C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Build Massive Muscles and Monstrous Strength with Heavy, Old-School Dumbbell Training      I don’t know when it happened, or how it happened, but when it comes to strength and power training, we think of barbells and little else.  I’m guilty of this myself.  I’ve written before about using the “ two barbell workout .”  It’s a sound theory, don’t get me wrong.  Basically, if you start your workout session, any workout session, with 2 big, compound barbell lifts—say, front squats and power cleans—you can then do whatever else you want for the rest of the workout and you will get great results.  Or, heck, you can just do 2 compound barbell lifts and nothing else at each workout.  But there was a time not that long ago, when the largest, most massive, muscular, and strongest lifters on the planet—the so-called “Bronze era” of the late 19th century, early 20th century—when strongmen did most of their training with dumbbells and not b...

       This morning, I received a question from a reader asking if it’s possible to—not just get in shape or get a “good” workout—but to actually build a lot of strength, power, and mass using only dumbbells.  I responded that yes it is possible to, in fact, build a tremendous amount of overall muscle mass and strength using nothing but dumbbells.  Believe it or not, sometimes, as I explained to him, dumbbells might actually be better than barbells—and certainly, of course, better than machines—for those very goals.  Anyway, since about half of the material that I write these days—at least here on the blog—is precipitated by a reader’s question, I thought that this would make a good article, even though I have written material similar to this one before.  But if it’s true, then it bears repeating, especially in the world of strength and hypertrophy-training, where there seems to be just about as much misinformation as ever in the b...