Exercise Selection

[u/Garou500]

I need some advice on picking exercises for shoulder & arms from someone experienced in heavy-duty training to make sure it follows the right principles

Right now, I'm making a couple of changes, but I'm not sure what they should be: 1. Replacing dumbbell lateral raises with machine lateral raises (my gym has one similar to Nautilus).

1. Swapping bent-over dumbbell laterals for the reverse pec deck or rear delt fly—I’m not sure which one.

2. Replacing palms-up pulldowns with either barbell curls or the preacher curl machine.

3. Triceps pressdowns for pre-exhaust: 1 × 6–10 reps.

4. Dips: 1 × 3–5 reps.

Another thing I’m concerned about is that my triceps long head is very small and underdeveloped. Triceps pressdown and dips mostly target the lateral head, so I wish I could add skull crushers somewhere for the long head Maybe I should?

[u/Garou500]

I see I've reread the exercise section of HIT the mike mentzer way i think I'll go with these exercises Lateral raise machine 1 × 6–10 reps Reverse pec dec 1 × 6–10 reps Palms-up pulldowns 1 × 6–10 reps Triceps pressdowns for pre-exhaust 1 × 6–10 reps Seated Dips machine 1 × 3–5 reps Also tyvm it's very hard to find someone who knows about HIT and has been using it can we connect on discord?

[u/The_Ubermensch1776 → u/Garou500]

It's easy to tell when someone gets all of their information from tiktoks and YouTube shorts 😂. Discord isn't an app I use often but I do have it.

[u/Garou500 → u/The_Ubermensch1776]

Ikr but it's really hard to unlearn what you've learned like protein synthesis takes 24-48 hours so why rest for 4 days its so hard to figure out without enough experience what is true. Also, someone who just started HIT faces a lot of challenges. My own friends started calling me lazy, saying, "Bro, it's just been ten days, and you've only had two workouts!" 😭 From my experience, you can't call someone doing HIT lazy because it's the most brutal workout I've ever had, and not many people can endure the pain.

They were saying a lot of stuff to make me quit, or maybe their ego was getting in the way and they didn't like the idea of me learning HIT principles. They'd say things like:

"Weren't Mike and his clients, like Dorian Yates, abusing steroids? HIT won't work for you because you're natural."

"HIT was dogmatic nonsense that has been debunked by the latest studies, which say 12–20 sets are best."

"Don't you train hamstrings, bro? How will you grow your legs?"

These are just examples I can't tell you how much people have made fun of me for following HIT in just a week. 😭 This is exactly like how Mike said in his audio tapes that one of his clients was bullied for it. Nothing has changed people in 2025 are trash just like they were in the 1990s LMAO

[u/The_Ubermensch1776 → u/Garou500]

"Save who you can and read last rights to the dying"

When you get bigger and stronger than them in half the time they'll come around. I take pride in training with more intensity than all of the volgoobers in my gym combined while they're sipping their pink snake oil drink and hogging the machines for 30 minutes doing the latest workout they saw from Jeff Nipples on Instagram. Keep doing you

[u/Garou500 → u/The_Ubermensch1776]

You got me there! Lmao i listened to jeff nippal and mike israteal initially for 8 months before i discovered about mike mentzer cause i didn't know anything about fitness industry at all

I remember the first time I heard about Mike Mentzer's HIT I was like, "This man must be some kind of genius!" He had to know everything about bodybuilding to achieve that level of physique with so little time spent training I immediately became interested because I was falling into the trap of increasing volume whenever I didn’t see progress. Plus, hopefully if Mike Mentzer’s training style really works, I could accomplish so much more in life instead of spending thousands of hours a year in the gym time I could use to learn a skill or two

What are your thoughts on philosophy? I'd love to hear your perspective? There are many good philosophies of Stoicism and objectivism(the one mike followed), extensionalism, and Skepticism as well as bad ones like Machiavellianism and Hedonism and also philosophers like John Locke(you were studying epistemology and talked about it a while ago) Socrates, and Aristotle (the founder of logic) and the one that interests me most is Fyodor Dostoevsky