C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       I had an email from a reader this morning who asked a question I don’t usually get, although I’m sorta surprised I don’t get it.  Odd as it might be, come to think of it, I don’t remember a time that I’ve ever received this question.  The question was: “Should I specialize on a lift or a bodypart sometimes or should I just follow a basic, overall mass-building program?”  Although the reader was solely interested in hypertrophy, the same question could be asked by strength athletes.      My answer was, “well, it depends.”  But, on the whole, yes, you should specialize.  And then you shouldn’t.      If you’re new to training, or if you haven’t built any appreciable strength or muscle mass (depending on your goals) then, no, you shouldn’t specialize.  Specialization should occur when you have a weak point, whether it’s a “cosmetic” weak point for a bodybuilder or a strength weak point for a lifter.  If you’re after both strength and muscle mass, then you may need to specialize at

      There is, at least in certain places online, a lot of “chatter” about whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting.  Many folks who used to previously tout intermittent fasting as some sort of miracle of modern dieting have backtracked, and now a lot of those “influencers” (or whoever-the-heck they might be) recommend a more standard, traditional approach to dieting for building muscle and burning fat.  Recently, there was even that god-awful “study” from the American Heart Association that showed a “91% increased likelihood of death” from heart complications by following intermittent fasting.  Now, this isn’t the place to discuss the real problems and politics around that so-called study, it will suffice for now to point out that its metrics were just plain wrong.   And, of course, on the flip side of all of that you also have the defenders, rightly so, of the benefits of various forms of fasting.      My point in this essay, however, is that most of the above—no m

  Muscle Mass AND Serious Strength:  The Best Way to Train for Both!      There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there—whether it’s on the internet or at the gym—about how to train for BOTH hypertrophy and serious strength gains.  The first problem seems to be that some folks just don’t know how to do either.  Guys go to the gym to “get big” but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift.  Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions.      If your goal is just hypertrophy, then don’t train like a strength athlete.  You should focus on pump-style training, “feeling a muscle” instead of working the movement, and ensuring that you can do more and more work for each individual bodypart.      If your goal is just strength, then you need to train for strength.  This means doing only a few core exercises—the ones you are training to get stronger on—and doing either a “Westside-st