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...

 I have, for a number of years on Integral Strength, pushed the benefits of high-frequency training.  But no matter how long I've been training, I can always learn something new.  And what I've learned over the past six months, is how wondrous hard, heavy, frequent  dumbbell training can be when it comes to eliciting mass and strength gains. I really can't believe it took me this long to give dumbbell-centric training a "go", but it did.  In the past, with HFT, I always used primarily barbell exercises, coupled with dumbbell training for "assistance" lifts.  Don't get me wrong, there were a few exercises that I always did, such as thick-bar one-arm dumbbell deadlifts and one-arm dumbbell overhead presses.  But now I've come to appreciate - not to mention very much enjoy  - exercises such as two-arm dumbbell power cleans, one-arm dumbbell power cleans, one-hand and two-hand dumbbell clean and push presses, two-hand dumbbell hang cleans, one-hand a...

 Building Mass and Power/Strength with HFT + Dumbbells Combo The great Reg Park overhead pressing a pair of dumbbells In my last post, I outlined a brief, basic, (somewhat) hard full-body, 3-days-per-week program using ONLY dumbbells.  For this post, I'd like to outline a  high-frequency training (HFT for short, hereafter) program using primarily  dumbbells to build mass, power, and strength. The MASS is going to come about on this program from the sheer amount of total work performed in the course of the week.  When a lot of lifters -at least the ones I've worked with over the years - first take up HFT, they typically complain because it doesn't seem as if they are doing enough at each workout, or they don't think that they are training enough.  But the sheer frequency of the workout program really does add up .  After several weeks on the program, when most of the lifters I've worked with begin putting on muscle at a rate they hadn't been doing befor...