C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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...

  A "Both/And" Approach to Training      We often live in a world of dichotomies, juxtapositions, and sometimes the downright oxymoronic.  Despite the obviousness, however, of the “yin/yang” of our world, we, as people, tend to take an “either/or” approach to life.  This is especially so in the worlds of bodybuilding, strength training, and, really, just general fitness and health.  It’s either high-volume with a lot of sets and reps or “high-intensity” with brief, incredibly hard workouts.  Or it’s Carnivore and other high-fat, animal-forward diets versus vegan and high-carb, incredibly low-fat diets.  To paraphrase Kipling, East is East and West is West, and never shall the ‘twain meet.  But the problem is that’s simply not the way of things .      Good religions, philosophies, and theologies always take a “both/and” approach to things.  I once asked a priest what he thought defined a “heresy” as...

   The following is an article of mine that first appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Planet Muscle  magazine .  I thought this would be a good "Thursday Throwback" piece since I just mentioned Bulgarian-style training in my recent essay "4 Tips for Serious Lifters" where I presented some ideas of strength coach Nick Horton - a proponent of the "Bulgarian method" - who said "overtraining doesn't exist."  Whether you agree with that statement or not, you shouldn't really argue against it, or for it, unless you have at least attempted the sort of training that Horton was discussing.      (With regards to the defunct Planet Muscle , in the future I would also like to do a piece on its founder and editor, Jeff Everson, who died suddenly in 2019 at the age of 68.  Everson and I became friends over the course of me working for him.  And I miss my friend.)      On with our Throwback: Iconic picture of the iconic weightlifte...