C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

High-Volume Workout Variation for Continuous Hypertrophy Gains      The more advanced a bodybuilder gets, the more variation that he needs.  The late strength coach Charles Poliquin believed that a bodybuilder should make a change to his training at every 4th workout.  He thought that 3 workouts was about the limit for doing the exact same session.  This doesn’t mean to overhaul your training completely at every 4th workout.  It means making a couple to a few changes, while keeping the workout template the same.  I think this is pretty good advice.  Some highly advanced bodybuilders might need to make a minor change at every workout session and some bodybuilders, even advanced ones, might do well with a slightly less frequent change.  Overall, however, I think the advice is fairly sound.      One mistake that I think some modern bodybuilders make is doing too much variety in a single session.  Fo...

How to Improve and Increase Your Work Capacity for Better, More Consistent Gains in Size and Strength      There are several problems that I see in modern-day training and among modern lifters.  I probably rail against them quite a bit in my writings, but that’s only because I want to see lifters get better and achieve their training goals.  One of the major issues in today’s training world is that gym-goers think a workout or training program is “good” if it produces fatigue, makes them tired, or leaves them exhausted at the end of a training session.  That might be good, at times, and is even necessary periodically for increasing one’s work capacity, the very thing that we’re going to discuss here.  Because another major problem is that modern lifters—both strength athletes and bodybuilders—rarely increase their work capacity, or their ability to handle greater and greater workloads in their training.  Without the ability to handle he...