Dorian Yates: From the Shadow: Official Biography by Kaspa Hazelwood & Dorian Yates

Author:Kaspa Hazelwood & Dorian Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dorian Yates
Published: 2020-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

1993 with Mike Mentzer.

Photograph © Dorian Yates Collection.

CHAPTER 12

The 1990s—Training

The second time that Dorian visited the West Coast, in 1991, he met American bodybuilding legend Mike Mentzer, until then probably the best-known exponent of HIT. Dorian would even go on to train with him. Mentzer lived in California and gave seminars and phone-based training advice. If Dorian could ever be said to have had a hero in the sport, other than Robby Robinson, it was Mike. Part of this was due to the style of physique that Mentzer had created, with its thick dense musculature: huge forearms, incredible calves, and the general appearance of superhuman strength rather than just enormous size. More than this, though, what really drew Dorian’s admiration was Mentzer’s training philosophy and the clear evidence that this was a bright guy who thought deeply, and “outside the box,” about what he was doing with his body and why.

I’d seen Mentzer’s training stuff long before I ever met the guy and I was impressed. He was an interesting person, intelligent and with that strongman style moustache and muscle thickness, big forearms and calves—in the end it turned out that we shared those traits. He wasn’t cool like Robby Robinson, but he was cool in his own way.

There were two major influencing factors on Mike. The first was an introduction to and subsequent training with Arthur Jones. The second, maybe even more important, was his absorption and embodiment of logical positivism as popularized by the Russian-American novelist, philosopher, and playwright Ayn Rand. Mike was consumed by Randian ideology and went on to attempt to apply reason and logic to every aspect of his training and his life. Effectively what Mentzer did was ask the question: Am I training in a certain way due to habit and the pressures of conformity or am I doing everything to ascertain the best ways of approaching bodybuilding to get maximum results? Mentzer had soon realized that even some of the ideas of his mentor Arthur Jones were somewhat arbitrary. What’s more, to his mind, logic dictated that it would be possible to train your body for maximum muscle gains by reducing the time spent performing exercises to literally minutes per work out.

Dorian would go on to cut back his own training volume after working out with Mentzer, but it would be going too far to say Mike became Dorian’s trainer or made any huge impact on Dorian’s approach—mainly because Dorian never limited his exercises, or training duration and frequency, to quite the levels that Mentzer ultimately advocated. Just by being around a free thinker like Mentzer was a great source of energy and inspiration for Dorian, who was surrounded, back home, by guys who had not made the leap to HIT. Ken “Flex” Wheeler said when I interviewed him for this book: “When Dorian trained he was in another world, no one else had that focus and intensity. The only way anyone can achieve that is to believe 100% that what they’re doing is correct.

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