C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Muscle Mass AND Serious Strength:  The Best Way to Train for Both!      There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there—whether it’s on the internet or at the gym—about how to train for BOTH hypertrophy and serious strength gains.  The first problem seems to be that some folks just don’t know how to do either.  Guys go to the gym to “get big” but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift.  Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions.      If your goal is just hypertrophy, then don’t train like a strength athlete.  You should focus on pump-style training, “feeling a muscle” instead of working the movement, and ensuring that you can do more and more work for each individual bodypart.      If your goal is just strength, then you need to train for strength.  This means doing only a few core exercises—the ones you are training to get stronger on—and doing either a “Westside-st

 For this week's "Thursday Throwback," I have selected an article that sort of "piggy backs" off of the Throwback  from last week on the "Top 10 Lifting Mistakes."  In that article, I mentioned the one that follows here, "Train Easy, Lift Big." To give you a feel of the sort  of article this one is, an alternate title could have been "Lift Big Using Russian-Style GTG Training."  If THAT whets your appetite—or has you wondering what in the hell I'm even talking about—either way, you should find what follows interesting... Train Easy Lift Big Slovenian lifter Erni Gregorčič is an example of an East European powerlifters that uses methods similar to this article. The legendary Russian powerlifting coach Boris Sheiko once remarked, “he who trains more—lifts more.”  For the most part, I agree with that statement, as many of the articles on this blog attest to, but you also have to put things into the proper context in order to unders