C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       Ken Waller is probably most well-known from the “documentary” Pumping Iron.  Although Pumping Iron primarily focused on Arnold’s rivalry with Ferrigno in the Mr. Olympia competition, the other main “story” of the pseudo-doc revolved around the rivalry of Waller and (fellow Mr. Universe competitor) Mike Katz.  Waller was sort of portrayed as the “villain” in the Universe competition to the more “All-American” Katz.  The problem is that the storyline was set up by the filmmakers, and none of it was actually true.  Katz and Waller were, in truth, actually good friends.      I still love Pumping Iron to this day, but I really wish I would have known that the Waller and Katz story was fabricated when I was a teenager.  Because before watching Pumping Iron, I liked Waller.  Afterwards, not so much.  Sometime in the late ‘90s, I discovered the truth (or “untruth,” I suppose) about Pumping Iron, and...

  How to Gain 50 Pounds of Muscle! Part 3: Bill Pearl’s Advanced Mass-Training      This is the 3rd part of my Classic Bodybuilding series based on an article that the great Gene Mozee wrote for IronMan magazine in 1992.  The first part covered the “Golden 6” training program of Arnold Schwarzenegger.  If you’re a beginner, or if you need to get “back-to-the-basics,” then I would start there.  The second part that I posted a few days ago was another full-body program based on Larry Scott’s Gironda-inspired mass-building techniques.  I would advise reading those pieces first.  And definitely don’t just leap into the training program presented here without a couple years at the minimum of (mostly) full-body workouts.      Bill Pearl has long been one of my favorite bodybuilders.  In another piece I wrote last year, I mentioned that I believe Pearl to be one of the 5 greatest bodybuilders of all time....

  Part One: Arnold’s “Golden 6” Workout for Bulk-Building (Plus a Bulk-Building “Extra”)      I often wonder what my teenage life would be like if I was a teenager right now in this generation of text messaging, smart phones, Wikipedia (and therefore information at your fingertips), along with blogs, YouTube videos, and Instagram stories filled with an absolute plethora of mass-building, strength-gaining information.  But, the thing is, I’m glad that I was a teenager in the 1980s.  I think it’s the reason I have a vast, encyclopedic, almost kaleidoscopical knowledge of hypertrophy training and strength-building.  And I’m really not bragging about my bodybuilding “expertise.”  You see, I don’t think I’m different from anyone else.  Because anyone who read every single bodybuilding magazine that hit the newsstand month-after-month, year-after-year from cover-to-cover many times—and did so from the mid ‘80s all the way up to at least...