C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

 When I first began working on this series, I was going to title it "Back-to-Basics".  However, I've had a change of heart.  From henceforth (man, that sounds official), this series will be titled "Fundamentals" in an homage to the great Bradley Steiner, who penned a column of the same name for Ironman Magazine  for a few decades beginning in the '70s. Bradley Steiner is seen here on the cover of one of his training booklets Steiner preached no-nonsense, sane, sensible training - almost ALWAYS full-body, 3-days-per-week workouts.  The man had a profound effect upon me through all of his many articles, not just as a lifter but as a writer and trainer. Everything in the rest of this series will follow his sane, sensible, no-nonsense theory of training. In the first post, I discussed workout frequency.  If you haven't done so, read that one first.  This one will build upon that one. Okay, now, before we get into the specifics  of the sets and reps that I

     For the last few days, I've been working on a post/article on the original Muscle Beach Iron Guru Vince Gironda. That piece will be much more extensive than this one, but it will also be largely about his training principles, revolutionary as they were at the time Gironda unleashed them upon the bodybuilding world. But in rummaging/scouring through old Ironman and MuscleMag International articles, I came across an article in the October '95 Ironman where Gironda listed his weight-gaining suggestions. Gironda at his peak      Gironda had so many innovative - not to mention downright cool sometimes - training ideas that it would be almost impossible to discuss them in one article, but I will discuss a couple of other additional nutrition ideas he had at the end of this post. But first, the tips! Here they are*:Drink water during your workout. Drink at least one pint after each muscle group worked, but dont' drink out of a fountain, because you swallow air.      It&#

  I thought, for the sake of a few e-mails that I have received recently, that I would do a "back-to-the-basics" series of posts covering most of what you need to know if you're just getting started in a serious weight training program.  Now, this could also be for you if you have been training for a considerable amount of time (6 months or longer),and haven't made any real gains. Let us begin with workout frequency. If you're just beginning - or if you don't have much muscle or strength as of now - then almost always begin your muscle-building career with a 3-days-per-week, full-body program.  In fact, you could spend your training lifetime using a 3-days-per-week program and do just fine. Clancy Ross spent his career using a 3-days-per-week, full-body program!* Most lifters enjoy using a Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine, just so they can take weekends off, but any three non-consecutive days are fine.  The one complaint I sometimes hear about that is that a

Matthew Sloan trains very high-frequency and is rarely sore!   Your workouts should not make you very sore.  It sounds odd, I know, especially when someone first hears it.  But it's true. I'm rarely, if ever, truly "sore" after any of my workouts nowadays.  I sometimes have a small soreness the next day, but it's more a feeling of tightness, a "good soreness", if there is such a thing, that is usually from a new exercise the day before, or doing an old exercise in a new way. I shouldn't be sore, but you  shouldn't be sore, either.  If you are, you are doing it wrong.  Don't worry if you're now angry with me, since it could be that you have been doing workouts wrong your whole life, especially if you're now trying to remember a time when you were not  sore from a workout. Let's say that your max squat for 10 repetitions is 225 lbs.  And let's say you do those 10-all out reps in a workout on Monday.  Even with one set, you are g

Franco shows off his massive chest muscles in his prime Franco Columbu was one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time. He's also one that I have hesitated writing about simply because I was never a big fan. I have no real clue why that is/was! When I was younger, and first getting into bodybuilding in the late '80s, he should have been one of my heroes. I was smaller in stature than most lifters/bodybuilders in the gym - just like Franco - and I was also a lot stronger than most bodybuilders that I trained with, even from a young age - just like Franco! Maybe it was the look of his physique, or the fact that I always loved the other bodybuilders in that quasi/pseudo-documentary "Pumping Iron" better than he. Oh, well, whatever the reasons were, I definitely missed out on using some of Franco's awesome training advice, which I have come to appreciate more as I've aged and matured, and (hopefully) grown in wisdom. If you do a cursory search on the web fo

Chuck Sipes as he appeared in the pages of the original Ironman Magazine. For a while now, I have wanted to write a piece on one of my favorite bodybuilders of all time: Chuck Sipes. I had relented in doing so until now only because there are so many good pieces that you can find on the internet just from doing a cursory search. But I finally figured, you know, what the hell, you can never have too much Chuck Sipes. Also, in addition to my own memories and thoughts on Sipes' totally bad-a training, I've tried to find some of the best information from various sites, and include a lot of that here. For those of you that don't know much about Sipes, he was one of a kind. I know that's a bit cliché, and I've used such terms before when it comes to other "classic bodybuilders", but there was nothing cliché about Sipes, so it's completely true in this instance. Don't believe me? Then read on. First off, he was natural. In fact, he was one of the l

  Zen Master Kodo Sawaki (known affectionately as "Homeless Kodo") sitting Zazen* Zen and the martial arts have a complex history.  And it is one that is (a) almost completely misunderstood by all martial artists, especially practitioners of the Japanese martial arts who seem to talk about it the most but also seem to understand it the least, and (b) not even understood at all by the modern "zennist".** In this short little post, I'm not going to get into all of the reasons both A and B above are true, but simply want to express how similar both Zen and the Japanese martial arts are, and maybe this will give a good reason for the budo-ka to take up zazen, and while I expect even less zennists to take up budo, it does help for him/her to understand the martial arts better. Zazen is a physical practice.  It's at least as much a physical practice as it is a mental one.  I think this is vastly - and I do mean vastly - overlooked by most people, even practitioner