Don't take anything at face value, understand it. This goes for Mentzer too and you want to understand it beyond the "flick the switch" analogy which has no basis in science. You want the analogy to reflect the science or it's faith based.

Reserves are limited, weight increases are the key to progression and hypertrophy, striking a balance between stimulus applied and reserves available to elicit maximal progress is the key to programming. Mentzer had all that right - this is the essential optimization problem. It is good stuff and it is absolutely key and lightyears better than going into the gym, doing some stuff (or a lot of stuff with low weight as in 1970s BBing), and hopeing something good happens.

The problem was that Mentzer didn't understand the mechanisms well enough to properly setup the optimization problem and then refused to ever reconsider it. Hypertrophy stimulus at the muscle is not an on/off binary but a continuum of workload. Failure is not stimulus at the muscle, it is motor units dropping out and the nervous system redlining to keep the weight moving. Overtraining is not at the muscle, it is at the nervous system and the nervous system is the major limiter to workload at hypertrophy inducing intensities (%1RM or basically a 55-60% threshhold for hypertrophy).

This is what you are balancing. This is dual factor theory. If it was all very simple at the muscle as Mentzer believed, then he'd be quite on track for most things. But it's not the way the body works or the way training impacts the body's systems. So his logical optimization of the problem had the wrong variables and constraints or bad information. Bad input = Bad output. That doesn't mean his training can't work, it just means his theories aren't based in reality no matter how much he or someone else stomps up and down to claim intellectual superiority and that his training viewed as a static maximizing plan is not optimal.

It is not an accident that HIT or Mentzer threads go this way and I don't expect that in your Yahoo Groups all the wonderful science you've been holding back from all your posts is just waiting to gush out. It is not that "HTV" [sic] people are just witty or good with words or able to distort things and pull the wool over people's eyes while the truly faithful remain unphased. Very simply, this is basic stuff and basic science, if we were bullshitting and spouting garbage it would be refuted very quickly, and no one from the Mentzer HIT camp has any science behind them to refute it other than "Mike said it's like..." or similar. Well "Mike said.." is not good enough because Mike never showed any understanding of the science despite claiming his program as scientific and claiming he was better or knew more while everyone else irregardless of their experience, knowledge, and credentials was just defending their ego because they couldn't deal with the only right answer, his.

EDIT: Kingfish - I'm not trying to be a dick to you, actually if I knew this was you at first I'd have never replied to it. What I am trying to do is point out that Mentzer HIT is not scientific, it is based on faulty premises. I had assumed you were a troll, i.e. the Fish in kingfish but maybe that's not the case and if it's not maybe put some time into learning about this stuff rather than taking someone else's word for it. But really, who cares as long as you are making gains and are happy. That's more important than being right, there are lots of miserable "right" people.