HIT, Spit, and Bullshit: An Interview with Ellington
Darden
by Nate Green


When Ellington Darden, Ph.D., learned I was from Montana, he
convinced me, in his laconic Southern drawl, that Clint Eastwood
was a friend of his. But before I had a chance to be impressed, he
corrected himself. Turns out, it wasn't Clint Eastwood, but
some guy named Clint Walker who starred in some hundred-year-old TV
show called Cheyenne.
Was Dr. Darden having a senior moment? Was he just playing loose
with the facts? Or maybe it's just that the man has forgotten
more stuff than most of us will ever know, so he might be forgiven
for screwing up an actor's last name.
I'm sure virtually all HIT disciples will claim the former.
HIT, of course, is the system of high-intensity training
developed by Arthur Jones and codified and popularized by Darden,
who was director of research for Nautilus Sports/Medical
Industries, the company Jones founded, for more than 20 years.
He's also the author of some four dozen fitness books and an
accomplished bodybuilder.
More important, for the purposes of this interview, Darden is a
man who's seen and heard it all over the past four decades.
He's just betting you haven't.


The good doctor
T-Nation: You hitched your wagon to Jones
and HIT back in the early 1970s. Since then, HIT has been more and less
popular, but it's never been overwhelmingly popular. So I'll
throw this out there for starters: Is HIT really the shit? I mean,
what can it do for the average Testosterone reader? Why
should he care enough to read about it?
Darden: High-intensity training is just a very efficient and
effective way to build muscular size and strength. That's
never been out of focus and it never will. Why should you care?
Well, a guy that is big and strong can still command respect
anywhere he goes. HIT's not for everybody. But for those who
don't want to spend a lot of time training, boy, it's the
only way to go.
T-Nation: So if it's not for everybody, who is it
for?
Darden: I'd say it's more for people in their thirties
and forties, as opposed to teenagers or young adults. A teenager
can do lots of things wrong and still get pretty good results. You
can suffer injuries and get over them quickly. But when you're
in your thirties or forties, it doesn't usually happen.
I'm 65. If I sprain my ankle today, it may take me two and a
half months to get over it. If you sprain yours, it might take just
10 days to heal.
T-Nation: So what you're telling me is, "No jack-ass
kids"?
Darden: It works for young people, too, but let me just say that
the training is very hard. Nowadays, all the young guys who are
into strength training and bodybuilding seem to be influenced by
the "more is better" philosophy. They don't want to
work as hard. They want the glitz. I understand. I was young once,
and did stupid stuff. But it's like me telling you that if
you're new to the world of sex with women, doing it right one
time is enough.
T-Nation: You had me going on the Clint Eastwood thing, but
I'm not buying that.
Darden: One time the right way might last you several
weeks. But that's not going to go over well with an
18-year-old who would go once an hour if he could.
T-Nation: Um ...
Darden: What I'm saying is, there's just a huge amount
of propaganda that says more is better. More is better in exercise,
more is better in food intake, etc. More could be better when it
comes to money or education or traveling, but it's not
necessarily the case when it comes to exercise.
T-Nation: But you didn't start out with HIT. You won
bodybuilding trophies before you ever heard of Arthur Jones. Back
then, you trained like everyone else, and it worked.
Darden: Yeah, but the truth is, you're not very smart when
you're young. Don't you think, 20 years from now,
you're going to be smarter than you are now? By then,
you'll have made hundreds of mistakes. Let me put it this way:
Training the traditional way, you might add a quarter-inch to your
arms in a year. Why do in a year what you could do in a
week?


Darden in '72
T-Nation: I'd love to do it in a week. But some of your
articles seem kind of gimmicky, like your "Big Arms
Challenge".
Can people really gain three-eighths of an inch of muscle in 10
days? Won't it just be swollen tissue?



