<u>*LONG, BORING, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POST ALERT*
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Well, technically I am using Max-stimulation which is an HST branch developed by Dan Moore.
I started lifting when I was about 15 years old. I was a very, very thin. I was 6'1" and about 140 lb.s when I started! I didn't know jack-**** about lifting or nutrition so I didn't get very good results. Eventually I read a crap-load of magazines and books about training and I learned some stuff. But I was very impatient: I would start a routine, stick with it for a couple of months and then quit when I didn't get huge overnight. Then I would read more articles in search of the 'magic program' that would make me huge. I eventually found HIT to be very logical and studied Arthur Jones and Mike Mentzer's ideas. Since I was such a slacker with training and eating, it took me about 6 years and at 21 I was finally about 170 lb.s....still thin, but healthy-looking. I lost interest in lifting for a long time and stayed about the same...170 lb.s, somewhat lean. I still lifted very infrequently to maintain what I had.
I bought my first house last spring of 2006, and the fact that I had enough space to build my own home gym motivated me to get back into lifting. I googled 'hypertrophy training' and found HST, but at first didn't like it. Bryan Haycock seemed arrogant and the fact that he was selling supplements made me skeptical. But he got me interested in researching the science myself instead of mindlessly spoon-feeding ideas like Mentzer was doing in his books. I then googled 'hypertrophy research' and found
hypertrophy-research I was instantly in love! I realized that all these years I was listening to Mike Mentzer enlighten me on
'the one true science of bodybuilding' he never did use any science to back his claims up. On hypertrophy-research.com, here was pages and pages of real scientific studies about skeletal muscle hypertrophy. I studied for days, took notes and formulated my own training routine. Then shortly after that I read enough scientific theory about Max-stimulation written by Dan Moore to start training that way.
It was May 2006 that I started Max-Stimulation training. Of course I gravitated here seeing as my mentor, Dan, is an HST expert and Bryan Haycock is his mentor. I was somewhere between 170 and 180 lb.s when I started in May, now, 8 months later I am 193 lb.s and my waist has only increased 1 inch, my chest has increased 1.5", my arms have increased 1", and my thighs have increased 1.5". So in 8 months of using Max-stim and HST principles I gained ~15 lb.s of mostly lean mass. I really admire Dan Moore as my mentor and I am the second-highest poster at his site and now officially a "M-time expert" along with a handful of other guys. I feel I am just beginning to see the results I have always wanted and won't stop until I have pushed my body as far as it will go naturally.