C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

High-Volume, High-Frequency Training and Realistic Muscle-Building for the Natural Bodybuilder      This article, I will admit, is in many ways nothing more than an excuse to show off my youngest son Garrett’s physique as seen above.  But since I have a good feeling that he has exactly the kind of body that most men would love to acquire, I also want to discuss his training philosophy and some lessons that you can learn from it.      First, however, let’s discuss the 3 training variables of volume, frequency, and intensity.  If you’re familiar with my point-of-view, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph.  If you’re not, then pay attention!  In order to get results out of resistance training, no matter your goals, you must properly balance and manipulate the 3 training variables of volume, frequency, and intensity.  Two of the variables need to be high (or one high and the other moderate) and the remaining v...

  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...

Muscle-Building Tips and Advice for the Natural Bodybuilder      In my last essay on how to gain mass fast, I mentioned that the secret just might be getting stronger on a handful of exercises.   (This essay, I suppose, is just an extension of that last one.)   In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m right.   If you’re a natural bodybuilder, then the one thing more important than any other is to get strong on a dozen or so exercises, with your strength-focus in roughly the 5 to 10 rep range.      One approach is to achieve this is to focus on movements over muscles .   In other words, instead of going to the gym and “obliterating” or “destroying” (why do bodybuilders always seem to use military-sounding jargon for a lot of their training) your quad muscles with endless sets of leg extensions, leg presses, and machine whatever, how about just trying to get stronger on the squat?   Same goes for the...