I was doing more for 30 reps then I could previously do for 20, then I stepped it down gradually in the fashion I had used before. By the time I was back on 5 reps, I was doing approx 10% more weight then previously. I had also added about another pounds and was showing abs for the first time since a skinny bag of bones teenager. I was now 92kgs, at 5'11" with abs and veins, and pecs like Arnold and shoulders as wide as a barn door lol Completely natural, and this was back in mid 80s. I had transformed into a monster. My conclusion is this, Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates can suck my dick. There workout advice is worthless as far as I'm concerned because unless you are on massive doses of steroids like them, you probably wont get jack shit out of following HIT. Steroids makes stuff work that would otherwise not. If you want mass.....volume, volume, and more volume. There is a limit of course, but up until that limit is reached, more is better.

Good video, good content!

Thank you for this.

There is just too much conflicting information by "experts" regarding this topic.

Doing 1 set of intensity to failure is what had me squatting 405 on 22 inch quads, and benching 265 with 13 inch arms. I'm decently strong, but I'd probably be stronger if I had started training properly when I started lifting, and I'd also have some quads to go with it. What confuses people and causes more debate than need be is that most people are not advanced lifters in terms of lifting age and can make a good amount of progress with any method, and then elite lifters who happen to be genetic outliers reinforce this while those of us that have been lifting 5 years and need to grind hard for a little progress are left in the dust.

hey alex, i just wanted to say it made me smile seeing your answer on my question to what breed your dog is. thanks :)

Ahhh...that's not Mike Mentzer you show in the first pic...It's Ed Corney. I'm 53, mostly used high volume for years. Never achieved a large physique but looked healthy. But after discovering Mike's videos a few years back, I was able to progress and put on size. I think each individual has to find out what works best for them and tweak workouts where they can. Be safe out there everyone. Keep grinding!