what about the heavy duty program? and how much time to rest in between workouts?

[WolfEEL]

I used to work out with a guy that zealously believed in the heavy duty system by Mike Mentzer.

It's where you only work out 2 times a week for only 15 or 20 minutes and only one section of the body at a time. But you do supersets and go to exhaustion. It is hard to do because you do a lot of weight until failure, and do negatives.

It asserts that you have to take long breaks in between workouts so that your muscles have enough time to rebuild and insists that frequent workouts(of non-cardio nature) are "overtraining" where the muscles are unable to rebuild. The guy that I exercised with was only doing two or three exercises twice a week because he said at his level he needed more time to rest so he wouldn't overtrain.

First of all, is this feasible? I'm not an expert -- so it seems logical to me, or at least in the way it is presented. But, it seems like most people thought we were crazy to work out like that.

The first day I did this workout I almost threw up in the gym, it felt like I had the flu severely but luckily I was able to deal with it. That's not a fault of the system though.

If there is some truth in it, how much time should be allocated to rest periods to prevent "overtraining"? Now I am doing very low weights with a lot of repetitions so I don't know how much time, if any, to spend in between workouts.
Thanks for any advice.

 

[malkore]

Its feasible if you are a LONG TIME dedicated trainee. If you haven't lifted in a long time, or just lift occasionally...this is NOT the routine for you.

Basic reason: the body adapts to the stress of weight training. Newbies get AWESOME results on 2-3 full body workouts per week (whole body trained each session). Over the course of time, they'll need to add more stress to the muscles to keep them growing, IF that's their goal. Thus they start doing push/pull splits, or upper/lower splits...and eventually if you train long/hard enough, you're ready for 'single bodypart training' - i.e. 6 exercises and lots of sets JUST for biceps (or chest, or back, etc) and nothing else trained that day, and usually 5-7 days recovery on that bodypart.

But if you don't look like a pro-bodybuilder...you're not there.