C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Welcome to the World of High-Intensity, High-Volume Workouts-Of-The-Day! First things first: read Part One of this series from September 15th of last month if you haven't already done so.  If you have, then we can move on... Let's keep things as simple as possible for the sake of "ease of workouts".  The workouts themselves will be hard enough without overcomplicating the program. Start off by training each of the core lifts - squats, bench presses, and deadlifts - on one day per week.  I like to train during the week when on this program - or when training someone on this program - and then take the weekends off for rest, relaxation, drinking cocktails, throwing down the gauntlet at an arm-wrestling tournament; ya' know, whatever it is you like to do with your weekends without having to think about also performing a hard-ass training session. So the split would look like this: Monday: Squats - pick any of the WOD below Wednesday: Bench Presses - pick any of the...

  Brief, Basic, Intense, and Frequent Workouts for Monstrous Muscle Gains! Mike Mentzer was a fan of brief, hard workouts (and he even trained fairly frequently in the '70s before going "nutso" with very infrequent workouts!) I'm currently working on Part Twos of my "Eight Point Program" and "Intense and Infrequent Workout" series of articles.  In the meantime, I thought I'd write something short and to the point, just like the workouts I'm about to recommend. I just finished a brief workout myself consisting of squats, thick bar deadlifts, dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell curls, and sandbag carries.  Sometimes it's good to get back to the basics. Come to think of it, it's always  good to do basic, intense workouts centered around the big lifts.  But, typically, in my observation, most lifters do these sort of workouts too infrequently.  I used to recommend hard, intense, infrequent  workouts myself years ago in articles for Ironman...

  No matter who you are or where you are in life, you need tools for "living the good life", as the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers would have put it. First, I believe that you need to be grounded in a religion.  And by "religion", I don't mean the form of fundamentalism that some of you may have in mind.  I mean religion as a living Wisdom Tradition .  The two Wisdom Traditions that have shaped me throughout most of my life are/were Zen and Eastern Christianity. Even once you are "grounded" in a Wisdom Tradition, you still need tools for your daily living.  One of the best tools that I have found comes from the late (and great) Indian philosopher and professor of religion Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran is most noted for developing what he called "passage meditation" where you memorize an inspirational passage and then use it in meditation to go deep within.  But it's not his passage meditation that I want to discuss in this post.  It...