Awakening to What Is

What Is is right before my eyes. It's the barbell in my hands. It's the sweat rolling down my face, dripping from my nose.

It's the pump that fills my shirt sleeve, stretching my t-shirt, filling me with bliss.

It's the pulled hamstring that fills my leg with pain, and drops me to the floor, that keeps me from lifting for weeks on end.

It's utter perfect, awakening me to What Is, not that which it is not.

It's just this, right now.

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The Hardgainer Size Solution

A 10-Week Mass Building Regimen for Lifters Struggling to Pack on Size I don’t like the term “hardgainer.” I don’t mean to imply that some lifters don’t find it harder to pack on muscle size than others. Some certainly do. It’s just that when a lifter is labelled a “hardgainer” he (or she) often resorts to the kind of training that may not necessarily be what they really need. I won’t go into all of the details here for why I find that to be the case. If you want more information on that , then read my essay from last year “ The Myth of the Hardgainer .” The gist of my theory, however, is that many lifters struggle to pack on muscle size because they do standard high-volume workouts, only to find that sort of training doesn’t work for them. After that, they proceed to low-frequency, “high-intensity” workouts, but those don’t work, either. It’s at that point that the lifter, or his lif...

Tailoring Your Workout Program - Part Two

Tips and Advice for Tailoring Your Training Routine Part 2: Selecting a Program In post-modern philosophy, there is a term that is important to understand. I’m not a post-modernist myself—I am, if anything, an integralist , one who integrates different philosophies, East and West, into a singular whole—but I feel this concept is important. It’s called “the myth of the given.” The “myth” is when we take our given perception of things to be how they actually are. We do this more often than we think. It’s easy to understand this concept when it comes to simple objects, but less so when it comes to ideas. We may not like how something tastes—raw oysters,for example—so we think oysters are simply bad. Others, however, may love raw oysters—I could eat them by the bucket. In this instance, it’s easy to see the myth of the given at work. Even though you may find oysters personally unsettling, and it befuddles yo...

The Old-School Way

The Classic Bodybuilding Approach to Cycling Workloads, Developing Work Capacity, and High-Frequency Training I’ve been lifting since the mid ‘80s, when my father bought me one of those old, shaky DP weight sets for, I think, my 13th birthday. If you are my age or older, you know well the kind of set I’m talking about, with weights made of plastic, gray in color, and filled with cement. Many a young man got their start in iron from just such a set. It was about all you could find down at the local Sears & Roebuck department store. The bench was flimsy as all get-out, the weights not that long-lasting, but, honestly, it got the job done. In many ways, it was all I (or others) needed. You could do deadlifts and cleans, overhead presses and curls, not to mention all the bench pressing your pre-pubescent heart desired. Like all other young teenagers, I wanted a big chest and biceps, so I did entirely too much benchi...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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