C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       In hundreds of articles and essays—both here on the blog and in various magazines and internet sites—I essentially repeat the same stuff.  Take what I call “The Big 4” for instance.  I’ve written about it ad nauseam, so much that you’ll find it repeated over and over on this site.  So why am I writing about it again , in what you’re now staring at on your computer screen, tablet, or phone?  The other day I received an email from a reader who wanted to know how to incorporate all of the elements of the Big 4 into his training split.  And my answer is essentially what precipitated this essay.      Before we go any further, assuming you don’t know about the Big 4, here goes:  No matter what your goals are—whether you just want to look good naked, enter a strongman competition, gain as much muscle as humanly possible, or step on a bodybuilding stage; male or female—you must do the following 4 things each and every single week : Squat something heavy. Pick heavy stuff off the floor.

Build Massive Arm Size and Strength with this Singles-Oriented Dinosaur Program The great Bill Pearl demonstrates just the kind of mass that is built with classic, basic "Dinosaur-style" training.      It really doesn't seem that long ago.  The '90s, though seemingly in a distant past for many younger lifters these days, seems as if it was just yesterday for me.      In the late '80s, early '90s, I got serious about weight training, and I spent the first seven years of the decade, or so, performing bodybuilding workouts.      I was a bodybuilding addict .  I tried almost every form of bodybuilding training  under the sun, while also attempting a hell of a lot of different diets and supplements.  (Supplements, for the most part, didn't get "advanced" until the early '00s—when creatine came on the scene mid '90s, it was absolutely revelatory, and it relegated all other supplements to sub-par status.)  (Some of those other forms o

The Other Kind of Hardgainer [1]      I think a majority of lifters—even ones who have been training a long time and should know better—mistakenly believe that there are two kinds of training in the lifting world today.  First off, you have your “high volume” training.  It’s not necessarily that there’s anything wrong with this kind of training, or so the train of thought goes, but this kind of training—multiple sets per bodypart, multiple days per week of training, fairly high reps, and going for “the pump”—is for those lifters and bodybuilders who respond well to this kind of thing, usually thought to be “genetically elite” men.  The majority of lifters, or so the line of thought continues, would do well with more infrequent training, but an infrequent training that is combined with minimalist training performed all-out!   In the bodybuilding world, the second line of thought was most espoused by Mike Mentzer and the rest of his ill-begotten ilk. [2]   For instance, when I f

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

Rut Busters Tips and Techniques for Bustin’ Your Sorry Lifts Out of a Plateau        This article is going to be broken into 3 parts—the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift.   Let’s get right to most everyone’s favorite lift: the bench press. Bench Bustin’ Tip #1— Do something other than flat bench presses.   I had to include this tip first, because too much bench pressing has to be one of the worst weightlifting sins under America’s sun.   If you’ve been bench pressing at every upper-body workout, and your bench press isn’t going anywhere, then give it a break and switch over to something else.   Don’t switch over to just dumbbells or varying degrees of inclines or declines, either.   Try some bottom-position benches, floor presses, board presses, carpet presses, or rack-lockouts to get that damn lift moving again. Tip #2—Speed it up.   Of all the innovations to come to the surface over the last couple decades, I would say that none of them are as important as speed