C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

From the Ashes of Misfortune Emerges a Monster Forged in the Flames of Hardship. by Jared Smith There are times lately when circumstances in life have left me feeling a bit bedraggled, broken, and beat up.  A combination of people in my life that lacked integrity and the unwillingness of people to act with decency had left me broken and miserable, with a heap of stress that felt almost crippling. Having to leave a place I called home, and wondering how my family would eat the next week has a way of bringing out the best and the worst in people. For myself, the best was not within reach just yet... With just enough money in my pocket to get my family fed for a few more days, I took a new job that paid next to nothing.  This new job - however low-paying - had one decidedly bad-ass advantage going for it: I got to lift and tote some heavy shit. With no wiggle-room in the budget, I had no money for a gym membership. To make matters worse, the owner of the gym I had trai...

I'm excited to announce that I have a new book that has just been published by Regimen Books. For regular readers of this blog, some of the chapters were previously published under some posts entitled "Ultimate Strength", as well.  There is also some additional content that was never in my original posts. You can currently order the book from Amazon.  Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=sloan%2C+ultimate+strength I will also post a link in the next day or so where you can order copies directly from Regimen Books.  Anyone who is interested in a signed copy, then email me and let me know.  I will gladly send you one.

For those of you who are my age or older, you can probably remember well the first time you saw the amazing physique of Serge Nubret: It was in the pseudo-documentary we all now know and love as “Pumping Iron.”  With the director and writers of Pumping Iron attempting to make out the film as a “David vs Goliath” with the young (but massive) Lou Ferrigno taking on the older “Goliath” in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger, they had no idea that their whole half-true enterprise would crumble a bit with the entry of Serge Nubret. You took one look at Nubret and you knew there was no doubt that Ferrigno was out of his league with both Schwarzenegger and the Frenchmen.  (Nubret was French.) Nubret - to this day - had one of the most classically beautiful physiques of all-time.  Arnold, of course, won the whole thing, but Nubret easily came in 2nd. By the time I watched Pumping Iron sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, there was very little information that I could fin...

Director Ke Zhou’s second directorial effort (the first being “The Master”) is more stylish than it is good, but it has enough drama and decent martial arts action to please aficionados, while the casual viewer would probably be best suited watching something else. I can remember the joy as a kid - and already a martial arts practitioner at the age of 9 - when I first saw Hong Kong kung-fu films.  There was something so different about them, and I’m not just talking culturally, I’m talking about the martial arts themselves.  It wasn’t until I was older that I realized just what that “something” was: the martial arts moves were fast .  This was in stark contrast to the martial arts films of Jean Claude Van Damme or even earlier ones starring Chuck Norris.  (And they were even more of a far cry from watching “Kung-Fu” as a kid, with the non-martial artist, non-Asian David Carradine!)  In American-made martial arts actioners - what few there were - the actio...

    Lately, my life has been pretty awful, and yet pretty awesome at the same time.  And, although most of the awfulness in this case is because of my own stupid choices, I think most of our lives are like this most of the time.  But that doesn’t mean that my life is just a mixed “blob” of these two ways of living - in other words, I truly mean that it’s both awful and awesome at the same time.     Many years ago, and in much better - not to mention cleaner - prose than I could ever hope (in the first case) or want (in the second case) to ever write, the pretty-much awesome writer of great Catholic apologetics, GK Chesterton, wrote that Christianity loves red, and it loves white, but it has a healthy hatred of the pink.  You see, good, healthy religion - and I think this can apply to Zen as well as Christianity, although Christianity at its finest is the best example - is never a blending together of opposites.  Nor...