C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A friend of mine here in Tuscaloosa - Jared Smith - has a new blog. It looks like it'll be pretty cool (especially if you're into super-high-intensity training). Here's a link: http://buildingthebehemoth.blogspot.com/

First, I want to apologize for my long delay between blog posts. I have been more than a little busy as of late. Between work (I do have a regular “9 to 5” job), moving into a new house (and all that entails), and writing quite a bit of articles, my blog just took a back seat. (Speaking of writing articles, I now have an article in almost every issue of Planet Muscle, so that’s where you can find all of my latest stuff. And I now only write occasionally for Iron Man.) With that out of the way, let’s get on with this blog post: As regular readers of my material know, I believe that fairly high-volume, frequent training is the best (the quickest, the most result-producing) route to bigger, stronger, more (dare I say?) functional muscles. (It must be noted that this wasn’t always my opinion. If you read a lot of my early stuff in Iron Man – mid ‘90s to very early ‘00s – you’ll find that my training programs tended to be based around infrequent training. But all of that changed when I actu

Here are some collections of articles that I discovered on the web recently, thought I'd share them with you. Some are new; some aren't. But they're new to me, so they might be new to some of y'all, as well. If you haven't been to it, a great site is www.theironsamurai.com . It's an Olympic lifting site run by strength coach Nick Horton. I don't know the guy—never heard of him until I came across the site—but he has some great stuff for all lifters, not just Olympic lifters. (Oh, and he has a touch of Zen here and there, as well, which might also interest some of you.) Here's a really good post from his site: http://www.theironsamurai.com/2011/02/09/happy-birthday-to-me-reflections-on-lifting-coaching-and-the-pre-masters-class/ . It has his thoughts on lifting and coaching, including a good bit on Bulgarian style training. For those of you who are fans of high-volume training (or would like to give it a shot), Nick has some insights that can help

If anyone has e-mailed me in the last couple of months, and not gotten a response, please feel free to write me again. It appears that quite a lot of the mail I was receiving was going to "junk," and I'm afraid that I probably deleted a good deal of my mail without ever responding.

Ultimate At-Home Workouts Volume One: The One with the Session from the Night of March 7th The Intro Recently, I’ve been forced to do almost all of my training at home. At first, this might not sound like that big of a deal to you. If you have read my posts—or my articles—for any length of time, then you know that I trained at home for years . But that was different. At one time, I had over 1,300 pounds of weights in my garage. (I counted the total amount of weight one point, but I don’t remember what it was—and I probably accumulated even more stuff after I counted it.) My entire garage was a gym. This included a squat rack, a bench press (Forza, good stuff), and a deadlift platform. When my wife and I separated a couple of years ago, I trained with minimum equipment. At the time, I really didn’t know how to train using minimal equipment, since I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and my father bought me one of those old, concrete DP sets for my 15 t

I hope that everyone who reads my blog—and even those of you who have just stumbled upon it—will take the time to view some of the videos below. They are some of my favorites. Although Jack Lalanne is gone, it's nice to know that we can still watch and listen to him as he tells it like it is.

One of my all-time heroes, Jack Lalanne, died yesterday. I'm not sure if—as popular as he was—Lalanne ever got his just due. Modern "fitness" experts (and I use that term rather loosely considering a lot of the current crop of "experts") couldn't hold a candle to old Jack. If you don't believe me, then ponder this: What current "expert" could do a 1,000 push-ups and a 1,000 pull-ups in just over one hour? The answer: not one. But Lalanne could. He's due more respect among bodybuilders, as well. (And if you don't believe that, just look at the picture above.) His physique in the '40s was as good as anyone (though, admittedly, not as large as others.) In honor of him, I thought I would post the article below. It's from 1949, but it's words ring as true now as they did back then. (Maybe even more true, considering the fact that so few lifters want to work hard these days.) Strength and Endurance by Jack Lalanne The ques

Now that 2010 is come and gone—and now that a whole slew of people (some of you reading this) are in the midst of attempting to succeed at their New Year's resolution—I thought I would post my pick for the "Best Article of 2010." If you know me—or at least my writings—then you won't be surprised by my pick. I've selected Bill Starr's article that appeared in the March '10 issue of Iron Man magazine entitled "Make it Harder: There are No Shortcuts on the Road to Building Strength." And if you are truly interested in succeeding at your resolutions, then this article is a must read. Enjoy. (And maybe in the near future, I'll post my "honorable mentions" for 2010.) Make it Harder There are No Shortcuts on the Road to Building Strength Bill Starr The current trend in strength training and the fitness world is to come up with some new piece of equipment or a training system that isn’t demanding but that

For those of you who still read articles in print—and not just stare at a computer screen for all of your bodybuilding, powerlifting, mass-building info—I have two new articles out in magazines this month. First, in the February '11 issue of Planet Muscle , I have an article entitled "400 Pound Bench and 50" Chest." What makes this one unique is that it's actually a re-print of one that I already had in PM about a year ago. However, they said that it was "hands down, their most popular article of the last two years." Their words, not mine. Pretty cool. And, in the February '11 issue of Iron Man , I have an article entitled "X-Factor Arm Workouts." I don't usually write "body part training" articles, so if I did, then you know it's going to be different.