Jack Lalanne - The effect of bad habits

Train Heavy. Train Often.

If you’re a natural lifter who wants to gain plenty of muscle mass but also the strength to go with it, I think there are three things that are paramount. First, you need to train heavy. Second, you need to train often. And third, you need to remain fresh while doing the first two. If you’re a student of the lifting game, and if something about my above statement seems vaguely familiar, there’s an explanation for that. I basically paraphrased the great Russian strength coach Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky, who, rather famously, said that the key to strength training was “to train as heavy as possible as often as possible while being as fresh as possible.” That quote is well-known for a reason. Following it judiciously will unlock a lot of strength and hypertrophy gains. Of course, there are a couple caveats to that statement. You need to be training with barbel...

The Squat and Grow Big Program

A Hybrid High-Frequency Regimen for Natural Mass-Building I have long been a fan of high-frequency training (HFT) and other methods of lifting that go against the stream of most modern training. This is especially true of strictly muscle-building methods. Perhaps it’s hubris on my part to think that I know better than bodybuilders lifting in today’s gyms, but I think there are better methods for the natural bodybuilder than what is currently used by the vast majority of lifters (at least in the West—bodybuilders in East Europe are another story). Infrequent training simply isn’t a good method for the majority of lifters if their goal is to gain muscle mass. And by “majority” I mean natural lifters. Steroids change the equation—and change it big time . Anabolic steroid use is often cited as the reason why bodybuilders from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s (before Dorian ...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan magazine. In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.” I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time . In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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