C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Some “Easy Strength” Methods, Tips, and Ideas for Easy Fat Loss      I have written a lot—and will continue to write a lot—about high-frequency training .  I have sort of an ever ongoing series, in fact, dealing with different ways to use and incorporate HFT based on your goals and needs.  In this essay, I want to discuss some ways that you can use HFT for fat loss.      I believe that a lot of lifters, and regular gym-goers in general, don’t achieve their fat loss goals because they train too hard and they diet too strictly.  That might seem as if it’s an odd statement at first.  After all, do we not get the best results when we are regimented and serious about our training and eating?  In some ways maybe, but not so fast.  When you eat very little and train with a lot of intensity—even if it’s just “intense” cardio—you quickly burn out, you don’t feel good, and you don’t stick with it.  You may...

Should or COULD younger bodybuilders use my Ageless Bodybuilding System?   This morning, I was sitting at my computer and working on my next installment of my "Ageless Bodybuilding" System, when I received a curious email.  Now, I check my email every day, and try my very best to answer my mail, but it sometimes take a little bit since I'm typically "backed up" in responses. (By the way, if you have emailed me and I haven't  responded, always give it a week or so—I do eventually  get around to a response.)  However, with this particular email, I thought it would be best if I wrote the general gist  of my response to the questioner for the rest of my readers. In a nutshell, this young  man said he was interested in what I had written about my Ageless Bodybuilding System, and wondered if there would be benefits—or drawbacks—to a young person in their 20s doing it.  (He specifically asked about young men, but I'm going to include women here in my res...

 I have, for a number of years on Integral Strength, pushed the benefits of high-frequency training.  But no matter how long I've been training, I can always learn something new.  And what I've learned over the past six months, is how wondrous hard, heavy, frequent  dumbbell training can be when it comes to eliciting mass and strength gains. I really can't believe it took me this long to give dumbbell-centric training a "go", but it did.  In the past, with HFT, I always used primarily barbell exercises, coupled with dumbbell training for "assistance" lifts.  Don't get me wrong, there were a few exercises that I always did, such as thick-bar one-arm dumbbell deadlifts and one-arm dumbbell overhead presses.  But now I've come to appreciate - not to mention very much enjoy  - exercises such as two-arm dumbbell power cleans, one-arm dumbbell power cleans, one-hand and two-hand dumbbell clean and push presses, two-hand dumbbell hang cleans, one-hand a...

 Building Mass and Power/Strength with HFT + Dumbbells Combo The great Reg Park overhead pressing a pair of dumbbells In my last post, I outlined a brief, basic, (somewhat) hard full-body, 3-days-per-week program using ONLY dumbbells.  For this post, I'd like to outline a  high-frequency training (HFT for short, hereafter) program using primarily  dumbbells to build mass, power, and strength. The MASS is going to come about on this program from the sheer amount of total work performed in the course of the week.  When a lot of lifters -at least the ones I've worked with over the years - first take up HFT, they typically complain because it doesn't seem as if they are doing enough at each workout, or they don't think that they are training enough.  But the sheer frequency of the workout program really does add up .  After several weeks on the program, when most of the lifters I've worked with begin putting on muscle at a rate they hadn't been doing befor...