Darden: I believe it's muscle, especially in the forearm
extensors and flexors and the elbow extensors and flexors. Your arm
is made up of more than just the biceps and the triceps. But
outside of a fairly expensive MRI, there's no way to tell for
sure. That said, accurate circumference measurements of the relaxed
and the contracted upper arm, along with taking before and after
photos, should be enough to prove there's a
difference.
T-Nation: If it truly is muscle, can people maintain
it?
Darden: It's not going to go away if you continue to do
some type of high-intensity exercise for those muscles once a week.
A number of guys who did the Challenge put an average of
three-eighths of an inch on each arm in two weeks or less. You can
go back and read the thread. A month later, many of them were
reporting they had kept most of the size they'd gained.
T-Nation: I know you practice what you preach. But when was the
last time you went to true, vomit-inducing failure?
Darden: I go to failure on just about every workout I do, but
not on every exercise. I don't do HIT like I did in the 1970s.
My goals have changed. I can keep the muscle that I have without
busting my ass on eight exercises two or three times a week. All I
have to do is give an all out effort on one or two of the seven or
eight exercises that I do. Like I was saying earlier, I'm 65.
My goal in life now is just to keep the muscle I got through HIT
training.
T-Nation: What about the people who don't get good results
from HIT?
Darden: They're probably not doing it correctly. They need
someone to help them out and show them the way.
T-Nation: That's quite a caveat, isn't it? I mean, can
a typical lifter in a typical gym succeed with HIT if he
doesn't have someone like you coaching him?
Darden: At one time I would've said, "Yeah, you will
if you just do the best you can." Now I think you need a good
coach to assist you, especially the first few times. But
that's no different from golf or tennis or lots of other
activities.
T-Nation: So what if you don't have a coach?
Darden: If you don't know how to do HIT correctly, if you
don't go to failure or even know how to go to true failure,
then maybe you're better off doing another set or two.
T-Nation: Blasphemy! But is it still considered HIT training if
you're doing multiple sets and not going to true
failure?
Darden: No.
T-Nation: Let's get back to something I touched on earlier:
You've done both high-frequency training and high-intensity
training. You've built muscle with both. How can you say one
works better than the other?
Darden: A lot of things are good, as long as you're
consistent and overload your muscles. HIT is made for people who
want to work hard and get results in a shorter period of time. If
you could get very good results from only 15 minutes twice per
week, why wouldn't you use HIT?

What I try to do is give people an approach that will get
results if they're willing to work hard for brief periods of
time, pay attention to good form, eat well, get a good night's
sleep, and quit thinking about it too much.
T-Nation: How has HIT evolved from the days of Arthur Jones and
Mike Mentzer?
Darden: It's evolved like newspapers have evolved. If you
look at USA Today and compare it to what was published 30
years ago, you'll see a vast difference. There's a lot of
variety on the front page and a lot of color.

The new HIT is the same way. In my books, I've given some
new variety and things that have not been talked about before now.
Today's trainee is on the Internet all the time and wants more
variety and more color. If you don't supply that, you'll
lose him.

But then again, some people just need a refresher course in the
basics. You can't go wrong with eight or 10 basic exercises to
become as strong as possible. That's still the major
cornerstone in bodybuilding and strength training.


Arthur Jones


Mike Mentzer

The overhead press, the bench press, the deadlift, the squat,
the curl ... there's nothing that's going to take the
place of those exercises. If a guy masters those, he'll end up
pretty close to his genetic potential. You could write it all down
on one page, but it won't be very attractive and it won't
hold your attention very long.
T-Nation: So what do you say to people who think that Arthur
Jones's intention was to make exercise more marketable to the
masses — fast workouts in assembly-line fashion? Do you think
the Nautilus philosophy was, at least in part, a sales gimmick to
sell more machines?
Darden: Sure. The machines were good things to hang your hat on,
but they also worked. It only turned into a gimmick after the fact.
Arthur was looking for harder, briefer forms of exercise and he
could get it with the machines that he designed. He had no idea
that fitness centers would be influenced and would want to get
involved. But when they did, he was the first one to take advantage
of it. And he did it very well.

He was always able to recognize opportunity. He used to sell
wild animals to roadside amusement parks and zoos in the
South.
T-Nation: Wait. You mean he'd catch wild animals and sell
them?



Darden: Oh yeah. He'd capture rattlesnakes, alligators, and
crocodiles from Mexico, and monkeys and things like that, and haul
them back to the U.S. and sell them to these little roadside
places.

That was back before we had Interstate highways. If you were
driving on these two-lane roads, you'd stop to see the biggest
rattlesnake in the world or a 12-foot alligator. Then when you got
back to your car, there'd always be a game of chance, like
Bingo or something. A few guys would come up and start playing with
you, but they understood the game, and before you knew it,
you'd lost all the money in your billfold.


Jones and some of his friends
T-Nation: So what you're saying is that Arthur always found
a way to "get" people?
Darden: Yeah, Arthur knew how to market and put up the right
signs and get people to stop. He was a master at coming up with a
lot of the early Nautilus ads that were centered around words
he'd thought up, like "duo-symmetric" or
"poly-contractile." They were new and exciting and
somewhat gimmicky.

But in the early 1970s bodybuilding really needed a spark. It
had just kind of died and was not very exciting anymore. And people
were doing so much exercise that the volume thing had everyone
overtrained.