C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  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...

  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...