C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Musings on Lifting, Life, and the Reasons for Training (with a few workouts thrown in for good measure)      Why do you train?  It’s a question you must ask yourself and it’s a question that only you can answer.  To help you with the question, I can only tell you why I train.  But to do that, we have to go back to the past a little bit.  Why did I train?  What got me started in the first place?  What kept me going?  Why do I train now and why will I continue to train long into the future?      I started training when I was pretty young, around 13 years old.  It might have been 14.  I’m not really sure, though 13 sounds about right.  It would have been in ‘86 or ‘87, when my father bought me one of those cement-filled DP weight sets for either my birthday or Christmas.  I think it was my birthday, because I remember first training in the summer, and I was born in May.  My siste...

The Magic of High-Volume but Minimalistic Training      As I have pointed out more often than I can count, there are many ways and multiple paths to achieve your physical goals, whether it’s strength, power, more muscle mass, less bodyfat, or a combination of several of those goals all at once.  The key to achieving your goals, whatever they may be, lies in the proper balance of volume, frequency, and intensity, but some training plans are decidedly better than others, depending on your genetics, training history, and whatnot.  In my last essay on balance, I briefly mentioned that if I absolutely had to select one training methodology over anything else, it would be the “sub-maximal effort” method.  With strength and power roots in Eastern European countries, mostly countries from the former Soviet-bloc, this method basically involves doing multiple sets of low reps with weights that are not quite maximal—hence the name.  Almost completely ...