C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Q: Hey, Sloan.  In your last essay on “the rule of 3,” you showed the current 3-way split that you are using.  Why do you train chest, back, and shoulders on one of the days and biceps and triceps alone on another?  Why not use a push/pull/legs split or chest/back on one day and shoulders/bis/tris on another?  It just seems like an odd choice, but I guess you have your reasons? A: Yes, I do have my reasons.  For one, and this would only apply to anyone else in my “predicament,” I have a well-developed chest, a large back, and good shoulders but my arms have always been my biggest weak area.  I have long, ape-like arms with a very wide and broad back.  I could stop training entirely and my back would still be big.  So, for me, it makes sense.  My lats will even grow from training my chest.  For instance, when I was a kid and was training in martial arts before I ever picked up a barbell, we would do a lot of push-ups to begin class—regula...

The 5x10 Workout Program      The longer that I have been training and working with other lifters, the more that I believe that simple, though not necessarily easy, programs are the best methods to use.  I think this is the case for the majority of lifters.  There are times when this is not so, but that’s usually for either elite athletes or programs for strength athletes at the top of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting.      In my last article on different ways that you can incorporate heavy, light, and medium workouts into your training, I mentioned a few ways that this can be done.  One of them is to keep your weights the same at each workout session but rotate the sets and/or reps.  This is in direct contradiction to the most popular method of H-L-M, Bill Starr’s 5x5 training, where you keep the sets and reps the same (5x5) but rotate the amount of weight used on the lifts.  The program here uses the firs...

       I received a question the other day via email.   It was succinct and to the point—and, when first received, I thought a bit generic.   “What’s the easiest way to gain mass fast?”   I get quite a bit of questions, and they are usually more in depth.   Most of them, truth be told, are the opposite of this question.   I find that a good many lifters have too many questions, usually because they overthink things too much or they are somehow searching for the “perfect” workout program (which doesn’t exist, by the way).   In the case of this questioner, I responded with a small litany of “the usual” advice for someone in need of quick mass gains: full-body workouts, compound movements, high-frequency training, the “big 4,” plenty of calories, lots of protein… yada, yada, yada.      Then last night, while I was watching one of those cozy little British murder mysteries on PBS and trying my absolute best to not...

A Hybrid High-Frequency Regimen for Natural Mass-Building      I have long been a fan of high-frequency training (HFT) and other methods of lifting that go against the stream of most modern training.   This is especially true of strictly muscle-building methods.   Perhaps it’s hubris on my part to think that I know better than bodybuilders lifting in today’s gyms, but I think there are better methods for the natural bodybuilder than what is currently used by the vast majority of lifters (at least in the West—bodybuilders in East Europe are another story).      Infrequent training simply isn’t a good method for the majority of lifters if their goal is to gain muscle mass.  And by “majority” I mean  natural  lifters.  Steroids change the equation—and change it  big time .  Anabolic steroid use is often cited as the reason why bodybuilders from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s (before Dorian ...