Stay on the fitness side of the internet long enough, and you’ll quickly learn that everyone swears by a different training style. Some lifters fall into the camp of high-volume routines with endless sets, while others rely on high-intensity methods. Six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates proved that less could be more, as long as training intensity was high enough.
Yates, the retired bodybuilding legend, recently appeared on the Huberman Lab podcast, where he discussed the training philosophy that defined his career prime: Blood & Guts. The approach is simple and brutal, consisting of short workouts built around maximum effort and minimal volume, with just a handful of working sets taken all the way to muscular failure.
“Somebody came up with a moniker, ‘Blood and Guts,’ when they saw my training. ‘That looks like blood and guts,'” Yates said on the podcast. “So that’s what we called it…It was briefer than everyone else I was competing against. And it had an effect.”
Early in his career, Yates trained just three times per week for 45 to 60 minutes at a time, and progress came quickly. However, when he experimented with higher frequency and more volume, his gains stalled within weeks. Cutting volume back sparked growth again, teaching him a lesson that would shape the rest of his career.
Yates credits his approach to the work of Arthur Jones, who popularized high-intensity training (HIT), and later Mike Mentzer, who popularized the idea of brief, brutally hard workouts built around sets taken to failure. Blood & Guts was his interpretation of Jones’ and Mentzer’s philosophies, which he adapted through years of training.
Throughout the ’90s, Yates popularized his method by relying on just one or two brutally intense working sets per exercise, using advanced techniques like forced reps, negatives, and rest-pause sets, to stimulate growth.
As with any training, it’s not a one-size-fits-all situation. On the podcast, he noted that Jones’ original HIT model, built around full-body workouts performed a few times per week, would be more than sufficient for the average person looking to build and maintain muscle for everyday health. His own Blood & Guts system was designed for competitive bodybuilding and demands a level of intensity that isn’t suitable for beginner lifters.
But for advanced lifters looking to train hard, Yates’ results speak for themselves. After all, his approach produced results that truly revolutionized bodybuilding, and to this day, Yates remains impressed by what he was able to achieve with it.
Related: 4x Mr. Olympia Reveals the One Dumbbell Exercise He Uses for Bigger Bicep Peaks
