Originally Posted by Jules

DC training philosophy has elements of hardgainer training (a variant of HIT) and the old-school HIT training system. It shares with HG training the belief that you should try to increase poundages every week, be it 2.5lbs or 5lbs, and also a preference for 20-rep breathing squats. It shares with old-school HIT training (from the 70s) a preference for post-failure techniques.

Thus, HST and DC both implement progressive loads at a fairly frequent rate. However, DC also introduces progressive fatigue and starts at a much higher fatiguing level than HST's 15s. DC is good at creating consistent sarcoplasmic hypertrophy; classic HST isn't. There's some speculation that if mitochondrial development falls behind, then sarcomere hypertrophy eventually falls behind too. Having really active energy systems is also important for optimal usage of a bulking diet toward hypertrophy.

The DC system is fairly aggressive in how it always going upwards in training weight. Unlike a hardgainer routine or a periodized program, there isn't a stair-step or undulating load parameter mechanism (i.e. wave cycle) to manage CNS responses to your body. It is also more aggressive than a traditional HIT program because you don't wait until you pass a certain rep range before you increase load (although in an old-school 3x-a-week full-body HIT routine, you would probably go up in training weight every week.) You go up every single time. Because of this, at some point , you will need to lessen your load increments to under the 5% threshhold

The increment issue is one of the reasons why the hardgainer routine tends to slow down significantly with its size gains, even though you hit a bodypart at least twice a week. This aspect of the DC training, in isolation of the other aspects of DC training, is to me a notable weakness with the system. This is also a weakness of most powerlifting systems for bodybuilding; however, because they start at a higher relative load (85-95% 1RM), this isn't as much a notable problem.

Pragmatically speaking, given that you sleep and eat properly, and consider taking a little caffeine before workouts, I think it's fairly realistic that you could go 4-6 weeks before you hit a strength plateau (i.e. when you can't increase the training load.) Bryan brings up that failure can drop your strength levels up to a week, but I feel it's in large part due to how much sarcomere disruption you experience from your workout. In other words, if you went straight into DC training after a 14-day layoff, the microtrauma from the training would be significant enough that your strength levels would plummet. Had you gone into DC training at a lighter load or say after a few weeks of moderate training, then your strength levels would only decline steadily. This is also part of the reason why you can train at your 5RM for another week or two on classic HST if you can't do negatives.

Thus we can say that, for the average trainee, classic HST and DC provide about 4-6 weeks of sarcomere-responsive progressive load (I'll assume 15s do nothing for sarcomere hypertrophy as a worst-case scenario.) With a little optimization (HST with its negatives, DC with its load increments), both can be expanded for a longer time, though I would argue that HST, by default, will always provide a longer period of weekly progressive load than DC. However, it can be argued that this is partially mitigated by the fact that you don't go on 9-14 days layoffs with DC training. The counerargument, though, is that you would have used supoptimal increments to prolong a DC cycle anyway. For the sake of argument, I'll say classic HST and DC are a draw in this.

Now, HST has an advantage over DC with its higher frequency. In a one week span, you'll have roughly 3 days/wk of elevated protein synthesis on DC, you'll have 4.5 days/wk on HST. For about a month (4 weeks), that's 12 days on DC, and 20 days on HST. Given the post-failure modality, it's not that realistic to increase DC's frequency. On HST, using a every-other-day, AM/PM setup, you could easily have elevated rates for 24-28 days per month. That's easily twice as long as DC per month. I should add, though, that even without elevated protein synthesis rates, you will still experience some growth provided there's significant microtrauma. Therefore, it's not the same thing as saying, you grow twice as often on HST than DC. But it goes without saying that both programs are much more efficient at generating adaptive responses than your standard MWF split.

If you wanted to use the DC system, I would actually recommend you try adding 1A compound movements into 1B, 2A compound movements into 2B, 2B movements into 1A. The difference would be that you'd simply train toward about 50-75% of the # of positive failure reps with the same load. So, if say you did 8 reps bench press before hitting failure during 1A, I'd do 4 reps of bench press again during 1B. I wouldn't repeat the isolation movements or stretch exercises. This is somewhat akin to HST zig-zagging; it's not enough to significantly hamper your neuromuscular recovery, but it's just enough to have a training effect on a bodypart every 2 days. Of course, you would only use this after you've figured out how you respond to DC training.

Finally, the extreme stretch. IMO, this is DC's major trump card over HST. I've brought up the effects of this on the thread before; in short, this would be the equivalent of adding very short high-load negative isolation movements into your 10s, and then making sure you keep progressing through the end of your HST program. These stretches, like introducing 5RM+ negatives early into your workout, overrides the regular sets the primary factor in creating sarcomere hypertrophy for many bodyparts. And because they create such disruption and stay ahead of RBE, they also override the declining load increments of the routine. As long as you can increase the stretch week-to-week (half of DC's stretches are angle or load-based, the other half involve increasing stretching time, which isn't as efficient), this effect on the training is huge. It's also no surprise that many trainees who don't as well under DC as Dante predicts, underuse this technique. It's supremely painful, but the lengthy stretch times is necessary to activate the golgi tendon's stretch reflex.

Therefore, workout to workout, the post-failure sets creates pretty optimal sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, the progressive loaded stretching creates consistent sarcomere hypertrophy. Of the latter, although the differences in sarcomere hypertrophy disappear as you approach the end of 5s (and you could argue that HST's negatives surpass DC training in sarcomere disruption), total time under DC with hightened sarcomere hypertrophy is still proportionally longer.

In short,

1) DC >> HST in sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
2) DC < HST in load progression increments
3) DC ~ HST in total productive cycle duration
4) DC << HST in total time of elevated protein synthesis
5) DC >> HST in initiating sarcomere hypertrophy

Thus, this is all-in-all why I argue that a DC routine would probably have slightly better results than a classic HST routine, provided you can handle it (Doggcrapp's routine isn't for the timid; if after your first workout, you don't feel like throwing up, you weren't doing his routine. ) However . . .

I would add that DC's program is sort of a tweaked HIT routine; a tweaked HST routine (such as a DHST variant) IMO would surpass DC.

cheers,
Jules