New Planet Muscle Article: "Big Bench, Big Body"

I have a new article out in the latest issue of Planet Muscle magazine (March/April '10) entitled "Build a Big Bench and Get a Big Body: Training Methods for Bench Press Power and Upper Body Size." If you're into powerlifting—or just increasing your bench press—then you should find it interesting. It covers most of the current methods for increasing bench press strength—Westside, traditional powerlifting cycles, eastern bloc methods, plus a few more.

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Choose Your Own Mass-Building, Strength-Gaining Adventure (i.e. Workout Program)

Some Ready Made (yet Do-it-Yourself) Size and Strength Programs In the 5 th grade, way back in 1983, I was obsessed with “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. If you were a kid in the ‘80s, you may very well have experienced this obsession yourself. According to Wikipedia, between the years ‘79 and ‘98, the books sold 250 million+ copies, so apparently it was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, sort of a big deal. In fact, until I started reading muscle magazines voraciously starting around ’86, I’m pretty sure that the extent of my reading was comprised of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Conan the Barbarian novels, and various-assorted comic books. (My favorite comic book series at one point was “Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters,” so take that TMNT.) Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you’re not familiar, were exactly what they sound like: books where you, the reader, decided what happened to the m...

Full-Body Blast

George Turner’s Old-School Full-Body Program for Gaining 90 Pounds—that’s right, 90!—of Pure Muscle George Turner was in his 60s in this picture! When it comes to old-school bodybuilders, George Turner remains one of my favorites. Probably because of the fact that he was more than just a competitive bodybuilder. He was a gym owner along with being a damn good writer of (damn good) training articles. He was also a bit—how should it be said?—curmudgeonly. But he was without a doubt curmudgeonly in the best possible way. He was, in many ways, similar to Vince Gironda in that regard, just without the disdain for squats. (That’s right, as much as I like Gironda, he wasn’t a fan of the barbell back squat.) Myself, I love back squats. As did Turner. Anyway, that paragraphic preamble is just a way of writing that, as I was thumbing through an old IronMan magazine this morning, looking ...

Programming Made Simple

Simple, Easy-to-Implement Strategies for More Size and Strength If the titles of workout articles are any indication, America doesn’t know how to train. I can’t speak for other countries, since I haven’t lived anywhere else. In the past, I have spent some time in Asia for work, and if my visits there were any indication, then I don’t think the rest of the world trains much better. So I guess there’s that. Now, if you know anything at all about proper training, and if you walked into any gym anywhere in America, you’d probably come to the same conclusion—that Americans simply don’t know how to train—so why am I singling out the titles of English-language workout articles? The reason is simple. Almost every single article I have seen lately—to a friggin’ tee—has almost the exact same title, and it goes something like this: “I did (fill-in-the-blank) for (fill-in-the-number of days...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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