C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Build Muscle the Classic Way with an Old-School Favorite      I’m going to stop writing that I’m going to stop writing about a subject, any subject.  For one, I never know quite where my writing is going to take me.  That’s correct.  I don’t really feel as if I write.  It’s more as if writing just happens through me. I sit down at my laptop in the morning, my heavy cream-laden coffee steaming next to me, with every intention of writing on a certain subject.  Only to find that it morphs into something completely different, sometimes not even remotely in the same orbit as my initial idea(s).  For another, quite practical reason, I never know what kind of questions my recently written articles are going to generate, often prompting another essay on a subject I thought I was finished with.      I mention the above because at the end of my recent Old-School Muscle-Building Once More , I wrote that I was going t...

The Classic Bodybuilding Approach to Cycling Workloads, Developing Work Capacity, and High-Frequency Training      I’ve been lifting since the mid ‘80s, when my father bought me one of those old, shaky DP weight sets for, I think, my 13th birthday.  If you are my age or older, you know well the kind of set I’m talking about, with weights made of plastic, gray in color, and filled with cement.  Many a young man got their start in iron from just such a set.  It was about all you could find down at the local Sears & Roebuck department store.  The bench was flimsy as all get-out, the weights not that long-lasting, but, honestly, it got the job done.  In many ways, it was all I (or others) needed.  You could do deadlifts and cleans, overhead presses and curls, not to mention all the bench pressing your pre-pubescent heart desired.  Like all other young teenagers, I wanted a big chest and biceps, so I did entirely too much benchi...

  An Old-School Program for Shirt-Busting Biceps and Titanic Triceps       This essay is the start of a planned series on old-school, real bodybuilding training.   It is a follow-up, however, to an article I wrote earlier this month entitled “Real Bodybuilding the Old-School Way.”   That article has proven popular enough that I figured there would be interest in an entire series on the subject.   So, I guess this is technically the 2 nd part, even though I never intended that first one as part of a series when I wrote it.      I would advise reading that article before continuing here (and not just because it will help you understand this article but because I think it’s a pretty damn good read even if, you know, I’m a bit biased), but the gist of it boils down to this:   Old school bodybuilders built impressive size, strength, and definition (before the advent of large amounts of PEDs) by following 3 “stages” of tr...