Interview With Mr Hi-Intensity John Robert Cardillo

In the world of bodybuilding, the preeminent high-intensity workout expert is Canadian bodybuilding champion John Robert Cardillo. His legendary style of short duration, high-intensity training created one of the most muscular physiques to ever compete in the sport. As a teenager, Cardillo went on to win the Mr. Junior Ontario, Mr. Junior Canada and the overall Open Ontario Bodybuilding Championships. Before he retired from bodybuilding at age 23, Cardillo won the Ontario Open Championships two more times and won major competitions in the U.S. Cardillo’s super high-intensity training methods were key to him achieving extraordinary results at a young age and in a relatively short period of time.

We caught up with John and had him explain the process he went through to learn high-intensity training and how he developed his Hi-Intensity workout program, which he calls the HIT3 Workout System, and his Shredded Nutrition Diet program.

Q. How old were you when you started training?

A. I had just turned 15 and weighed 122 pounds.

Q. Did you start training in a high-intensity manner?

A. I thought I was training hard when I started, because I was following everything that I read in the muscle magazines. In reality, I didn’t understand how hard a person could train.

Q. How many days a week were you training?

A. Six days a week.

Q. Were you making improvements?

A. At the beginning, I was. Then I started getting burned out because I was training too much, not giving my body enough time to rest and recuperate.

Q. Why were you training six days a week?

A. Because I read in the magazines that all the champion bodybuilders were training this way. In fact, some of them were training twice a day. I thought that to get big like them, I needed to do the same.

Q. When did you realize you were burned out?

A. I started realizing this after four or five months, when I wasn’t seeing any muscle gains or strength gains.

Q. What did you decide to do?

A. Through a stroke of luck, it was a long weekend and the YMCA where I trained was closed, so I heard about this gym that was open on the holiday Monday called the Olympic Gym. I decided to go and work out there that day and met the owner, who put me through a workout. He killed me in less than 10 minutes.

Q. How did he do that?

A. Well, I made the mistake of telling him that I knew how to work out, and that I thought I was advanced because I trained six days a week. Hearing my cocky attitude, he responded by telling me that his gym was only open three days a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He explained in a sarcastic tone, “Because it’s not necessary to work out more than three days a week, if you are training correctly!” He then offered to put me through his workout. I decided to take him up on it.

Q. Well, how did he kill you?

A. After a short warm-up, he started me with thighs. The first exercise was 90-degree leg presses, with a weight that seemed manageable for 6 to 8 reps. But he pushed me to do more and more until I did 20 reps, making me do each rep until my knees were into my armpits, pushing me until I couldn’t do any more! Then he rushed me over to a second exercise, the leg extension machine. Full reps again, making me hold the contracted position for two seconds. Again he pushed me to total failure, making me do forced reps, and then when I couldn’t lock out anymore, he made me do negative reps until my thighs were burning with pain. Then, without rest, he hustled me over to a squat rack made of plumbing pipes. He had me do full squats with a little more than my body weight on the bar (150 pounds), demanding in an authoritative voice that again the goal was to do 20 repetitions. I could barely get 10 reps. I pushed until I almost collapsed under the bar. I put the bar back on the rack and fell to the floor. I felt sick to my stomach. Never had I felt so destroyed in my life. It was five or six minutes of total annihilation.

Q. Did you continue the workout?

A. I couldn’t. I was sick. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Never had I worked that hard. In three sets, he had demolished my thighs. This was the first time I performed exercise to total muscular failure. He pushed me to do more than double the repetitions that I would have normally done on my own. After only one set of each exercise—a total of three sets—my thighs were destroyed and I was physically ill. I considered this the first real workout of my life.

Q. Wow! That must have really surprised you!

A. It certainly did in more ways than one. The gym owner’s name was Benny. He changed everything about what I thought training was about. I decided to join his gym and have him train me.

Q. How did that go?

A. It took me about a month to be able to complete a full workout after I got used to the intensity. I trained at his gym three days a week and really started seeing my strength and muscle size increase. Benny nicknamed me “eager beaver” because I was forever asking him questions about working out. He also started giving me Iron Man magazines to read, which he had a subscription to. That’s where I started reading about Arthur Jones and his high-intensity training methods. I was so intrigued by what I read about Arthur Jones that I decided to drive down to Florida with my training partner to visit him to learn more.

Q. What was that like?

A. Arthur Jones was fascinating, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I could write a book on everything I learned from him. He was even more intense than Benny was. I really learned how to train insanely hard with Arthur. Jones was ahead of his time. His method of training was one set of each exercise performed to concentric failure followed by as many negative (eccentric) repetitions as possible. This type of training was done mostly on the Nautilus and Medx Fitness machines that he invented. He was a critical thinker who understood physiology, and he had a real passion for scientific ways to do things. I loved his authoritative style of speaking and how he was able to push me far beyond what I thought I could do. I was a sponge around him, because he was a genius. I went down to see him many times, and attended seminars that he ran.  Arthur thought that most bodybuilders were wasting their time by spending too much time in a gym doing low-intensity workouts, which produced little in the way of results. He used to say that if you took the Dianabol away from bodybuilders, they would all shrink and look like girls with no muscles, and they would all stop training. He hated the idea that a healthy activity like weight training had become infiltrated with drug abuse.

