C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part Three: How to Build a Massive Squat      In this, the 3 rd part of our series on heavy, light, and medium training, we’ll take a look at how you can build a superhuman squat using this form of training.   Make sure that you read Part One , as it covers the basics of H/L/M training, before continuing to this one.   Part Two is on “upper body training,” and it, too, would be good to read before continuing here, but not necessary.   As I mentioned at the end of that essay, if this series was a book and these posts were chapters, I’m not sure the order they would appear, outside of the first and last entry.   So, read Part One so that you will know the basics; this article assumes familiarity with all of the concepts presented there.   So, with that out of the way, let’s get on with it…   All Hail the King      The squat.   It has been hailed the king of all exercise...

    Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part One: The Basics of Program Design      This past week, I received an email from a reader asking if I would write an article on how to design a heavy, light, medium program.   It was a bit serendipitous, as I had been gathering together some of my past articles on just that very subject with the intention of putting together an e-book entitled “The Heavy, Light, Medium Manifesto” (or something such as that; I’m a little “iffy” on the title at the moment).   You see, April of this year will be 10 years since Starr-man (as Bill Starr was sometimes affectionately known) left for that grand weightlifting gym in the sky.   And I have been thinking that what better way to honor the man than to put together a book covering every aspect of his lifting wisdom that I can think of.   His heavy, light, medium system had the single greatest impact on my personal training than any other method.   ...

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....