C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Life Lessons Learned from Lifting      In my life, I have learned much from people and from paths.   My life is not my own.   It belongs to God, and to those that have molded me.   My life is fleeting and temporal—as are all of our lives.   All men die, but many do not live as they were meant to.   I can only thank those that taught me well, that my life will not have been a complete waste.      From my father, I learned of decency, a mild temperament, kindness to others, and the value for a man to attain a scholarly mind.      From my mother: piety, morality, and the ways in which a woman should behave.      From my uncle Kirk: that austerity, toughness, and raw strength in a man can be balanced with tenderness and love—that a man can be a man and still cry as much as he needs.      From my friends Chad, Josh, and Puddin’: that it is okay—even neces...

The One-Exercise-Per-Muscle Group Manifesto      God only knows how many different training routines are out there in today’s bodybuilding world.   The magazine in your hands alone probably has at least a half dozen of them.   All this eclecticism can get a bit confusing for many bodybuilders and strength athletes.   Especially for those guys and gals of you that are just starting out.   So, what is the best way to train?      One reason that so many different programs exist is because all of them are effective (to a certain extent), and lifters and ‘builders all respond differently to different programs based on their body types.   I’m here to tell you, however, that one method of training seems to stand above all the others.   And this method is the one-exercise-per-bodypart philosophy.   Of course, many different workouts exist within one-exercise-per-muscle group training, so this article will at...

     The easiest thing about bodybuilding should be gaining muscular bulk.   The truth is—if you train correctly and eat correctly—it shouldn’t be much of a problem.   But I’m guessing that a whole lot of you reading this article are in no way training and eating correctly.   Otherwise, I wouldn’t be flooded with emails on a weekly basis from lifters who struggle with this issue.   When I read over the training and nutritional regimens (or lack thereof) of these bodybuilders, it doesn’t take long to see the problem.   And if you walk into any gym in America, you’ll see the same kind of training on a daily basis—guys struggling to gain bodyweight pounding away on countless sets of high-rep chest and arm exercises (and usually on machines).   Many of them even train with “intensity” but it doesn’t matter.   They are all wasting their time because they are not doing the following (and let me sum this up as simply as possible...