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This is what Bryan wrote/believed, and what I believed. In reality size and strength are interrelated. Only folks who broke the HST rules grew. I mentioned a few of them.

Nothing wrong with that, only I envisioned HST differently. It seems to me that Bryan himself too believed in the re-sensitizing trickery. As a strength gaining routine HST's 5-7 weeks of suboptimal loading and only 2 weeks of growth falls short of other "primitive" periodization routines...

Assuming you periodically zig-zag loads while extending 5's to recover, HST would not be very different from any other linear periodization routine aimed at getting stronger, such as Madcow's 5x5. Initially the "smart stuff" was very intriguing and appealing: SD re-sensitizing muscle to previous...

Wernbom's meta-study was based on studies involving mostly untrained subjects. Trained subjects may need to use loads in the higher range of 65-85% or even beyond for them to be effective. Oh, you won't see this anyway, O&G :)

Depends on how you look at it. Practically, I never experienced growth (bigger measurements) with lower loads. It seems like shorter rest periods (60-90 sec) are critical to enhance metabolic effect on growth. So is higher volume, on the order of 4-5 sets per exercise, 3-4 exercises per MG...

O&G, care to share one such study? I can give you the one proving the contrary: previous loads do their best to recover most of the lost muscle. If there is indeed a study telling me that I've actually been growing lean tissue all this time without having the opportunity to grow much stronger...

If you feel good spending 65-70% of your calendar time with sub-5RM loads (including SD) not growing, fine. The problem is, you aren't doing it. No one in their right mind would stubbornly follow HST advice. Only I did. For five years.

I don't have a problem progressing, at least not any more. My only problem was sticking with "previous loads" for too long, but this obvious protocol deficiency has now been taken care of. Good luck to you too.

The BBB split routine wants you to visit the gym 4 times per week... what if I only want to go three times? And the short fixed length rest periods are impractical in a more or less crowded gym. It takes away much of the flexibility. I could instead do just one slow tempo 10 rep metabolic set...

More correctly, 5 de-loading workouts and 4 workouts in a row using max loads (5-10RM depending on exercise). My muscles will now be exposed to higher loads at least twice as frequently (compare 3 week long cycles with 7-9 week long including SD).

@mick1965, I don't like doing several sets per exercise with fixed rest, which is too boring, preferring to do just one heavy set. I will simply be extending 5's with 1 set per exercise, as usual. It's more resemblant of madcow's 5x5, with just one set, and more exercises. Farewell, previous...

Nah, I *will* be wasting time with HST, only no more SD+deloads this often. Because the "SD+previous loads" concept simply doesn't work, at least not for natural newbies and intermediates, period. What I will be doing is extending 5's 3 times per week for as long as I'm progressing, sprinkling 2...

Here's an opinion of a guy with lousy genetics who managed to put on 43 pounds of muscle. The secret to gaining muscle is to get stronger. Read more: http://stronglifts.com/how-to-build-muscle-mass-guide/ I feel really sorry I spent so much time spinning my wheels with HST, doing "previous...

DUP looks like zig-zags taken to the extreme, allowing CNS to recover between heavy bouts.

Ditto. True adepts shouldn't be using any kind of DUP, even if it's superior to HST's SD+linear progression. It's non-scientific, because, if we quote Bryan,

Intuitively, smaller SD would have shown smaller (if any) muscle loss and subsequent recovery at a smaller rate, never surpassing the continuous group's rate, unless the muscle indeed got very much stronger suddenly, which is unlikely given the rate of growth during 5's, rarely exceeding 5-10...

Sorry, mate, if we compare this opinion & wishful thinking with real graphs, we see that at least 3 week long SD+resumption of training doesn't grow new muscle. Only if you lift bigger loads, will your muscle have opportunity to grow. So most of SD+previous loads look like wasted time and...

Losing body matter is always the result of eating less than you spend, even in my imaginary world. You have to provide enough circumstances for the body to dig into its fat stores. By "load" I meant increasing its absolute value up to the required level, not the tricks involving SD and...

Load is still the primary driver... I did 1000 total incline pushups within a few hours, with no measurable results. Once the load is sufficient, though, required volume tends to fall dramatically.

Once again, this isn't to say that HST doesn't work. Like with every routine out there that has you increase the max loads you work with periodically, you will grow doing 1-2 sets per exercise. My point is that the reasoning behind SD and submaximal run-ups looks naive, in light of the research...