C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

To fail or not to fail... that is the question. We're talking training to failure, of course. On one side of the spectrum, you have strength coaches such as Chad Waterbury and Charles Staley (and I suppose myself in recent years) who seem to never recommend training to failure. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the great strength coach Charles Poliquin, and bodybuilding writers/trainers such as Steve Holman, Eric Broser (and whoever the hell invented that Doggcrapp—yes, that's the actual name of the training system for those of you who don't know— crap) who seem to always recommend training to failure. The million dollar question: Who's right? I think the answer is both—as long as certain criteria are adhered to for the most part. I haven't always felt that way. If you read my early writing for Iron Man magazine and MuscleMag International —I used to write quite a bit for those magazines 10 to 15 years ago—then you would have assumed I was a training...

     This type of high-set, low-rep training has become popular among strength coaches in various sports, and has been used by powerlifters and Olympic lifters for quite some time.   It only makes sense that bodybuilders should start taking advantage of it as well.      Powerlifting super-coach Louie Simmons uses a form of it to achieve the awesome results he gets with his lifters.   Another proponent of this training is strength/bodybuilding coach Charles Staley.   His method is similar to what I prefer when it comes to building muscle mass.   It's probably the method that would best be preferred by the majority of you out there who just want to pack on some more muscle mass.      Basically, for accelerative low-rep training, the force produced by each rep is more important than the amount of reps performed in each set.   More sets are performed to compensate for the lack of volume.   Let me explain.      Let us assume that you can perform 10 reps in the bench press with a...