High Intensity Training - Controversy

Controversy

A large number of skeptics dispute the methods and results claimed by HIT advocates. Some of the criticism asserts that HIT violates much conventional "wisdom" in weight training. By always using a weight that one can lift 8-12 times, using 4 second negatives, and so on, it has flown in the face of the exercise establishment.

There exists also a controversy related to the development of HIT and its originality. Near the close of the 19th century, a medical doctor by the name of Gustav Zander developed a complete set of machines similar to Nautilus and also a workout method remarkably close to that promoted by Arthur Jones in the early 1970s. Jones stated:

So, in attempts to improve my exercise results, I designed and built a total of about twenty very sophisticated exercise machines, then believing that these were the first exercise machines ever built by anybody. But many years later, I learned that a doctor named Gustav Zander had designed and built a number of exercise machines in Europe nearly a hundred years before I built my first one; I did not copy Zander's work and learned nothing from him, was not even aware of his work until long after I had made the same discoveries that he had made. But if I had known about, and understood, Zander's work, it would have saved me a lot of time and a rather large fortune in money, because the man was a genius; his only problem was that he lived about a century ahead of his time, at a time when very few people cared about exercise and even fewer knew anything about it.

Regardless of who originally developed the systems (and machines) it is clear that through Arthur Jones and his company and a crew of HIT advocates, the principles and concepts of HIT became popularized.