To begin, I believe that everyone is a highly unique individual, with varying work capacities and biological composition. This belief is founded in a great deal of science, ranging from the work of Roger Williams in “Biochemical Individuality” to a variety of other authors and anecdotal evidence, including my own experience. Mike Mentzer, however, thought that every single person is like a cog in some massive machine, and that human beings are essentially mass-produced organic machines, with interchangeable parts and identical biological functions and structures.

He was dead fucking wrong.

Everyone starts out with a VERY DIFFERENT work capacity based on a combination of nature and nurture, namely, how good their genetics are and how useful their parents were in raising a young Teddy Roosevelt.

TR, clearly about to stomp throats because he spotted a pussy in the crowd at his inauguration.

Your genetic capacity is based on a variety of things (don’t even come at me with the fucking somatotypes horseshit, as it’s been addressed, and bodybuilders are the only ones who think that theory holds any stock whatsoever anymore) ranging from the size and arrangement of your internal organs to the composition of your muscle fibers.

Now, before you consign yourself to “hardgainer” status, note that you can change your body’s ability to metabolize both nutrients and wastes, in addition to the number of mitochondria in your muscle cells, the thickness of the muscle fibers, and the thickness of your muscle attachments through a combination of good diet and extremely hard training. Additionally, one’s capacity to handle hard exercise actually improves over time, so the more you do, the more you’ll be able to do in the future.

Want proof? How about the fact that Lance Armstrong is able to still draw breath? By HIT’s concepts, he should be dead by now. In fact, he should be deader than Mentzer’s dumb ass.

Amazingly, healthy enough to compete in multiple endurance sports AND bang busloads of hot sluts with Matt McConaughey. I fail to recall any tales of any such exploits by Mentzer. Hell, I fail to recall any tales of Mentzer either getting ass or being pleasant to anyone around him.

So, what was the nonsense Mentzer preached?

Mike Mentzer, for those of you who don’t know, was a bodybuilder in the 1970s and 1980s who pimped Arthur Jones’s Nautilus equipment and trained according to Jones’s philosophies of tremendously short, brutally hard workouts. Jones himself was a tiny guy, with no appreciable muscle mass and no definable reason for believing that his system was the best, save for the fact that he apparently hated working out.

Underwhelmed? Me too.

Jones took under his wing two up-and-coming bodybuilders, Casey Viator and Mike Mentzer. Viator won the Teen USA, Junior America, and Mr. America all in the same year, 1971, and later went on to take 3rd in the 1982 Mr. Olympia, his crowning achievement. For those of you who don’t know, 1981-1983 were some of the sorriest years of the Olympia’s existance, seeing the crowning of three fairly unimpressive Olympians amid a field of virtual nobodies (though Franco was kind of the shit, he beat a pack of nobodies). Mentzer came up around the same time, and was notable for simultaneously being a speed freak who rarely slept, a genetic freak, and one of the biggest fucking crybabies in any sport ever, while at the same time hilariously espousing a drug-free lifestyle. After losing the 1980 Olympia to Arnold, he quit the sport and began misinterpreting Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and applying his inane, drug-crazed ramblings to bodybuilding.

To be continued…

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