Q. Who else adopted Jones’s training style?

A. I became good friends with Mike Mentzer and Casey Viator, who also trained under Jones. I trained with both of them often when they moved to California. The three of us adopted Jones’s high-intensity principles and applied them to our bodybuilding workouts, using both Nautilus machines and weights.

Q. Didn’t Dorian Yates also follow high-intensity training?

A. Yes, he did. He told me that he read all the literature in the magazines about how Mentzer, Viator, and I trained and followed a similar high-intensity workout style. I remember Dorian coming to California and training with Mentzer for a while.

Q. How did you develop your HIT3 system of Hi-Intensity workouts?

A. It was a compilation of what I learned from my first coach Benny, Arthur Jones, Mike Mentzer, and what I learned at the University of Western Ontario reading literature on how the Eastern Bloc weightlifters used Faradic stimulation. I compiled everything and implemented it in my workout programs. My goal was to formulate the highest form of high-intensity workout.

Q. What is the difference between your present HIT3 workout program compared to the high-intensity workouts that you learned training with Arthur Jones, Mike Mentzer, and Casey Viator?

A. The high-intensity training back then was basically training to positive failure and then finishing each set with negative-only repetitions. My HIT3 program has three levels of intensity. The first level is the basic training to muscular failure with forced reps and negative reps. The second level is a two-set pre-exhaustion using the same principles as level one and adding static repetitions at the end. The third level is the highest form of intensity, which incorporates a combination of three or more exercises for a body part performed in a pre-exhaustion fashion using the principles of levels one and two and finishing with Faradic contractions.

Q. What would you say is the difference between your Hi-Intensity workout system and high-volume workouts that bodybuilders tend to do?

A. Hi-Intensity workouts are much harder to do compared to the volume training of today. However, the muscle gains made by training with Hi-Intensity are longer lasting, and you don’t need steroids to increase hypertrophy and strength.

Q. How many days a week should a person train using your system of HIT3?

A. At most three days per week.

Q. What days should someone train?

A. The ideal way to train is with one full rest day between workouts. Therefore, a person should train on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Q. How long does each workout take to complete?

A. After a good warm-up, a workout should not last more than 45 minutes maximum. Any longer than one hour means that person is taking too much rest time between sets of exercises. To create maximum intensity, there should be minimal to zero rest between sets.

Q. What is the goal of each workout?

A. The goal is to attack each set of each exercise with maximum weight, training to absolute muscular failure. That means the weight should be sufficient to be able to complete at least 8 repetitions, with the goal of doing 10 to 11 repetitions. Once 10 repetitions are achieved, the weight will be increased for the next workout by at least 5 to 10 percent. Progressive resistance will always cause the muscle to be challenged resulting in hypertrophy stimulus. Getting stronger means the muscle will grow, as opposed to doing typical volume training (using a light weight each workout, doing countless repetitions and sets without getting stronger). Pumping blood into a muscle does not cause hypertrophy.

Q. How many days a week would you train a body part?

A. My HIT3 system is based on training a body part once every seven days. That gives each body part adequate rest in order to recuperate and grow, which will result in each body part getting stronger for the next workout.

Q. What do you prefer to use in your HIT3 workouts—machines or free weights?

A. I use a combination of both. I do not believe that machines alone should ever be used, nor do I believe that free weights alone should ever be used. The combination is best to biomechanically work each muscle.

Q. Recuperation seems to really be a big part of your HIT3 protocol?

A. Recuperation is everything. Once you have thoroughly stimulated a muscle by working out in a Hi-Intensity fashion, recuperation is when the growth happens. Without proper recuperation, growth cannot take place. That is what most people do not understand. Training every day not only overworks the muscles but also exhausts the neuromuscular system, which controls muscle contractions. Without recuperation, you cannot get proper muscle contractions, leading to inferior performance during the next workout.

Q. Do you get overtrained using your HIT3 system?

A. I think after several months of any type of workout, your body starts getting a feeling of being overtrained. I always recommend one week off total weight workouts after every eight-week training block to allow the body to rest and rejuvenate without any form of high-intensity stimulus. I find this works best.

Q. Can a person achieve weight loss using your HIT3 workout system?

A. Absolutely! By exercising in a Hi-Intensity fashion, you burn more calories while doing exercise and continue to burn calories during the recuperation period after each workout. HIT3 workouts are much better for weight loss than cardiovascular exercise. Obviously, what a person eats also will affect whether they gain or lose weight. But nothing beats Hi-Intensity training for fat loss.

