C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Massively High-Rep Training for Massively Built Muscles (AKA: An Homage to the Late Dr. Ken Leistner)     Around five or six years ago, I was training with a good friend of mine.  Even though he and I are good friends, we rarely trained together (and still don’t) due to the simple fact that he never liked to train legs or back muscles very hard, and, unfortunately, preferred a lot more training on the “showy” bodyparts of the chest and biceps.  And, while I’m not against a nice “pump” workout for the pecs and the arms, I’m primarily going to train my legs and my back hard, even if it’s at the expense of other muscle groups.     And even though my friend could out-bench press me by a couple hundred pounds, I could easily (at least at one time) out-squat or out-deadlift my friend by 300 pounds on each lift!     That’s just sad in my book.     Now, even though my friend knew that I liked to train my back and my legs with plenty of intensity (“intensity” in this case refe

The Total Annihilation Program Classic Training Meets Modern Bodybuilding Tactics By Jared Smith Old School Influence          I can remember sitting in the living room as a kid watching Conan the Barbarian, and watching Arnold being transformed into a behemoth-of-a-man through suffering. Once he became huge then he became deadly as he was forged in the fires of combat, along with being trained by warriors from the East.   In addition to this, my father was a very large man who spoke very little and—to this day—is the very essence of the strong silent type. I grew up with a clear vision of what a man should be: big and strong!          When I was about eighteen, I decided that I needed to “live up” to the vision that I had grown up with. In my high school library, I was lucky enough to find Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. This was my first education in terms of training. This inspired me to go to the local Books-A-Million and raid the magazine rack fo

     Sorry for the long delay in posts.  I will try to make up for it this month by publishing numerous posts/articles.  Here's the first:       For years—back when I was writing almost monthly for IronMan magazine —IM’s editor-in-chief, Steve Holman, penned many articles on his personal brand of high-intensity, briefer-is-better, training: something Holman called “positions-of-flexion” training, or just POF for short.      Holman first revealed this “new” form of training sometime in the mid ‘90s.   I can’t remember the exact year, but I think it was sometime in ’94 or ’95, and it was highly touted by IM as a new “state-of-the-art” form of high-intensity training.   (IM took advantage, at the time, of the rising popularity HIT was experiencing, especially under the incarnation of it that Dorian Yates was espousing as the key to his Mr.O dominance.)      POF was based on something that I thought—and still do think—to be fairly inventive.   Holman’s thought was that