Dorian Yates Workout: Complete Training Guide

Dorian Yates rowing / “Blood and Guts” screen capture / Kevin Horton

Dorian Yates resurrected high-intensity training (HIT) and carried it on his enormous, granite back to new heights. Without Yates, HIT may have ended up just another dusty relic of the ’70s, like mood rings or bean bag chairs. It took a one-man “British Invasion” to once again make HIT relevant. During Dorian Yates’ six-year run (1992-97) atop the bodybuilding world as Mr. Olympia, high-intensity reached a new-level of acclaim and influence. Let’s examine how Yates utilized high-intensity techniques and analyze his full body workout from his Olympia-winning years to see exactly how he built a physique that revolutionized bodybuilding.

Before 21-year-old Dorian Yates picked up weights in 1983, he picked up books, reading all he could about training science. It was Mike Mentzer’s Heavy Duty that won over the Englishman. Then when he toiled in the dungeon-like Temple Gym in Birmingham, England, Yates modified Heavy Duty via experimentation. He did four to eight working sets per body part. He also put a Mentzer-like emphasis on low reps, doing around eight for most body parts. As he advanced, he pushed these sets beyond failure usually with 2-3 forced reps, but he also incorporated drop sets, rest-pause, and negatives. In 1988, Yates won the British Championships weighing 226—46 pounds heavier than he was five years prior. And he was about to launch the most consistently superb pro career of all time: 15 wins, 2 losses (both seconds).

By the time Dorian Yates hoisted his first of six consecutive Sandow trophies in 1992, he had settled on a training style of typically just one all-out working set per exercise. However, before this apex set, he usually pyramided warmup sets. And he sometimes did as many as three such warmups, going increasingly heavier. This led to a common misconception about his workouts. Some people observed Yates battling weights in person or on video and declared—aha!—he actually does a normal quantity of volume. Pfft. In fact, the confusion merely highlighted the difference between his working sets and those of most bodybuilders. Pyramided sets at moderate intensity were his warmups—mere preparation for the final (beyond failure) set of an exercise. To him, that working set was the only set that truly mattered.

As with Arthur Jones and his protégé Casey Viator in 1971-73 and Mike Mentzer in 1979-80, Yates inspired a new generation of bodybuilders in the ’90s to give HIT a chance. Once again, few stayed with the strict, low-volume dogma for long. But this time high-intensity training had lasting effects. Several neo-HIT philosophies developed, including Doggcrapp and Max-OT. And a lower training frequency became the norm. Pre-Yates, hitting body parts once every seven days was nearly unheard of. Today, it’s the most popular split among bodybuilders. Most importantly, because of Dorian Yates’ influence then and continuing influence today, bodybuilders put more emphasis on pushing some sets to failure and some sets beyond failure. Six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates is the ultimate HIT Man.

◾️Yates trained four days per week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday) and rested the other three (Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday). If you choose, you can train five or six days per week by dividing your workouts accordingly.