C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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....

  Only Have Time to Train on the Weekend? No Problem.      Yesterday, I received an email from a reader who had a question about setting up a “weekends-only” strength program.  I have had similar questions asked before.  The most commonly similar question is when lifters only have a couple days of the week to train, and so they want to know how to set up a minimalistic training regimen.  If that’s you, then check out this program I wrote last year entitled “Maximum Mass, Minimum Training.”   Anyway, this particular reader said he had been doing a full-body workout, 3-times-per-week, alternating between heavier and lighter sessions.  He said that he has a new job that is going to make it very tough for him to get to the gym during the weekdays, so he wanted to know if there was a way to train on only Saturday and Sunday, but still do full-body workouts.  The program below is the one that I gave him, and the one that I recommend ...

       It’s quite possible that, at one time or another, I’ve already written about this subject because, I swear, I remember doing so, but when I looked around on my blog—and in the myriad of word documents that I have stored on my computer—I couldn’t find it.  I also have a sense of deja vu, as the reason I started thinking about this subject was because I received an email from a reader who was confused over the different variations within 5x5 training that he had come across.  And I, once again, could have swore I received this same email—or one unabashedly like it—awhile back.  And I thought I had written an essay in response to said email because I figured that there are other readers out there who are probably looking for similar information.  Hence, the deja vu.      Oh, well, I reasoned, even if I have written about 5x5 variations before, I write a lot of articles that often revolve around a similar the...