Title: Once-a-Week Training for Mass | Muscle & Fitness
Headings: Once-a-Week Training for Mass
Once-a-Week Training for Mass
Can you really add muscle with once-a-week training?
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Content: Once-a-Week Training for Mass | Muscle & Fitness
Training
Once-a-Week Training for Mass
Can you really add muscle with once-a-week training? by Flex Staff
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When Mike Mentzer first came out with his radical book Heavy Duty, people thought he was crazy. Mentzer preached high-intensity exercise once every five to seven days, and every training session shouldn’t last more than 20 minutes in order to achieve maximum muscle stimulation. Mentzer believed many bodybuilders were “overtraining,” so he emphasized brief, high-intensity, and infrequent workouts. It seems that new research can validate Mentzer’s claim with clinical trials in younger adults but not with older adults. Researchers examined how strength and muscle mass were affected by cutting back on training to once a week in both younger and older adults. Seventy adults, 39 in the younger age group (between ages 20 and 35) and 31 in the older age group (between ages 60 and 75), completed the first phase of the trial, which lasted 16 weeks. In Phase 1, participants performed three sets of three resistance-training exercises—leg press, knee extensions, and squats—three times a week. The second phase of the trial, which lasted 32 weeks, was a de-training study. Participants were divided into three groups: