C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  On Programming, Variety, and Making Gains!      The other day, Jason, a lifting friend of mine, called me on the phone.  He needed some advice for breaking out of the rut he was in.  Jason’s one of those guys that’s always into “powerbuilding.”  He wants to look like a bodybuilder, but also wants to have impressive strength.  He said that several months ago he had started on one of those “briefer-is-better” programs—the kind of program that would have made Ken Leistner proud—and got some of the best results he’s ever had in just a matter of a few weeks, but then it all ground to a sudden halt.  After explaining to me what he had been doing, and some of the adjustments he’d made but to no avail, he was almost at his wit’s end.  “I just don’t know what I’m doin’ wrong,” he said.  To which I replied, “It ain’t what you’re doin’.  It’s what you’ve done.”      “Huh?” he replied in turn, bemusing...

…That is the Question      With all respect to Hamlet, and his creator Shakespeare, the question on the minds of most lifters and bodybuilders isn’t whether or not life is preferable to death (or vice versa) but whether or not we should spend our training lives reaching momentary muscular failure.  Or not.      When I first started writing for IronMan magazine over 30 years ago, a lot of their more popular writers—such as Steve Holman, Richard A. Winnett, and Clarence Bass, not to mention Mike Mentzer—were decidedly in the training-to-failure camp, albeit with limited sets to mitigate that supposed entity known as “overtraining.”  But you also had writers that came out around that time, such as Charles Poliquin, who recommended much more voluminous workouts programs but still believed in taking the majority of sets to muscular failure.  And on the flip side of that , within a few years you had other writers that came t...

  Minimum Training Time?  No Problem.  Follow this 2-Days-Per-Week Program for Maximal Mass and Strength A young Ken Leistner.  This program—with its basic, brief, but hard  tenets—would have probably made the late Dr. Ken proud.      My sons came to visit me this past weekend.  When they do this, they sometimes train with me in my garage gym, and sometimes they go to the commercial gym they train at instead.  So this past weekend, we somehow got on the subject of "what people know" at a commercial gym.  Keep in mind that I haven't trained at a commercial gym in a long  time.  I think the last time that I had a gym membership of any sort was in 2009, when I was going through a divorce, and had to move all of my weights—a quite extensive garage gym—to a storage facility.  Until I could find a new garage for my weights, I trained at a commercial gym for about six months.  But that wasn't your "average" gym, since i...

For this week's "Thursday Throwback," I have selected an article that I wrote ten years ago, when I was just about to turn 40.  In the ten years since I wrote this one, more and more lifters and bodybuilders, thankfully, use high-frequency training, which is really the gist of what this article is about. If you have tried both "conventional" bodybuilding training (fairly high volume, split workouts, going for the "pump") and "hardgainer" training (low volume, all-out "intensity", a couple days a week of training, full-body workouts), but haven't gotten good results from either kind of training, well, you might just be...  The Other Kind of Hardgainer [1] C.S. about ten years ago, when this article was originally written. I think the majority of lifters—even ones who have been training a long time and  should  know better—mistakenly believe that there are essentially two kinds of training, and two kinds of lifters: the "ea...

  Brief, Basic, Intense, and Frequent Workouts for Monstrous Muscle Gains! Mike Mentzer was a fan of brief, hard workouts (and he even trained fairly frequently in the '70s before going "nutso" with very infrequent workouts!) I'm currently working on Part Twos of my "Eight Point Program" and "Intense and Infrequent Workout" series of articles.  In the meantime, I thought I'd write something short and to the point, just like the workouts I'm about to recommend. I just finished a brief workout myself consisting of squats, thick bar deadlifts, dumbbell bench presses, dumbbell curls, and sandbag carries.  Sometimes it's good to get back to the basics. Come to think of it, it's always  good to do basic, intense workouts centered around the big lifts.  But, typically, in my observation, most lifters do these sort of workouts too infrequently.  I used to recommend hard, intense, infrequent  workouts myself years ago in articles for Ironman...

Here's an article that I wrote around 10 years ago for IronMan Magazine .  At one time, I had a link to the original article on IronMan's  website, but that link doesn't work anymore, so I removed the old post.  But, anyway, here's the article in its entirety: Dorian Yates performed some pretty "insane" workouts in his day. Mass Insanity Stuck in a rut?  Need something different from the run-of-the-mill training program you've been doing for the past several months?  Sometimes in order to keep the gains coming -- or to bust out of the rut you're stuck in -- you have to get a little crazy. Enter mass insanity .  On the following pages, I'm going to outline several training programs that I guarantee you haven't been doing lately. In fact, it could be that you've never attempted -- or even thought of attempting them.   I'm including four different plans. Variety is a crucial component of making continuous ga...