C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A Simple 3-Days-Per-Week, H/L/M Bodyweight Regimen      I received an email the other day asking me if I was going to write another part of my Bodyweight Training and Beyond series.  I wrote Part 3 of that series back in January, and mentioned at the end of it that I would soon do a 4th part.  I have yet to do so, however.  I have a tendency to get on “kicks” where I cover a certain topic for several different essays or for weeks on end before moving on to something else, and I haven’t written that much on bodyweight training of late.  I wrote back to the reader that, yes, I do plan on writing another part to that series, maybe even several.  I’ve made quite a few notes on isometric training along with “dynamic tension” that I plan on including in the next part.  The reader also had a request.  He asked if I had a suggestion for how to design a 3-days-a-week workout using only one’s bodyweight.  He has a chinning bar a...

Unique Training Concepts and Ideas for Gaining Size and Strength or Getting in Shape      I have a lot of stuff that I’m trying to write.  So much that it can get overwhelming—a book I’m trying to finish but seem to constantly get stuck in neutral in the process, about 20 different notes for articles and essays, along with a handful of others that I’ve already begun and need to simply finish—that I don’t really know where to start.  Or finish.  With that in mind, I thought it might be good to just write an “odds and ends” essay, the very thing that you’re now reading.  These are a few of the ideas that I wrote down for some articles, but I’m not really sure if there’s enough there for each one to comprise an article of its own.  I thought, well, what-the-hell, I’ll just throw a few of them together in one essay.      With that short preamble out of the way, let’s get going and see where this thing will go. Rest-P...

Variations on the 10 Sets of 10 Reps Method for One-Exercise-Per-Bodypart Training      Since the ‘90s, I’ve preached the benefits of one-exercise-per-bodypart workouts in articles I wrote for Ironman magazine and MuscleMag International .  The very first method that I touted was the 10 sets of 10 reps workout.  Back in the last century, when I still trained as a bodybuilder before my “conversion” to powerlifter, I did most of my hypertrophy workouts using the standard multiple exercises per muscle group for multiple sets—typically 3 to 4 lifts per bodypart for 3 to 4 sets of (somewhere between) 6 and 12 repetitions.  I’d hazard that’s still the way most bodybuilders train in today’s gyms.  Back then, I was “chasing the pump” in most of my workouts.  I noticed something, though. I would often start a workout with a good pump on my first exercise but when I switched to a new one, I would lose my pump or it would diminish somewhat.  ...

Simple Methods to Improve Your Workouts and Obtain Better Results      Over the years, one of my most popular articles has been my “ Train Long, Not Hard ” feature that I wrote for Testosterone Nation around the beginning of this century.  The title comes from a saying of Arthur Jones, the creator of Nautilus equipment and the father of so-called “high-intensity training” and the whole one-set-to-complete-momentary-muscular-failure approach to workouts.  He and Mike Mentzer are responsible for brain-washing an entire generation of lifters and quite possibly ruining real strength training, at least here in America—though I’ll save my ramblings on that for another essay or you can read my article on REAL High-Intensity Training .  Anyway, his saying goes like this: “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.”  Jones, quite obviously, believed that “train hard” was the answer to that conundrum.  In my article...