C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Some Thoughts on Attaining Your Training Goals      It won’t be long—about a month and a half—and the gyms will be filled with new members, intent to get in shape or lose weight as part of their New Year’s resolutions.  They’ll probably quit sometime in February.      I have long believed that the reason for this—well, outside of the fact that it’s not something they really want to do in the first place—is because the approach they take, at least here in America, is wrong.  We live in a culture—at least, a gym culture; I suppose this applies to other areas, too—that is all or nothing .  You either train all-out, balls-to-the-wall, foot-to-the-floor (use whatever pithy little slogans you can think of) or you don’t train at all.  And to get in shape, it’s not just weights, either.  Nope, you gotta start running 5 miles a day, and throwing a medicine ball against a wall hundreds of times in a session, then battling...

  Another High-Frequency Hypertrophy Program for the Natural Lifter      I write a lot about high-frequency training (HFT).  I think on average—assuming the lifter has the time to make it to the gym frequently—it’s the best form of training for the natural lifter or bodybuilder.  When I first started writing about this form of training—which I have been doing now for more than 20 years, perhaps longer—my programs mainly focused on strength training or strength training along with concomitant mass gains.  Recently, however, I have created more and more hypertrophy programs using these methods.  Part of that probably has to do with the fact that I have personally been using HFT for my own physique goals.  As I am not getting any younger, my body often can’t handle the heavy weights that I used to enjoy training with, but it can handle high-frequency when done with “reasonable” weights.      There are differen...

  An Essay for the Natural Lifter or Bodybuilder Read on and Discover One of the Secrets to Massive Muscles      Over the years, it has often been debated—on gym floors, discussion forums, and among bodybuilding trainers and strength coaches—whether hypertrophy is built via heavy weights or through high reps.  The debate was there when I first picked up a barbell almost 40 years ago and it’s still debated to this very day.  Now, we’re not talking about strength or performance here—heavy weight and low reps has, and always will, reign supreme in that domain—but, rather, strictly muscle growth.  Both camps have their proponents and their detractors.  On the “heavy side” of the camp, you have bodybuilders like “Brutal” Bertil Fox*, who built some of the thickest, most herculean mass possible and whose favorite method of training consisted of doing 3 exercises for each muscle group for 3 sets of 3 reps each.  And on the opposite side yo...