C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Unique Training Concepts and Ideas for Gaining Size and Strength or Getting in Shape      I have a lot of stuff that I’m trying to write.  So much that it can get overwhelming—a book I’m trying to finish but seem to constantly get stuck in neutral in the process, about 20 different notes for articles and essays, along with a handful of others that I’ve already begun and need to simply finish—that I don’t really know where to start.  Or finish.  With that in mind, I thought it might be good to just write an “odds and ends” essay, the very thing that you’re now reading.  These are a few of the ideas that I wrote down for some articles, but I’m not really sure if there’s enough there for each one to comprise an article of its own.  I thought, well, what-the-hell, I’ll just throw a few of them together in one essay.      With that short preamble out of the way, let’s get going and see where this thing will go. Rest-P...

Simple Methods to Improve Your Workouts and Obtain Better Results      Over the years, one of my most popular articles has been my “ Train Long, Not Hard ” feature that I wrote for Testosterone Nation around the beginning of this century.  The title comes from a saying of Arthur Jones, the creator of Nautilus equipment and the father of so-called “high-intensity training” and the whole one-set-to-complete-momentary-muscular-failure approach to workouts.  He and Mike Mentzer are responsible for brain-washing an entire generation of lifters and quite possibly ruining real strength training, at least here in America—though I’ll save my ramblings on that for another essay or you can read my article on REAL High-Intensity Training .  Anyway, his saying goes like this: “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.”  Jones, quite obviously, believed that “train hard” was the answer to that conundrum.  In my article...

  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...