C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The Best Leg Workout You’ve Never Tried!      Two things work the best when it comes to moving massive amounts of weight, and/or gaining massive amounts of muscle: Simple work, combined with hard work.   Nothing else is going to cut it.      As Mark Rippetoe once remarked, “the most valuable lessons of the weight room: a simple, hard program works best, and that you get out of your training – and your life – exactly what you put into it.”      I could never have said it better myself.      I also have a good feeling that a whole lot of lifters know that simple, hard work is absolutely the best way to train for building slabs of muscle that is also capable of hefting ponderous poundages, but they don’t do it.   And I think they don’t do it for a couple of reasons.   First, either they’re lazy and/or have convinced themselves that fancier programs that don’t require hard work—brutally simple hard work—work just as well.   Or, second, sometimes they just want to do som

      Although my posts on Stoic philosophy are not as popular as those on lifting (or drinking beer, or good literature), I am going to continue with them nonetheless.      For those interested in lifting weights – whether you’re a bodybuilder, powerlifter, or just casual lifter (or, hell, even for you Crossfitters) – Stoicism is the philosophy par excellence.  Lifting weights, particularly hard and heavy lifting, can teach us a lot about how to live our lives, but we have to learn to listen to what our lives have to tell us.  For some, the art of listening is a little more difficult.  This is where philosophy comes in.      This particular piece comes from Seneca.  Seneca has long been my favorite of the Roman writers on Stoicism.  Perhaps this is because he is not just a Stoic, for he borrows on other philosophies of antiquity when they serve his purpose.      This piece on death, and how it’s one thing to live a life, and it’s another thing to just exist, is also one of my

Old-School Arm Training Secrets: John McWilliams’s Arm Routine      My most popular posts here at Integral Strength typically fall into two categories: old-school bodybuilding programs or serious strength and power routines.      With that in mind, I thought I would do a series of articles on various old-school lifters and bodybuilders (the two overlapped once-upon-a-time), and on various old-school methods for training different bodyparts or lifts.   Thus, this first entry is on old-school arm training, but others will be on old-school chest, shoulders, back, legs, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, power cleans, etc.   And for this first entry, I decided upon an old-school bodybuilder cum powerlifter that many of you may never have heard of: John McWilliams. McWilliams's back double-biceps pose.  He was impressive even in his 40s.      When I first came across an article about McWilliams (written by Gene Mozee) in the early ‘90s, I had certainly neve