C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  On Programming, Variety, and Making Gains!      The other day, Jason, a lifting friend of mine, called me on the phone.  He needed some advice for breaking out of the rut he was in.  Jason’s one of those guys that’s always into “powerbuilding.”  He wants to look like a bodybuilder, but also wants to have impressive strength.  He said that several months ago he had started on one of those “briefer-is-better” programs—the kind of program that would have made Ken Leistner proud—and got some of the best results he’s ever had in just a matter of a few weeks, but then it all ground to a sudden halt.  After explaining to me what he had been doing, and some of the adjustments he’d made but to no avail, he was almost at his wit’s end.  “I just don’t know what I’m doin’ wrong,” he said.  To which I replied, “It ain’t what you’re doin’.  It’s what you’ve done.”      “Huh?” he replied in turn, bemusing...

The Truth About the Dietary Regimens of a Couple of Bodybuilding Legends!      When you think of intermittent fasting, you don’t usually associate it with the classic bodybuilders of the past.  For the longest time, I certainly didn’t.  Turns out, however, that I was more than just a little bit wrong.      I have written elsewhere that I think I can safely say, without much in the way of trepidation, that I was one of the first lifters I know of who tried intermittent fasting more than 25 years ago .  In fact, I first read about it in the late ‘90s, when Ori Hofmekler—who was actually, at the time, editor of Penthouse magazine of all things—published articles on his “Warrior Diet” in the online magazine T-Nation .  I didn’t refer to it as intermittent fasting—I don’t think that term had caught on yet—but simply told other lifters that I was going to try this (insanely sounding) Warrior Diet in order to lose enough w...

Reimagining a Classic Bodybuilding Method for Strength and Power      When I first started lifting—not to mention reading bodybuilding magazines—in the mid to late ‘80s, most bodybuilders trained the same way.  By and large, although there were exceptions, mind you, so I don’t mean this as an entirely blanket statement, the majority of bodybuilders trained on either a 6-on, 1-off split, or a 3-on, 1-off split.  The body was split 3 ways.  Typically, one followed either a push (chest, shoulders, triceps)/pull (back and biceps)/legs split or an “antagonistic” split where you trained your chest and back one day, your shoulders, bis and tris the 2nd day, and, finally, your legs on the 3rd day.      Although this seems as if it’s a lot of volume, especially if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid of “high-intensity” training, it was actually less work than bodybuilders from previous eras.  Arnold, for instance, trained on a ...