Q. If it’s that effective, why don’t more people train in a high-intensity way?

A. A lot of people actually believe they’re training in a high-intensity way, because they think they’re training hard. However, it’s often not the case. Watching a person train in a high-intensity fashion is a unique sight to see. The effort put out is a bit scary. It certainly isn’t a leisurely workout. It resembles an attack-type workout, with extreme effort being put forth. The reality is that training with high intensity is not easy or pleasurable for most. However, it is the best way to make the quickest muscular gains. Not everyone wants to put out that extreme effort.

Q. How do steroids help people train six days a week?

A. Steroids seem to help people recuperate faster as a result of increased nitrogen in the muscle cells. For the most part, I think that steroids mask the effects of overtraining, leaving bodybuilders looking big and puffy and not hard and shredded with deep cuts and striations.

Q. How does Hi-Intensity training cause more muscle and strength gain?

A. Hi-Intensity training allows you to recruit the highest percentage of myofibrils while performing the exercise, which will stimulate more growth. Using progressively heavier resistance/weights forces the muscle being worked to contract harder. The harder the muscle contraction, the more myofibril tears/damage is caused to the myosin and actin in the cell. This stimulus causes trauma to muscle cells, which through rest, proper nutrition and recuperation will result in maximum hypertrophy.

Q. Can you tell us how Faradic muscle stimulation works?

A. This method was first used by Eastern Bloc weightlifters to add with their training. Electronic muscle stimulation is an electrical signal through the neuromuscular system, causing muscle cells to achieve maximum contractions without the use of resistance. It recruits the greatest percentage of muscle fibers, more than anything that can be achieved through weight training. The science of this is due to the sliding filaments whereby the electrical signal is sent to muscle actin and myosin within the myofibrils, which causes them to shorten and contract. Intense contractions cause muscles to grow and get stronger. I incorporate Faradic muscle stimulation into my training system to help achieve maximum contractions, which increases muscularity and brings out more definition in each body part. This improves the shape and look of a muscle.

Q. Which body parts did you use it on when you were competing?

A. I used it on hard-to-contract areas such as rear delts, the low triangle area in my low lats, and in my quads to bring out cross-striations. Also, I used it a lot on my chest, where I was able to bring out seven striations across each pec!

Q. What is your opinion of bodybuilders today doing half reps during an exercise?

A. I think it’s ridiculous. That’s the reason why many pro bodybuilders today lack muscular detail in most muscle parts. How can you explain a Mr. Olympia-caliber bodybuilder not having any cuts across his chest or front deltoids? You can only accomplish this by doing full-range, maximum extension and maximum contraction movements. It is the full movements that recruit more muscle fibers, which causes more growth throughout the muscle, making a muscle look more complete. The shredded look. Like an anatomy chart. Anything less than a full movement is a waste of time.

Q. I guess from this interview on Hi-Intensity training, I can sum up your viewpoint that true bodybuilding is about hard workouts that build real long-lasting muscle?

A. One hundred percent. Anything less is a waste of time. And I hate wasting time, or seeing other people waste their time in a gym!

Canada's Premier Fitness Expert John Cardillo Revolutionizes the Way a Bodybuilder Trains

John Cardillo developed training principles that flew in the face of the traditional bodybuilder's approach to training. The idea of lifting weights only 3 to 4 times per week for just 45 minutes per workout is counterintuitive. We’ve all been taught that in life, the more time you put into something, the better your results. But it’s important to realize that if you train to absolute failure on every single set and take almost no rest between sets, you simply can’t train for more than 45 minutes! And if you do this more than 3 or 4 times per week, you WILL overtrain even if you’re using steroids, SARMs, Growth Hormone, or other PEDs. Men and women can make the best gains of their lives if they have the mental fortitude to train this hard and the discipline to stay out of the gym on scheduled days off. Dorian Yates once told us that to win the Olympia six times, he trained only 4 times per week and said that staying out of the gym on his 3 days off days each week was one of the hardest things he had to do because he simply loved training so much and wanted to be the best in the world. But rest days are just as important as training days. Unfortunately, few people can commit to pushing their body to this level of intensity during a set and instead do countless “pumping sets” to try to make up for it. This training style is good for total beginners, the elderly or for those rehabilitating an injury. Pump-style training gives you a good muscle pump delivering nutrient-rich blood to the muscle but the gains in new muscle tissue are slow or nonexistent. Localized water retention and inflammation in the muscle group trained is often mistaken for new muscle growth. True gains in new muscle can be achieved by incorporating John’s Hi-Intensity training system if you have the mindset and heart to push your body to this level of intensity and the confidence to try training a completely different way. By training to absolute failure and allowing your body enough time to fully recover on off days, you will make the best gains of your life. We’ve been so impressed by John’s HIT3 workout system and his principles on nutrition that we’ve invited him to be a regular columnist for MUSCLE INSIDER! Watch for more content coming from John Cardillo as we uncover the bodybuilding secrets he’s learned from some of the top human performance experts in the world.