C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Use This Training Concept for Better Athletic Performance and/or New Gains in Size and Strength      In my article The Fighter’s Physique , I mentioned the benefit of “weaving” together one’s strength training with one’s fighting art in the same session.  While proper strength training improves athletic performance, martial arts or otherwise, it will have even more benefits when both the strength training and the sport one competes in are performed simultaneously.      This concept is nothing new.  The idea was originally “created” by German strength coach Peter Tschiene in the 1980s, though I have a feeling that other athletes going back decades—or perhaps even centuries—were already using the method, even if Tschiene coined the term “mixed training” and was the first to widely promote it.  Monks at the Shaolin Temple were combining resistance training—bodyweight calisthenics, isometric holds, and lifting stone locks (ca...

On Plain, Simple, but Effective Workouts and Progressive Training Programs       Zhazhou asked Nanquan, “What is the Way?”      Nanquan said, “Ordinary mind is the Way.”      “Just watch children playing.  Eat vegetable soup instead of duck stew” ~Matsuo Basho (the most famous haiku poet of Edo-era Japan; this was his advice to poets)      When in pursuit of our goals from resistance training—whether it’s size, strength, both, or just aesthetics—it’s only natural to look toward what you want to achieve down the road.  That is, after all, the reason that you are training to begin with.  You want to achieve.  You are in pursuit of mass and power.  Maybe you don’t want to just achieve but you want to excel.  But when we are constantly focused on the future, we take ourselves away from the now , the present moment where we are actually lifting.   ...

Minimalistic Programs for Strength and Power, Added Size, or an Aesthetic Physique      The other day I was at the grocery store stocking up on meat, veggies, and my other pantry mainstay, dog food and treats.  If you have a couple of Labradors who you consider part of the family, then you understand.  I’d actually go to the grocery store less but one of my dogs’ favorite pastimes is riding there, so we go a few times a week.  Anyway, on this particular day, I decided to look over the magazine rack—I’m glad that enough people read so that the magazine section still exists, despite the preponderance of fluff that most of them are filled with.  Obviously, I decided to peruse the “fitness” magazines, just to see what-the-heck are the current fads in training and to see what crap is currently being hawked in the advertisements.  But then I opened a pop-psychology rag and came across an interesting study that claimed that depression is direct...