C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       Recently, there has been some renewed interest in my Texas Volume Training program that I wrote a little over a decade ago, based on the amount of views my original post has had of late and based on some emails I have received the last several months.  With that in mind, I thought it was time that I did a new post on this form of training.  What follows in this essay is an amalgam of a couple of my earlier articles on Texas Volume Training, and some insights I’ve garnered from lifters that have used it in the years since I first created it.      First off, TVT is a powerlifting program.  And though this might sound as if it’s hyperbole, and though I might obviously be biased since I came up with it, I think it’s one of the best programs anyone could ever use for powerlifting, but you have to be advanced enough to handle the amount of workload involved.  Also it’s not a program for people who only want some hypertrophy or only train for aesthetics, although it definitely will

Some Thoughts on Hard Training, Challenges, and Other Such Stuff      In my last essay on “ Outdoor Workout Challenges ,” I mentioned the body’s need for challenges on occasion, and gave some workout ideas for loaded carries and odd lifts.  In this essay, I just want to discuss hard training in general, and give some thoughts on when—and when not—to use challenges and other hard forms of training.      First, the body does need to be challenged constantly in some way.  But this doesn’t mean that one has to always go “all out” at each session, much less on each and every work set.  For instance, the act of working out on a regular basis is itself a challenge to the body.  Your body grows bigger and/or stronger—or fat loss occurs—through adaptation and accumulation.  Without pushing your body to do more and more on a regular basis, this won’t transpire, and results won’t happen.      Our body doesn’t just need to be challenged through training.  It also needs to be disciplined through

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.  This is not the essay to get into al