Balancing Life, Work, and Lifting In 1998, I was heavily invested in powerlifting. I loved it. I was dead-set on being one of the strongest powerlifters in the world. I was willing to do whatever required of me, training wise, to achieve that goal. At the time, I was also writing a lot for Ironman magazine and MuscleMag International , two of the largest and most popular bodybuilding magazines of the day. I had an article in one of them, sometimes both, almost every month back then. But it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. And powerlifting, like a lot of underground, niche sports, didn’t pay anything. Nope. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. It cost money—payments to enter meets, along with travel and food costs associated with them, not to mention the money I poured into nutrition, training gear, and, at that time, setting up my own garage gym replete with everything a world-class strength athle...
A 2-Way Split Training Regimen for Building Incredible Strength and Power with a Size-Building Side Effect An East-Meets-West Strength and Power Routine In September of last year, I published a training program called The Pure Power Program . It is a full-body routine that rotates between heavy workouts, light sessions, and “speed” workouts. Feel free to read that original program if you wish—especially if you are looking for a full-body regimen—but in this article, I want to show how you can use it in a 2-way split program. I will also review all of the “tenets” that comprises the program, so don’t feel as if you have to be familiar with my original article to continue here. This is an “East meets West” program because it utilizes principles from “Eastern” countries (Russian extensively but also Bulgarian to some extent), primarily on the “heavy” training days, along with principles that are borrowed from b...