C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Some Rambling Thoughts and Reflections on Bodybuilding Supplements of the ‘90s      I came of age in bodybuilding, so to speak, in the ‘90s.  Oh, I started lifting in the ‘80s when I was a middle-school teenager, mainly to improve my strength and power in martial arts, but it was the early ‘90s when I went from weighing 135 (when I graduated high school) to 220 pounds of (primarily) solid, lean muscle tissue over the course of a handful of years.  If asked at the time what my “secrets” were to gaining so much mass, I probably would have rattled off the usual suspects: hard and heavy training, a massive, copious amount of calories on a daily basis (at one time I was eating between 6,000 to 8,000 calories each day), and the use of good supplements.  But I’m not so sure about that last one anymore.  Indeed, and eventually, at least, there were some good supplements that came out of the ‘90s—or, at the very least, there was one good supplement: creatine.  Overall, however, it was more th

A.K.A: The Wildest and Craziest Muscle-Building, Fat-Burning Diet the World has Ever Seen! That's Right—EVER! Off and on, over the course of the past decade or so, I have thought repeatedly about writing what you are now staring at on your computer (or phone) screen.  But for some reason, I could just never bring myself to do it.  Maybe if I would have decided to write it as a sort of "museum piece," an essay from my favorite decade of bodybuilding (that I personally trained during) where I looked at Stewart's dietary principles from a more critical angle, well, perhaps then I would  have written this several years ago.  For the longest time, my "It Came from the '90s" essays were the most popular posts on this blog, only recently overtaken by all of my "Classic Bodybuilding" articles.  But the thing is this : I actually agree with most of what Stewart says here, and I agreed with it the first time I read this bit of (what others would call) in

 A.K.A.: Intermittent Fasting: A Personal History Hugh Jackman used intermittent fasting to get shredded  for the X-Men movie "Days of Future Past" (seen here in this scene from the film). I'm going to go ahead and say it (or write it, in this case), even if there's an ever so slight possibility that I might be wrong: I was one of the first serious lifters in this country to experiment with intermittent fasting for competition.  How can I make such a bold statement, especially considering the fact that every single athlete, bodybuilder, lifter, etc. on planet friggin' Earth  has at least heard  of intermittent fasting, and knows something about what it is even if they don't practice it/utilize it?  I say it with some degree  of confidence because I did it in the '90s, while getting ready for a powerlifting meet, and, I'll add, I had no clue whatsoever that what I was doing would go on to be called "intermittent fasting".  And that's becau

Build Massive Arm Size and Strength with this Singles-Oriented Dinosaur Program The great Bill Pearl demonstrates just the kind of mass that is built with classic, basic "Dinosaur-style" training.      It really doesn't seem that long ago.  The '90s, though seemingly in a distant past for many younger lifters these days, seems as if it was just yesterday for me.      In the late '80s, early '90s, I got serious about weight training, and I spent the first seven years of the decade, or so, performing bodybuilding workouts.      I was a bodybuilding addict .  I tried almost every form of bodybuilding training  under the sun, while also attempting a hell of a lot of different diets and supplements.  (Supplements, for the most part, didn't get "advanced" until the early '00s—when creatine came on the scene mid '90s, it was absolutely revelatory, and it relegated all other supplements to sub-par status.)  (Some of those other forms o

It Came from the ‘90s: The Anabolic Diet      Today, I sat down at my computer to write the second-part in my Denis Du Breuil “rules of bulk-building” when something I was writing (about the benefits of carbohydrates) made me think—for some odd reason—about Mauro Di Pasquale’s “anabolic diet”, a diet I had great success with in the mid ‘90s.   One of my training partners had even better success with it—I remember it vividly because it was the first time that I witnessed someone get bigger while staying very lean.   (These days, bodybuilders tend to know better.   But back then, the over-riding philosophy was that you bulked up as big as possible in the off-season—gaining a combination of fat, water, and muscle—and then got really lean starting 12 to 16 weeks out from a competition—or the summer, if you didn’t compete.   Of course, “over-riding philosophy” didn’t mean that everyone did it—there were some bodybuilders sounding the trumpet against such bulking strategies,