04/08/2022
Another great example of High Intensity Training at its best! 💪
The Colorado Experiment took place in May of 1973 at Colorado State University. The purpose of the experiment was to produce a high level of muscular growth by training Casey Viator every other day, or 14 times in 28 days, in a supervised university setting.
Nautilus-inventor Arthur Jones personally trained Casey for every workout. Training was intense, progressive, and involved a negative-only repetition style on 50 percent of the exercises.
During the first week alone, Viator gained 27.25 pounds of solid muscle. Repeat: That's 27.25 pounds of muscle in 7 days, or an average of 3.9 pounds of muscle per day. The facts show that during week 1, Viator gained 20.25 pounds of body weight and lost 7 pounds of fat, for a total of 27.25 pounds of muscle mass.
Viator's overall muscle mass gain in 28 days was 63.21 pounds. That was an average muscle mass increase of 2.26 pounds per day.
These results are incredible but here’s the central message: what imparts the benefit the stimulus to which the body adapts is an aggressive recruitment and momentary weakening of muscle fibres. If you are able to recruit, fatigue, and weaken muscle fibres within a defined time frame, then you are going to recruit all of the different muscle fibre types aggressively and therefore get the most mechanical and metabolic effect for producing an adaptation. If the exercises are performed properly that is, in accordance with muscle and joint function you can do so in a way that eliminates all of the other extraneous components, such as excessive force and excessive wear and tear on the joints, which are completely unnecessary for
the delivery of the stimulus. This is the level of understanding that should be baseline across the industry, though sadly we’ve resorted back to flipping truck tyres and swinging kettle bells 😅 🤦♂️
