Alright, been way busy, but am starting to get somewhere on answering my question: Do the heavy, full body compound exercises, actually elicit a greater hormonal response?

The answer appears to be yes, but with significant caveats...mainly that the greater response might not make any difference.

Here's one study that points that way (there are several more that indicate a significant increase in hormonal response for the resistance exercise protcols that involve heavy weights over more muscle mass). I have quibbles with the study design (there is sympathetic training responses in the untrained arm when you train only one arm, this will cloud the results in a study design like this) and will continue looking at the research when I get some free time. Unfortunately, I haven't been a grad student in a long time and don't have ready access to either hard copies or full text of most of these journals, so I'm relying on abstracts.

This is from the Journal of Applied Physiology, 69:1442-1450:

Elevations in ostensibly anabolic hormones with resistance exercise enhance neither training-induced muscle hypertrophy nor strength of the elbow flexors.
Daniel W. D. West1, Nicholas A. Burd1, Jason E. Tang1, Daniel R. Moore1, Aaron W. Staples1, Andrew M. Holwerda1, Steven K. Baker2, and Stuart M. Phillips1

ABSTRACT:
"The aim of our study was to determine whether resistance exercise-induced elevations in endogenous hormones enhance muscle strength and hypertrophy with training. Twelve healthy young men (21.8 ± 1.2 yr, body mass index = 23.1 ± 0.6 kg/m2) trained their elbow flexors independently for 15 wk on separate days and under different hormonal milieu. In one training condition, participants performed isolated arm curl exercise designed to maintain basal hormone concentrations (low hormone, LH); in the other training condition, participants performed identical arm exercise to the LH condition followed immediately by a high volume of leg resistance exercise to elicit a large increase in endogenous hormones (high hormone, HH). There was no elevation in serum growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), or testosterone after the LH protocol but significant (P < 0.001) elevations in these hormones immediately and 15 and 30 min after the HH protocol. The hormone responses elicited by each respective exercise protocol late in the training period were similar to the response elicited early in the training period, indicating that a divergent postexercise hormone response was maintained over the training period. Muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) increased by 12% in LH and 10% in HH (P < 0.001) with no difference between conditions (condition × training interaction, P = 0.25). Similarly, type I (P < 0.01) and type II (P < 0.001) muscle fiber CSA increased with training with no effect of hormone elevation in the HH condition. Strength increased in both arms, but the increase was not different between the LH and HH conditions. We conclude that exposure of loaded muscle to acute exercise-induced elevations in endogenous anabolic hormones enhances neither muscle hypertrophy nor strength with resistance training in young men. "

Interesting, and not entirely what I'de expect.
But I wonder if there would be a difference in hormonal response in trained vs untrained individuals, which is kinda the idea that I got out of the Miller article - that cross training is used as method to continue to produce results after the individual is well trained and gains are much harder to come by.
As opposed to untrained individuals that are are probably going to respond quickly to new stimulus, regardless of hormone levels.
Thanks for posting what you found Will.

Continuing...this one also shows that training the larger mass (jump squats vs. bench press) elicits greater hormonal response (2x in this case). More interestingly, there were also correlations with diet.

J. Appl. Physiol. 82(1): 49¨C54, 1997.

Testosterone and cortisol in relationship to dietary nutrients and resistance exercise
Jeff S. Volek, William J. Kraemer, Jill A. Bush, Thomas Incledon, and Mark Boetes

Abstract
Manipulation of resistance exercise variables (i.e., intensity, volume, and rest periods) affects the endocrine response to exercise; however, the influence of dietary nutrients on basal and exercise-induced concentrations of hormones is less understood. The present study examined the relationship between dietary nutrients and resting and exercise-induced blood concentrations of testosterone (T) and cortisol (C). Twelve men performed a bench press exercise protocol (5 sets to failure using a 10-repetitions maximum load) and a jump squat protocol (5 sets of 10 repetitions using 30% of each subject¡¯s 1-repetition maximum squat) with 2 min of rest between all sets. A blood sample was obtained at preexercise and 5 min postexercise for determination of serum T and C. Subjects also completed detailed dietary food records for a total of 17 days. There was a significant (P ¡Ü 0.05) increase in postexercise T compared with preexercise values for both the bench press (7.4%) and jump squat (15.1%) protocols; however, C was not significantly different from preexercise concentrations. Significant correlations were observed between preexercise T and percent energy protein (r = −0.71), percent energy fat (r = 0.72), saturated fatty acids (g ⋅ 1,000 kcal−1 ⋅ day−1;r = 0.77), monounsaturated fatty acids (g ⋅ 1,000 kcal−1 ⋅ day−1;r = 0.79), the polyunsaturated fat-to-saturated fat ratio (r = −0.63), and the protein-to-carbohydrate ratio (r = −0.59). There were no significant correlations observed between any nutritional variables and preexercise C or the absolute increase in T and C after exercise. These data confirm that high-intensity resistance exercise results in elevated postexercise T concentrations. A more impressive finding was that dietary nutrients may be capable of modulating resting concentrations of T.

Would be interesting to see some studies that test for correlation with micronutrient/vits/minerals. Zinc, specifically. I'm sure they're out there.

Wouldn't vigorous masturbation elevate the same hormones?

Will - I think Rob Miller was pointing more towards the "big lifts" i.e. the back squat, the deadlift, the press etc to generate as close to 100% of your genetic potential for atheletic ability.

He couples the idea of a high level of skill training, ramping up intensity and lowering volume. And cross training in an efficient manner to quickly activate the maximum amount of muscle motor units while doing whatever skill you are trying to accomplish.

He alludes to a hormonal response that would increase strength, and therfore increase "performance" across the board. Performance being different for each type of athelete, in Miller's words... their trajectory.

Could someone please translate the nutritional part of Will's 2nd post. I'm dumb and got lost =)

Here is a simplified breakdown of 10 different studies revolving around hormone response to specific weight training. Done by some folks at the University of New Mexico. Unfortunately they don't have the cited studies available to the general public as far as I can tell.

Hormone studies

Will are you actually reading and analyzing the research studies or just copying and pasting abstracts from PubMed?

Nate,

The first article uses untrained men for their study group. So I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding expecting to see increases in untrained men, since the study came to the conclusion that they didn't.

Additionally they only used a sample size of twelve (untrained) men, which is terribly small to apply these results to a larger population, let alone a trained individual. Their exercise regiment was one arm at a time per day, which is definitely not applicable to any scenario that a person would use.