C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

     Sometimes the best workouts for building muscle mass look almost easy to the casual trainee or observer.  Too many times, lifters equate how hard you train at each workout to the results that are produced.  But it just doesn’t work this way in reality.  Some of the biggest, strongest lifters and bodybuilders I’ve known looked as if they were taking it easy in their workouts.  When I first witnessed this as a young man in the gyms of the early ‘90s, I chalked it up to “genetics.”  After all, I was told in many of the magazines from that era that, if you were a “hardgainer,” you needed to train with brief but incredibly hard workout sessions.  But with many years of training—and training others—under my belt, I just don’t think that’s the case.  Now, don’t get me wrong (I mean, really don’t get me wrong), there are definitely times when you should train hard and push it in the gym.  But the majority of the time, belie...

  An “Easy” Full-Body Muscle-Building Program      I have written quite a bit over the past year on high-frequency training.  I have a semi-regular, ongoing series discussing how to use HFT for various goals—general strength, powerlifting, fat loss, and whatnot.  Although I have written some about it—such as this post from last May—I would like to do a few different essays on HFT for hypertrophy .      The program I’ve designed for this article has its roots in the full-body workout programs of the old-time bodybuilders from the ‘30s and early ‘40s where they used, primarily, full-body workouts performed 3x per week and multiple exercises for a limited number of sets per exercise—often no more than 1 set per movement, sometimes 2 at the most .  In fact, it wasn’t until the likes of Clancy Ross and Leo Stern—who trained with each other in the military—that bodybuilders started utilizing 3 or 4 sets per exercise in t...