My results were even worse than Hoppers and i wasted years trying to find the magic application of HD. i was ALWAYS sore 3-5 days after a workout and basically went nowhere wasting time trying every new "intensity" technique

we have to understand that what Mike was really trying to do was emulate his idol Ayn Rand.
Mike was a dogmatic Objectivist who claimed that Rand achieved "Intellectual and moral perfection" in her field of philosophy and he was trying to do the exact same thing in his field.

the other thing he was trying to do was earn a living!

Almost any training program will work in the beginning but over the long term Mentzer's "theory" will be self-defeating. Systematically adding more rest days and/or lowering volume will manifest itself in a dwindling work capacity and poor conditioning. That is a simple law of reality, the less you ask your body to do the less it will end up being capable of doing!
(just ask those guys who are still sore 5 days after doing ONE set of pulldowns!)
Mike was indeed a master at selling the "logic" of the theory but unfortunately when one takes a good close look at it, it is rife with contradictions and holes and based on a false premise i.e. that training to failure is an objective requirement for triggering muscle growth. Using Mike as an example of the efficacy of the theory is total BS because Mike was a genetic freak who used steroids and trained way more often and way longer than his theory advocates.
(just as it is equally BS to use Casey Viator as proof of Arthur Jones methods)
HD advocates will spout off that if you didnt get good results you just didnt train hard enough, use enough rest days, apply the theory properly etc etc etc, but it's all a smokescreen for what is a fundamentally flawed approach to weight training.

i mean do some math . . . Mentzer's "Athlete's program" has one in the gym once every 7 days using a 2 way split routine. ok that means 26 sessions a year of workout A and 26 of workout B, right? so i am to understand that within 26 sessions of squatting i will be able to reach my genetic potential on that exercise???

the other problem i see in the with training world is that a good number of people seem to think that you can use either "volume" training, as advocated in the Weider mags or "High intensity" training as advocated by Jones, Darden and Mentzer which is of course another huge load of BS! i remember when i used to post at high intensity dot net and informed everyone i was switching to Rip's program, they all started calling me a volume trainer!! 9 working sets in a session constitutes volume training? a ridiculous notion but that's the mind set Mentzer was perpetrating in his books and i have found that, despite Mentzer's advising that HD'ers think for themselves, most of them really just take his word as the gospel and any deviation from, or questioning of it is scorned instantly.

obviously lower volume-higher EFFORT training can be used very effectively at times (i.e. fridays session when using the Texas method etc etc) but as the be-all-end-all method to reaching ones genetic potential in less than one year, fughedaboudit!!!!

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