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 and Why Planned “Overtraining” is a Key to More Size and Strength      At some point, “overtraining” became a bad word in the world of strength training and muscle building.  Basically, or so the thinking goes, one of the keys to making continuous progress is ensuring that you never overtrain.  Many of the greatest strength athletes, not to mention strength coaches, of all time, however, thought that not only is overtraining not bad, but that it’s also a necessity once the lifter reaches a certain level.      My original strength mentor was the late and great strength coach Bill Starr.  Starr wrote several articles on the need for overtraining.  He believed that, in order to make continuous progress, you must do “too much” for a certain period of time—the so-called “overtraining” period—before backing off after that.  It was during this “de-load” period when the athlete makes the most gains, but those gain...