Most people spend the greater part of their lives building up personal wealth, only to spend the money on their fading health during their last few years. From my experience this isn't due to lack of knowledge as most people already understand the health benefits of exercising and training with weights. They know that exercise and healthy eating will extend their lives and keep them healthy, happy, energetic and strong, but they lead busy lives and don't think they can make time for it. I once agonized over that same problem and even stopped exercising entirely for almost five years because of it. While I knew that I wanted to stay young, strong, and physically fit I was unwilling and unable to spend several hours per day at the gym like most successful bodybuilders were advocating. That's when I read the story of a man named Casey Viator. Casey had won the Mr. America bodybuilding title back in 1971 and was arguably the best Mr. America the contest had ever seen. What made Casey's win so interesting was that he was engaged in an unconventional method of training that eventually came to be known as High Intensity Training, or HIT for short. Casey's High Intensity methods would initially be discounted and rejected by the experts who would soon be forced to revise their opinions when faced with its incredible success. Unlike all the other top bodybuilders who were training anywhere from three to five hours per day, six times per week, Casey was only training one hour per day, three times per week. It struck me that if Casey could win the Mr. America title with only three hours of training per week, then someone with more modest goals could probably achieve a state of excellent physically fitness in even less time than that.
The principle of High Intensity Training is based on putting 100% of your lifting capacity into a very small number of repetitions and then giving your body lots of time to recuperate. Famous bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu suggested doing anywhere from 12-20 sets per body part, and most of us quickly realize the difficulties involved with training six days and 25 hours per week. When you consider that a nine to five job keeps you busy for 2080 hours a year, 1,200 hours per year for physical fitness is virtually impossible to justify. With the High Intensity Training method you do only one set, with the greatest amount of weight you can lift at least once-- but not more than six times. In other words, you do only one set per body part per week, and you put everything that you've got into it so that by the end of the set you've reached what's known as the point of muscular failure; the muscle should not have the physical ability to lift any more at the end of the set. Every time that you achieve an increase in your strength the amount of weight used must be increased as much as needed to make sure that no more than six repetitions are possible for you. The idea is that if you're physically able to lift a weight more than six times, then you're probably only putting out 80% of your capacity most of the time and it's 100% exertion that best stimulates the body to adapt and grow stronger. After doing that one set you then give that muscle a full week to recover before training it again. The only exception to this rule is your legs with which you should do 6-10 repetitions for either one or two sets. Realistically, you should be able to train all the major muscle groups of the body in about one hour per week, broken into three 20 minute training sessions.
I have personally found this method to work extremely well. Using the bench press as a gauge- when I once returned to the gym after five years of inactivity I weighed 186 pounds and was able to achieve a one rep maximum lift of 150 pounds. 18 months later I weighed 169 pounds and on the same lift I was working with 315 pounds. That represents a significant reduction in body fat and a strength increase of over 100%, all based on a healthy diet and only four to five hours per month of real exercise which actually became quite enjoyable.
While some cardiovascular exercise is also recommended to keep a healthy heart, high intensity weight training is in this author's opinion the most time efficient method of keeping a healthy body and warding off the harmful effects of aging. Aside from looking good at the beach-- weight training can improve your general health, skin tone, bone density, circulation, strength and metabolism. It can also act as a stabilizing force in your life, make your back resistant to injury and help ensure a long active future. For a cost of only one hour per week it may just be the best investment you'll ever make.
Jason Roskopf is a competitive bodybuilder, author of numerous health and fitness related articles and is owner of I.T. Milwaukee computer repair service centers.
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