I am frankly staggered by reading this. Literally stopped in my tracks. I have never seen someone so caught up in the supperiority of their own logic, preaching hardcore science yet having an absolutely abysmal grasp - hell, almost zero grasp at all, of the actual science and mechanisms at work. I read his stuff in the early 1990s along with his first HD book, I can only guess that I either had far higher tolerance and less knowledge or he has gotten worse.

-------
Mike Mentzer analogy:
The world is flat, you can see it's flatness for yourself and you don't fall off. This is logical and there is only one theory to it. All these people observing the stars and taking measurements are disturbed and don't have a proper background in math and science like I do. Those people who have sailed around the world are living in delusion and not able to navigate. Those people who have flown into space and seen it for themselves and taken pictures don't have a solid fundamental grasp that there can be only one true theory, mine, which although I base everything on what some guy marketing Nautilus told me in the 1970s and have not bothered to update, I have absolute faith in and need not ever look at the world or any other science again because I know I'm right.
---------

I think the best advice is to not put your trust in someone else and learn for yourself. Even a tiny bit of investigation will reveal that Mike's understanding is severaly lacking.

One example among many, if intensity [sic] and failure is all that's needed a single rep would be just fine - we don't need any level of volume since Mike says volume is unimportant and there is no evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately there has to be enough work for microtrauma (and if Mike thought there was no evidence relating microtrauma to hypertrophy - well, that's fairly discrediting right there).

How much work will depend upon the person and their tolerance (RBE and otherwise), but obviously some volume is important - a rep is a rep, why do you need more than one and if you need 8-12 why not 2 sets of 4-6 to get the same number of reps, why does time/density/clustering matter. Is 8-12 or whatever Mentzer perscribes his one set as really just for safety? If I have a good spotter can I just do 3 reps because more reps is eating into my limited recovery ability? I'd honestly like to just warm up and do a static hold, but range of motion is important to hypertrophy - I wonder why? Maybe there is a threshold requirement for microtrauma and you get that through a range of motion and maybe you need more than 1 rep to get enough? How much is enough, is it 10 reps? 20 reps? 30 reps? Can I break those reps into sets so I can keep the weight high with some rest between efforts i.e. less density? Hmmmm - interesting.

This is why people say you can't do triples or singles for hypertrophy. A single is just a rep, same as any other. A set is a very dense group of singles (but obviously submax weight). Multiple sets are multiple dense groups. The issue with the assumption about singles is that the weight will be very high and near one's 1 rep max. Well, you probably can't do many singles with that kind of weight. But, if one lowered the weight to manage to fire off 12 singles with a few seconds between them - hey, you are very close to a set now and maybe enough work to induce enough microtrauma for hypertrophy (maybe not, kind of depends).

John Cassler, a fan of HIT and fairly knowledgable, once said something about mistaken certainties. Well, I have never seen anyone more certain and more mistaken than Mike Mentzer. I have also never seen anyone with so little reason to be certain.

Mike doesn't have all bad ideas. Volume for volume's sake is stupid. Progression is the key. There needs to be some efficiency and strategy in balancing limited reserves with training stimulus. That said, his understanding is inadequate to be proposing good plans. And for any fan of Mike's reading this - just assume I'm an idiot and the whole world is too and that Mike was right about everything irregardless of how little he understood and his seeming pathological ability to avoid any science that might have required a revision of his own ideas. But that's what science and the Socratic method are about, constant revision if you find exception to your theory. This is how we learn and improve. Dogmatic certainty is a sure way to never learn anything again and wind up with some pretty bad theories as first incarnations tend to be not something you want to hold too tightly to (i.e. they tend to suck and be incomplete as people find they break down in various scenarios and need another element or revision and in a number of cases it winds up being a whole new model).