I wish someone had told me this: once you put muscle on your frame it tends to stick around.

If you bulk up and turn into Hercules over the course of a few years you can scale back your training volume dramatically and as long as you keep your diet right, you will continue to be a jacked and cut dude for many many years.

I'm sure this gets less true as you age but it seems to apply to me in my 40s.

Maintenance is just way easier than the initial buildup.

I discovered this pretty much on accident when I scaled back the volume and intensity of my own training and noticed... Huh would you look at that... Very little changed.

Like on some level, it would be harder to return to the state of roly poly schlub that I was once in, than to continue being the fairly fit person I am now. I just autopilot twice a week to the gym after work, zone out and listen to podcasts for an hour while doing some pretty moderate intensity lifts, and the body stays in pretty decent shape. I barely break a sweat now compared to the first year or two.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Shannon Sharpe was doing a lot more than one hour per day of training when he was playing competitively. It's my observation that two workouts or practices per day is typical for collegiate athletics, even in the sports and at the schools that don't bring in money.

But after that? Yeah, no doubt that one can maintain most of that fitness with a small fraction of the time and effort.

As I said up-thread, I started running as an Army cadet, and I've continued to take annual fitness tests throughout my career. The fastest guys on those tests are guys who (unsurprisingly) were serious runners or soccer players in high school / college but who (surprisingly) did very little running after that. They could jump into the test cold and laugh their way to two miles in 12:00 (11:00 if they were really trying). I, on the other hand, basically didn't start running until I joined the Army, and I had to put in a lot of miles to break 13:00. For several years after that, though, I was able to reduce my mileage too and still run circles around a lot of people.

Dorian Yates (former mister Olympia) claimed he trained 4 times a week for 45 minutes while preparing for the contest. But very intense training.

When you're on steroids your body is basically a muscle making factory. You mainly need to consume enough protein and calories and your body will essentially do the work for you.

A person who takes steroids and doesn't work out will still gain more muscle than a non-steroid user working out for an hour every day.

He also sells training so there is reason to doubt anything he says about the topic.

Um, not really any reason to doubt as there's nothing wrong with selling what you find works

Moreover, my experience in having formerly trained to compete at top international levels, studied exercise physiology and worked as a trainer, is very similar.

The really short oversimplified version is: more intensity, shorter training, and more rest — it is the balance of exercise and rest that is key. And world-class results are definitely possible with relatively brief workouts; in fact, it's the best way to do it.

The simplified concept is the muscles gain strength with stimulated rest. The training/exercise only provides the stimulus for the muscles to grow, the exercise does not actually grow the cells, it degrades or damages them. It is the repair process that strengthens the muscle. Too much exercise and too little rest (=repair+growth) just degrades the system; too much rest without exercise stimulus wastes potential growth time.

Some is good, but more is not necessarily better.

While there is no question that some exercise is almost always better than none, if you want peak results, intensity is the key. By intensity, we mean pushing the muscle to failure, so the end of each lifting set is not a predetermined number of reps, but the rep where you push as hard as possible and simply cannot complete the lift (after ~5-25 reps depending on focus on strength vs bulk, respectively). Do that one to three times for each muscle in the workout, then give it some days rest. A 45-min workout is sufficient to work the upper, mid, or lower body zone. Doing only one zone each day fits a max of six workouts per week, and monitoring vital signs (pulse/bp/temp) for overall stress will usually reduce that to around four weight workouts per week. This is what worked for me and the people I trained, and I'm not the least bit surprised to find it also worked for Dorian Yates (and no, I'm not selling anything related to exercise programs).

Eh... I disagree. I've not bought his training but I have been actively fit since I was in highschool and have bought training before. There is value is getting regimens and techniques from really experienced athletes.

Edit: Also, I've been on a 4 day Bukgarian split before and had very good results. If you want proof there is a 30 minute routine that can kick your ass I recommend looking up Ryan Humiston's take on it.

He is also 56 years old and has the muscle definition of a man in his 20s, when biology shows building and retaining that kind of quality muscle at that age is very difficult even with a history of physical fitness. I'll just say it, he's probably on TRT or some other gear..