paul e said:
If there is only one clearcut way to training nirvana, how come there are so many advanced and knowledgeable body builders, pros, and others, natural and otherwise, who are employing so many principles , many of which are diametrically opposed?
If we want our car to go faster, we can give the engine forced induction, cubic inches, and/or lighten the vehicle.. theres not much disagreement there.
So how come theres so much disagreement about how to build the body?
There really isn't much disagreement - at least outside of BBing. A lot of times it's a question of optimality and the condition, experience, and goal of a given trainee has to be taken into consideration.
If you want a muscle to adapt to higher workloads then you have to increase the workload they are subjected to over time (and any program should have this as the underlying premise - if there is no system for improvement it's a "routine" and routines are just that - routine and no progression, for experienced lifters it is not enough to go in and work hard). This might be through any combination of volume, intensity, or frequency manipulation. Beginners can use a linear pattern and hammer away all the time while more advanced trainees typically make the best progress using periodization to enable them to train with higher workloads than they'd be able to tolerate using a strictly linear approach where it must be tolerated on a constant basis indefinitely.
What I was getting at earlier when I asked you about what the stimulus for adaptation to weight training was and told you it absolutely wasn't failure (as supported exhaustively by science) was the workload answer. Training to failure programs are using intensity primarily (i.e. the weight being lifted) to increase capacity. They train to failure so they have a benchmark of their capacity and they try to improve it each session (i.e. add weight, work to get target reps, if successful add weight again - session to session). And you know what? It can work. The main issues are that you have only a single variable to work with and training to failure has been shown not to result in excess gains yet can be excessively taxing to the CNS so you have to deal with a degree of possible wastefulness and the limitations that imposes on volume and frequency.
Still, it's a nice quantifiable and easy to follow plan. It's a lot harder to manage volume and frequency. Give a group a program like this and keep the volume tolerable to the least common denominator and you'll improve most of them. Great for getting a lot of people trained without a lot of attention using a basic cookie cutter template. Will it be optimal, maybe for a few guys but not for all due to widely varying tolerances for workload and current conditioning. This is the role of a coach - to make optimal progress with each trainee not to punt and hope the least common denominator works well enough.
Cookie cutter programs tend to not be optimal because volume plays a massive role in workload calculations and the variations of the tolerances between lifters are much larger and harder to discern (even those with comparable experience and maximum lifts). You want to have this factor at your disposal. Volume manipulation is key to manipulating workload. Frequency is a good thing and from the quotes and discussion above you can see that how one distributes workload is fairly important, must be tailored to the individual and goal, and simply punting and doing an exercise every 7 days leaves someone with less than optimal results.
Probably a good explanation is to read this link and the link at the very top that's contained in it as it defines some of the terms more clearly -
http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/showpost.php?p=5017744&postcount=686
Here is an article on HIT written by elite sprint coach Charlie Francis:
http://www.charliefrancis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=2
EDIT:
I should probably add the caveates to the above that obviously each factor (frequency, volume, and intensity) is important in it's own right. It's not like once a month you can do some rediculous workload and grow or do negatives with massive weights. Everything needs to be in a semi-decent range and this is why even though most programs might seem at odds with each other they are at least similar enough that people will get some type of result (especially novices).
Also, it's somewhat unfair to HIT to say that they don't adjust workload outside of intensity. The idea behind the one set is that you start there and then train again when you can do more weight (in its most simple sense - there are obviously more to some HIT based programs so a lot of this is somewhat an unfair generalization yet if you look at the versions of HIT most seem to be employing in the gyms this isn't out of line). This allows the frequency to be set by the lifter to their own capacity. So number of training times will determine the volume. Not great but that's the idea. They also generally don't periodize so people wind up getting fatigued and using very low frequency on a constant basis rather than altering this. In addition, intensity isn't strict definition with hit because when you can do 8 reps with a heavier weight your 1RM has theoretically changed too so it's still the same % of 1RM and the same intensity - it's just easier to think like this for classification.
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