Classic Bodybuilding Articles and Essays

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan magazine. In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.” I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time . In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

Mass on Demand - The 5x10 Workout

The 5x10 Workout Program The longer that I have been training and working with other lifters, the more that I believe that simple, though not necessarily easy, programs are the best methods to use. I think this is the case for the majority of lifters. There are times when this is not so, but that’s usually for either elite athletes or programs for strength athletes at the top of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting. In my last article on different ways that you can incorporate heavy, light, and medium workouts into your training, I mentioned a few ways that this can be done. One of them is to keep your weights the same at each workout session but rotate the sets and/or reps. This is in direct contradiction to the most popular method of H-L-M, Bill Starr’s 5x5 training, where you keep the sets and reps the same (5x5) but rotate the amount of weight used on the lifts. The program here uses the firs...

High-Frequency Wave Load Training

A Highly Effective High-Frequency Program for Strength, Power, and Muscle Mass In several recent articles, I have presented a few key concepts to building strength, power, and muscle mass. One of the concepts is the “90% method” where you do most of your sets at 90% of a certain rep range. It could be 90% of 1 rep, of 3 reps, of 5 reps, or even as high as 10 reps. (If you want more in depth discussion on the 90% method then read my article “ Skill Training as Size Building .”) I have also presented the concepts of weight ladders and wave loading , where, instead of sticking with the same weight throughout several sets before moving to a different weight, you move back and forth from heavier to lighter sets. One of my more popular recent articles that used the above concepts is “ The 1-5 Program .” It’s a high-volume program. It’s good for lifters who like to use split programs, as it’s a mul...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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