Born in Ephrata, Pennsylvania in 1951, Mike Mentzer was an early devotee to the iron game. A straight-A student in high school, Mentzer first began bodybuilding when he was just 12 years old. Inspired by the physiques he encountered in fitness magazines, from a young age Mentzer resolved to mold his own body into one of muscle and might. ( 2)

Peter McGough, ‘The Mike Mentzer Story,’ The Barbell (originally published in Flex Magazine, 1995). https://www.thebarbell.com/the-mike-mentzer-story/ Mike Mentzer was born on November 15, 1951, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and was of German descent. In grammar school and Ephrata High School, he received "all A's." He credits his 12th grade teacher, Elizabeth Schaub, for his "love of language, thought, and writing." In 1975, he started attending the University of Maryland as a pre-med student where his hours away from the gym were spent in the study of "genetics, physical chemistry, and organic chemistry." After three years of study at the University of Maryland he dropped out. He said his ultimate goal during that period was to become a psychiatrist. [4] [5] Bodybuilding career [ edit ] Amateur [ edit ] Recent studies have vindicated Mike Mentzer, of course. A man who trains regularly can coast on three or more weeks of complete inactivity without any loss in muscle or strength.In their 1997 book Power Factor Training, Peter Sisco and John Little created a HIT program which utilizes partial reps. The following year, their book Static Contraction Training explains how to workout by holding a heavy weight steady. They advocated incredibly low volume: one workout per week lasting less than five minutes. Little’s Max Contraction program later topped SCT with even scanter workout time—10 seconds per week! We’d reached peak low volume, but was anyone growing from such little work? It was time to focus less on low volume and more on high intensity. BEYOND FAILURE TRAINING Developed by Paul Delia, Maximum Overload Training prescribes moderately low volume (six to nine sets per bodypart), 30-40-minute workouts, and low-reps with basic exercises. Max-OT advocates using weights so heavy that failure is reached in no more than six reps but diverges from high-intensity training in cautioning not to go beyond failure. This system peaked in popularity when its most prominent practitioners, drug-tested bodybuilders Skip LaCour and Jeff Willet, won the overall IFBB Team Universe Championships in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Mentzer retired from competitive bodybuilding after the 1980 Mr. Olympia at the age of 29. He maintained that the contest results were predetermined in favor of Schwarzenegger, and held this opinion throughout his life. While Mentzer never claimed he should have won, he maintained that Schwarzenegger should not have. Nevertheless, the two eventually had an amicable relationship. [6] [4] Legacy [ edit ] The above video, featuring Mentzer training Boyer Coe, is rather clinical and stunted. Focus, however, on the content — he pushes one set to all-out failure. This, he believed, made the muscle grow.

Mentzer was an Objectivist and insisted that philosophy and bodybuilding are one and the same, stating that "man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of mind and body." His books therefore concern themselves equally with philosophy and bodybuilding. [4]

I’ll be following the heavy duty model in my gym routine for a month or so, maybe I’ll update this review with the result. So he's a dork, but he's credentialed. Let's give it a try. I'll hop on High Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer way for a few months, and if I'm shredded to the bone and 5'8" by June, we'll know it worked.