C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

    Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part 5: An H/L/M Miscellany – On Variation and Advanced Options      This is the 5 th part of our ongoing series on heavy, light, and medium training based on the coaching of the (always) great strength writer extraordinaire Bill Starr.   If you haven’t done so, then please read the other parts before reading this.   If you don’t read them, then the rest of this essay may be a bit confusing—unless, of course, you are already familiar with Starr’s methodology, in which case you can just jump right in here.   When I presented parts 2 through 4, I mentioned that you at least needed to have read part 1 before reading any of those, though it wasn’t necessary to read the other parts aside from the 1st.   With this essay, it’s good to read part 1 and be familiar with the other parts.   This article will discuss bits from all of the previous installments and assumes a working knowledge of those pieces. ...

  Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part 4: Building a Massive Back and Monstrous Pulling Strength      This is the 4 th part of our ongoing series on heavy, light, and medium training inspired by the methods of one of the greatest strength coaches to ever walk the planet, Bill Starr.   Once this series is finished, I hope that it will include everything one needs to know in order to train using this methodology.   If you haven’t done so already, or if this is the first article in the series that you’ve stumbled across, please take your time to read the other articles.   At the very least, you need to read the first part before continuing here.   It lays the foundation that the other articles are based upon, and the rest of the articles assume a working knowledge of that one.   So, here’s the links to the past essays in this series: Part One: How to design an H/L/M program Part Two: Upper body training Part Three: How to build a mas...

A Bill Starr-Inspired Method for Making Consistent Progress      When many lifters think of Bill Starr (assuming they even know who he was), they often think of his 5x5 heavy-light-medium system , a system of training that I have used at times, and have often touted, over almost the entirety of my lifting and writing career.  You can probably do a brief, cursory search right now on “Bill Starr training program” or something similar, and you will, in all likelihood, find more than a few training plans, and almost all of them—or so I would bet a hefty sum—will outline a week or two of training using 5 sets of 5 reps.  But if you take the time to read a lot of the training articles that Starr actually wrote—he penned hundreds, if not thousands, of articles for almost all of the major bodybuilding magazines and training journals during his lifetime—you would find that there was a lot more to his system of training than what he is typically known for....