“Go One Set All Out”: Bodybuilding Champion Swears by Routine Pioneered by Mike Mentzer After Horrifying Injury Forced Him Out of Mr. Olympia

The recent Mr. Olympia championship witnessed a lot of changes at the eleventh hour. The most tragic of all was bodybuilding icon Nick Walker’s gory injury that forced him to pull out of the competition at the very last minute. After a lot of lamenting and deliberating, however, Walker accepted his fate and is already back in the gym.

Amidst speculations of whether or not he’ll return to the stage during the Arnold Classic in March, the icon has adopted a familiar training routine. Revealing his plans for 2024 at The Menace Podcast, Walker spoke about how Dorian Yates’ training method, pioneered by Mike Mentzer, inspired him.

Mike Mentzer introduced his signature technique of performing high-intensity exercises as a part of bodybuilding training. The idea behind this is to perform workouts with full force right until the last rep. This cuts down training time and challenges the muscles enough to grow. Walker spoke about how Yates would follow the same technique to grow wider and bigger.

“I’m a big advocate of Dorian Yates’s training. I personally think it’s probably the best in my opinion, because it pushes you to your maximum limit but it doesn’t overdo it”

Yates was Mentzer’s student who swore by the late veteran’s HIT method. One specific strategy that both the bodybuilding legends popularized was going all out on one set. Mentzer called it the ‘1 set to failure’ system, where just as the name suggests, the bodybuilder would perform one set of an exercise and push till failure. The 29-year-old Mr. Olympia aspirant revealed how his training methods changed according to this:

“The more muscle you have, the quicker your body can become taxed. So I rather go one set all out, b***s out and uh just train less, but train harder at the same time”

Astonishingly, a method pioneered by Mentzer decades ago is still relevant to current-day bodybuilders. While the aesthetic standards have somewhat followed the kind prevalent during the mass monster era, the late bodybuilding legend’s techniques hold a lot of value in the sport.

Mike Mentzer once issued a disclaimer for his signature routine

Following a high-intensity method to the T is quite taxing. Every person has a separate set of individual capabilities and innate adaptability. This means that the approach, though built on the idea that physiology is common throughout different people, needs to be customized.

There’s also an edge that comes with this kind of training. In a lecture, Mentzer once pointed out that while his routine is guaranteed to work, it wasn’t for the casual fitness enthusiast. Bodybuilders could dip their toes in it and still be good. And the fact that icons like Nick Walker still choose to follow it tells us a lot about how Mentzer’s thinking was ahead of its time.

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• Mike Mentzer
• Nick Walker