C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The Best Leg Workout You’ve Never Tried!      Two things work the best when it comes to moving massive amounts of weight, and/or gaining massive amounts of muscle: Simple work, combined with hard work.   Nothing else is going to cut it.      As Mark Rippetoe once remarked, “the most valuable lessons of the weight room: a simple, hard program works best, and that you get out of your training – and your life – exactly what you put into it.”      I could never have said it better myself.      I also have a good feeling that a whole lot of lifters know that simple, hard work is absolutely the best way to train for building slabs of muscle that is also capable of hefting ponderous poundages, but they don’t do it.   And I think they don’t do it for a couple of reasons.   First, either they’re lazy and/or have convinced themselves that fancier programs that don’t require hard work...

      Although my posts on Stoic philosophy are not as popular as those on lifting (or drinking beer, or good literature), I am going to continue with them nonetheless.      For those interested in lifting weights – whether you’re a bodybuilder, powerlifter, or just casual lifter (or, hell, even for you Crossfitters) – Stoicism is the philosophy par excellence.  Lifting weights, particularly hard and heavy lifting, can teach us a lot about how to live our lives, but we have to learn to listen to what our lives have to tell us.  For some, the art of listening is a little more difficult.  This is where philosophy comes in.      This particular piece comes from Seneca.  Seneca has long been my favorite of the Roman writers on Stoicism.  Perhaps this is because he is not just a Stoic, for he borrows on other philosophies of antiquity when they serve his purpose.      This piece on dea...

Old-School Arm Training Secrets: John McWilliams’s Arm Routine      My most popular posts here at Integral Strength typically fall into two categories: old-school bodybuilding programs or serious strength and power routines.      With that in mind, I thought I would do a series of articles on various old-school lifters and bodybuilders (the two overlapped once-upon-a-time), and on various old-school methods for training different bodyparts or lifts.   Thus, this first entry is on old-school arm training, but others will be on old-school chest, shoulders, back, legs, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, power cleans, etc.   And for this first entry, I decided upon an old-school bodybuilder cum powerlifter that many of you may never have heard of: John McWilliams. McWilliams's back double-biceps pose.  He was impressive even in his 40s.      When I first came across an article about McWil...

Double-Split Training, Part Two Understanding Why Double-Split Training is Effective      Here’s a cool thing about double-split training: there’s an endless amount of variety that you have at your disposal when it comes to double-split workouts.   In fact, however-the-heck it is that you like to train, you can make your training a bit more effective by turning all of those workouts into double-split programs.      Do you like to train each bodypart once-per-week, by training one bodypart-per-day, and blasting the living hell out of it, then giving it a week to recover?   (As I’ve written many times before, this was a very effective training system that I used to pack on pounds of muscle when I was much younger.)   If that’s your cup of tea, no problem, here’s what your double-split program could look like: Mondays: Chest Tuesdays: Back Wednesdays: Legs (quads and hamstrings) Thursdays: Shoulders Fr...

      In the summer of ’91, I dove headlong into training.   I read all of the various bodybuilding magazines that I could get a hold of—or, at least, all of them that I could both afford and get a hold of.   I was lucky, however, in that I had an off-again/on-again training partner who had stacks of magazines from around that time frame—primarily Ironman , Muscle and Fitness , and Flex —and I also had an uncle who had many older issue of Iron Man and Flex , plus things such as Strength and Health , and other such forgotten magazines that seemed (to me, at least) as if they were from another era.      Ironman had the most influence on me due to the “hardgainer” articles written by such writers as Steve Holman, Randal Strossen, Bradley Steiner, and Richard Winnett.   All of these preached a “less-is-better” and “hard and heavy, but infrequent” training philosophies.   (Not to say that Ironman only presented training ph...

     When I started this blog several years ago, it was with the intention of making it an “integral” blog – hence the name “Integral Strength”.  At the time, I was quite enamored with Eastern philosophy – Buddhism in particular, having practiced strains of both Theravada and Zen for some time – and so I thought it would be a great way to combine my love of lifting weights and philosophy, not to mention martial arts – a passion of mine that has existed since childhood – into one website.  Add into the fact that I was also reading quite a bit from the “integral” philosopher Ken Wilber at the time – some of my earliest posts that you can still find on here attest to this – and you can see why I thought that Integral Strength would be such a cool, not to mention accurate, name.  (Let me say this right off the bat, however: I don’t care much for Wilber or his philosophy any more.  I think it is, on the whole, quite reductionist, and actually has many of ...

The 10 Most Common Mistakes Lifters Make When Building Strength, Power, and Muscle Mass      What follows are 10 of the most common mistakes that lifters make when trying to add muscle mass and build strength.   Fix these mistakes and your mass-building/strength-gaining plateaus will be a thing of the past.      In true countdown fashion, we’ll start with #10 before we make it down to the #1 mistake that the majority of trainees make—not to mention coaches. #10: Using a Percentage-based Training Program       For some of you, this may seem like an odd thing that I would pick as a mistake.   Especially considering the fact that the most-effective powerlifting program I ever used was (is) a percentage-based program: the training plans of Boris Sheiko.   But Sheiko is the exception, not the rule, and it’s not something you need to attempt until you have plenty of training under your belt. ...