C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Embracing the Pain and Hard Work of Budo Zen      Real Zen training sucks.  Real budo training sucks.  And that’s okay.  In fact, that may be the point.      Another fact: If your training, in budo or in Zen or in the combination of the two, doesn’t suck—at least some of the time—then you might not be training correctly.      First, both disciplines suck because they require hard work, and this is especially so if you’re combining the two.  Lots of hard work!  And this isn’t something that should just be “passed over.”  You need to embrace the pain, and embrace the hard work if you want to succeed, which is exactly, by the way, how it should be.  If you’re going to succeed at budo, at Zen, or—even better—at both, then you need to understand this early on in your training, and you need to embrace it early.  If you do, then something will happen that doesn’t suck : ...

  My son Garrett Sloan trains, eats, and looks  like a warrior.      One of the problems I often see in strength-training/muscle-building circles is an emphasis on aesthetics over performance.  Aesthetics can be “tricky” and even misleading if you only go by the “mirror” instead of what you are actually doing in your workouts.  So—you might now be asking—how should you approach your training, not to mention your diet, if the emphasis is on performance instead of mere aesthetics?  What follows are a few thoughts on exactly that. Train the Movement or Train the Muscle? Go By the Mirror or Go By the Weight on the Bar?      This is one of the “arguments” that you will often hear/read about, and one that can sometimes become heatedly debated.  Some bodybuilders, for instance, will argue that you should train the muscle, and not so much the movement.  They will talk about feeling the muscle, and about how ...

...And Watch Your Strength Explode! C.S. pulling over 500 pounds almost 20 years ago. A few weeks ago, in another "Thursday Throwback," I posted an article I wrote for Planet Muscle magazine on "Building a Bigger Bench." Since there was quite a bit of interest in that particular article, I thought I would post another powerlifting article that I wrote on training your deadlift. This is, specifically, on how to train for your body type - that's right, different programs work better for different lifters. This article originally appeared in "Dragon Door" online magazine in 2008. And if you're struggling at all with your deadlift, I promise, this is just what the powerlifting gods ordered... The other day I was reading an article by a well-known strength coach when he mentioned that Olympic weightlifting coach Anatoly Bondarchuk believed there were three different kinds of athletes—those who responded best to volume, those who responded best to in...

  The Power/Mass Methods of the “Silver Era” Bodybuilders from the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s!      Years ago, I wrote an article for IronMan magazine entitled “Attack of the Old-Time Strength and Power Routines” which included several programs that were, at least somewhat, based on the training programs of many of the bodybuilders from the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s.  The title, of course, was an homage to the B monster and sci-fi movies of the ‘40s and the ‘50s.  This article’s title is, as you may have already surmised, also an homage to that era of awesome B movies that I loved as a kid, and pretty much still love to this day.  So - assuming you read the “Attack” article, as well - you can look at this as the second presentation in our double-feature from the Silver Era of bodybuilding.      We’ll look at a couple of programs that were used by the old-school lifters of this era, and ways that these training routines can wor...