“Really Awesome”: Exercise Scientist Critiques 6x Mr. Olympia’s Training Frequency

Exercise scientist Dr. Mike Israetel has made a name for critiquing the training routines of celebrities. This time, Israel did something different in his latest video. He analyzed six-time Mr. Olympia winner Dorian Yates’s workout regimen. Yates was someone who won bodybuilding’s biggest title six times consecutively during his career and introduced a new era in the sport.

The original mass monster of bodybuilding, Dorian Yates, utilized High-Intensity Training (HIT) developed by Arthur Jones and popularized by 70s bodybuilding icon Mike Mentzer. Thanks to his heavy-duty approach to training, Yates didn’t spend too long inside the gym and had a unique training frequency. The exercises scientist found this “very interesting,” and analyzed its pros.

Dorian Yates trained “two days on, one day off,” and repeated this cycle. “I would say really smart,” said Israetel. “So it’s an asynchronous split which means your workouts don’t line up. Sometimes Sunday is off, sometimes Sunday is legs,” added the exercise scientist. Yates also trained each body part once a week, and in a video on his YouTube channel, Israetel concluded that this was “really awesome.”

Many modern studies have proved that training each muscle group twice a week leads to hypertrophy, especially for natural lifters. According to Dr. Mike Israetel, this is because smaller muscle groups recover faster. However, Yates’s approach enabled him to “go hard and get in that groove of training for two days,” while more frequent rest days helped him recover better.

Dorian Yates spent less time in the gym but lifted extremely heavy weights. Resting every two days helped him heal “in a huge way physiologically and psychologically,” said Dr. Mike Israetel. While he did showcase his admiration for the bodybuilding great, the PhD holder didn’t wholly agree with Dorian Yates’s approach to bodybuilding. In fact, the bodybuilding coach has disagreed with aspects of HIT.

Exercise scientist cites breakthroughs

Mike Israetel explained that Dorian Yates may have benefited from training the smaller muscle groups like the biceps. According to him, the six-time champion has built even better biceps with a little more focus on training volume. Similarly, he disagreed with Mike Mentzer, who was the poster child of HIT training, and even gave some pointers to Yates.

The exercise scientist once blasted Mentzer’s advice to do just one high-intensity set to absolute failure per body part. “Multiple set programs were definitively proven more effective in the early 2000s,” the PhD holder in exercise physiology explained. Mike Israetel explained that studies have found exercise programs ranging from 18 to 57 sets per week better for muscle growth than HIT.

So, while the bodybuilding coach found Dorian Yates’s training frequency smart, he doesn’t always praise every aspect of the HIT approach. However, his latest video also shows that Israetel gives credit where credit is due, urging others to learn from the best parts of various approaches.