C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Part One of a "How to Get Strong On (fill-in-the-blank)" Series      Based on a whole slew—or, well, at least a handful—of emails that I’ve received in recent weeks, I thought it might be a good idea to do a series dealing with how to get strong on various lifts and exercises.  I don’t know how long or short this series will be.  It depends on how many exercises I end up covering, and if there’s interest from readers for additional tips about exercises I don’t cover at first.  So, hell, this thing could just be two articles or it could be five or six.  We’ll just wait and see.      Questions I receive regarding getting stronger on certain exercises come in, generally, two forms.  Some readers will ask about specific powerlifts or quick lifts; stuff such as how to get stronger on the bench press, the squat, the deadlift, the overhead press, the power clean, or some variation of those seem to be the most common.  The other questions deal with how to get stronger on differen

…That is the Question      With all respect to Hamlet, and his creator Shakespeare, the question on the minds of most lifters and bodybuilders isn’t whether or not life is preferable to death (or vice versa) but whether or not we should spend our training lives reaching momentary muscular failure.  Or not.      When I first started writing for IronMan magazine over 30 years ago, a lot of their more popular writers—such as Steve Holman, Richard A. Winnett, and Clarence Bass, not to mention Mike Mentzer—were decidedly in the training-to-failure camp, albeit with limited sets to mitigate that supposed entity known as “overtraining.”  But you also had writers that came out around that time, such as Charles Poliquin, who recommended much more voluminous workouts programs but still believed in taking the majority of sets to muscular failure.  And on the flip side of that , within a few years you had other writers that came to prominence such as Charles Staley and Pavel Tsatsouline who re

  Use the Power Rack for Massive Gains in Size and Strength      In my last essay on “The Big 4,” one of the programs that I outlined was a power rack program inspired by Brooks Kubik’s “Dinosaur Training.”  I read that book sometime (I think) in ‘96, although it could have been ‘97.  The book was instrumental in my switch from training like a bodybuilder to training like a lifter.  In ‘98, I bought a power rack, an Olympic barbell set, and started training in my garage.  I have rarely stepped foot in a commercial gym since.      Although I found that some of the programs in that book didn’t work well for me, I wholeheartedly embraced the ideas Kubik espoused regarding power rack training.  And though I eventually went on to experiment, and often utilize, the training methods of Westside Barbell, and then the much more voluminous methods of lifting that came out of the countries of the former Soviet republic, it was old-school power rack training that first allowed me to make a lot of