C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Some Thoughts on Different Methods of Training, Intuitive Workouts, and How to Break the “Rules” of Lifting      I’m not really sure where I’m going with this.  About half, maybe slightly more and perhaps a little less, of my articles I plan rather meticulously.  I make notes.  I craft an outline.  I have, in short, a plan.  The other half are nothing but the random musings of what is, at the time, circulating throughout the recesses of my mind.  As I’ve pointed out in other essays, I often write just to see what happens.  For me, it is these latter writings that bring a sense of joy to writing.  I’m a writer, sure, but I’m also a creative .  I think it’s also one of the reasons that I love training so much, as well.  Although there undoubtedly is some science to lifting, it is also an art form.  If I’m correct in this assumption of lifting as art, and I have absolutely no doubt that I am, then working out ...

Training Design for the “All-Around” Lifter      The popularity—or lack thereof—of many of my articles often surprises me.  Sometimes I will write an essay that I think will be a real hit—I spend several days crafting and honing it, giving it plenty of thought and time—only to find that it never really “takes off” or gets many reads.  On the flip side of that, I will occasionally write a piece in a flash of inspiration, giving hardly any thought to it but just allow my writing muse to take me where it will.  I also, quite often, don’t think that those works will be very popular, only to find that they get way more reads than many of my others.  My last article “ High-Frequency Grease-the-Groove Training - The Intuitive Approach ,” is a case in point.  I wrote it very quickly, in only a few hours, shortly after I came up with the idea while on a morning hike with my dogs Kenji and Kiko.  I was unsure if it would garner interest, but...

Can a Lifter Really Train Using Instinct Alone? My Slightly Rambling Thoughts on the Subject      Ever since I first picked up a bodybuilding magazine sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, I’ve read about so-called instinctive training.  Even then (as there are now) there were debates over whether or not one could train “instinctively.”  A lot of bodybuilders, once they became advanced enough, seemed to naturally incline toward instinctive training.  Vic Richards—perhaps bodybuilding’s first true “mass monster”—trained in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard manner, but he simply called it instinctive training.  He would show up at the gym, have absolutely nothing planned, then did whatever he thought felt “right” when he hit the weights.  On the opposite side of that, you had Mike Mentzer , and others who took a more “scientific” approach to training (or at least thought they did—there might be more science to what we call instinctive tr...