Basically, it revolves around working your muscles past failure to build them faster and burn more fat. Has anyone heard of this? It's more tailored towards men and the ability to build obscene amounts of muscle in an unassisted manner, but for women it does help burn a lot of fat.

musclenet.com/coloradoexperiment.htm

For example; you'd do an arm extension for triceps for as much weight as you can handle for 10 repetitions, then do something like bench press that uses the triceps as the secondary muscle group, forcing your triceps to work past failure. The experiment was performed over the course of 28 days with 2 workouts a week at about half an hour long each. That's just 2 hours over a month and they put on incredible amounts of muscle.

It sounds like the method promoted in Body for Life or at least based on similar principles.

HIT has some merits and some pitfalls. I believe there was a thread on here a few months back on Mike Mentzer's HIT.

I believe there are much better cases to be made for HIT than that experiment though. At least they did refer to it as an experiment and not try to pass it off as a study. Research it is not.

You only had two subjects and both of those subjects would have been expected to gain substantial amounts of muscle and could even be expected to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time do to their current training statuses.

The first subject is a former Mr. Olympia who had lost a good deal of muscle after long periods of detraining due to an accident. The body regains lost muscle much easier and much faster than it initially builds. Substantial gains would have been expected on just about any sensible resistance training program.

The second subject (which is also the author, head of the experiment, and founder of the company that makes the equipment used in the experiment) had an irregular training history and only 6 weeks of training in the past four years prior to the experiment and no training in approximately 5 months. He is for all intents and purposes a newbie. Ever hear of newbie gains? They apply here.

Jones wants to point that this proves that both HIT and Nautilus equipment are vital, but he doesn't show us that both contributed to the gains. As they were both used by both subjects so we cannot compare how much better one did with Nautilus compared to the other.

If he really wanted to conduct a fair experiment, he should have:

1. Used a larger sample size
2. Used experienced trainees who have been working out consistently for a period of about 2 years or more. This weeds out any newbie gains, muscle memory etc.
3. Separate the population into 4 groups
a. One uses a more standard exercise protocol. Perhaps Bill Starr's 5x5
b. One uses the same protocol as A but substitutes exercises using Nautilus equipment.
c. One uses HIT with standard free weight equipment
d. One uses HIT with Nautilus

Only when group D makes substantial and significantly greater gains than the remaining three groups among experienced trainees can Jones make the claims he did in this article and have them be credible.

This is basically the same as the article-like advertisements you can read in Muscle and Fitness about how Supplement A took some schlub and turned him into a competitive bodybuilder in 6 weeks.

I am knocking this "experiment" more than I am knocking HIT. Some people do have great success with HIT (no, they are not gaining 60lbs of muscle in 28 days but have success). It is not for everyone though. If you are interested in HIT, I think you should research it more. Start by googling Mike Mentzer and Elliott Darden.

If you read the entire page though, they also tested the experiment on a professional football team with similar results.

Basically they said Denver Broncos stopped by observed the workouts then tried the workouts for two weeks (not really long enough to make a definitive judgement as any new stimulus will cause adapatation) and then bought equipment. This basically shows nothing except maybe Jones' expertise as a salesperson which is unquestionably top notch.

Are the results of the other football players cited substantially above those who followed other training programs? Nothing to show yes or no, but young football players who are before their primes are actually expected to make these kinds of gains year to year.

Go to Strengthcoach.com and listen to some professional strength and conditioning coaches. Are they still using HIT and relying primarily on nautilus? Not many if any from what I have seen. Why did they abandon it?

Again, this is not a knock on HIT only on this "experiment". Jones also did not disclose in this article/advertisement his relationship with Nautilus. That the magazine did not include this disclaimer actually leads me to believe that this probably was not an article but a paid advertisement in article form.

Also, the author did point out that the subjects were not average and that typical results would likely be much different but then tried to pass them off as evidence.

The gains of the football players were actually fairly normal for the population in question.

Again, HIT has merits. It MAY be the right program for you. Definitely look into. Look into the works of Mentzer and Darden which will give you a much more complete and unbiased view as well as more realistic expectations than this advertisement provided.

David, what are you hoping to get from this thread? The article in ref is from 1973, and appears, as Depalma says, to be a blatant ad for Nautilus equipment. Makes sense, considering when it was published. Did you have a question relating to your own training program? Sorry, I'm just a bit confused about how to be helpful here.

I'm wondering if anyone here has tried it or known someone who has tried something similar and seen results.

Yes, and no I didn't suddenly turn into Casey Viator.

IMHO, HIT is a good choice if you are getting a lot of "work" for your muscles through your job or lifestyle, otherwise you are going to under train. If I had a really physical job or was a competitive athlete, that I would definitely consider HIT.

It might even be a good choice if you are doing tons of cardio as part of your weight loss routine. Has any bodybuilder built a championship level physique training purely with HIT? No, in fact it is probably better suited to making strength gains without putting on muscle. Even Mike Mentzer used a fair amount of volume (and lots of "supplements") back when he was a top bodybuilder. Training volume is much more important to gaining size than intensity. HIT is about maximizing intensity and minimizing volume.