C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

                4 Tips for Serious Lifters Loaded Carries - one of the 4 tips for serious lifters      I have been lifting weights since, I think, 1986 or ‘87, when, for either my 13th or 14th birthday, my father bought me one of those cement-filled, plastic DP weight sets replete with a flimsy bench.  I’ve come a long way since then - in other words, I’ve gotten friggin’ old - but I’ve never stopped lifting, and I’ve seen a LOT of different exercises, workout routines, and training programs (some good, most not) done by a lot of different people.  In other words, in 36 (maybe 37) years of training - and paying attention - I’ve seen damn near anything and everything you can think of in the lifting world.  And so I’m also pretty sure that in another 36 (or 37) years, the following tips will be just as good then as they are now. Consistency Trumps Everything       “It doesn’t matter ho...

  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...

High-Frequency Training for Muscle and Strength with the Two-Barbell "Plus" Program Matthew Sloan demonstrates more lean muscle built with HFT      This is part of my on-going series on how to build muscle and strength fast  by using low-rep, multi-set, high-frequency training.  If you haven't read my other, recent posts on the subject, you may want to do so before continuing with this article.  If not, then this article certainly stands on its own two feet. The Two-Barbell "Plus" Program      This program begins with its starting point something that I have, in the past, called the "two-barbell rule".  (Others, such as Dan John, have certainly written about it as well.)  The two-barbell "rule" says this: at the start of any workout, begin with two barbell exercises before proceeding to anything else.  I recommend using it in conjunction with my "Big 5" rules.  In summary, even though I have discussed this ...

Simplify Your Training, Your Diet, and  Your Life to Receive Your Best Results Ever!       Okay, perhaps the title of this article is  slightly over the top.  After all, some of you probably have achieved some pretty good results in your days spent pulling, pushing, and battling the barbell.  But, for a great majority, it could be pretty close to the truth.  If you have spent weeks, months, or, possibly, even years toiling away at ineffective—and often too damn complicated—diets and training programs, it could be that you've never really seen the results you want, much less what you're actually capable of achieving.      After training and working with many bodybuilders, lifters, and average men and women (my favorite people to train were always just average women who wanted to get in shape—they always trained hard, never complained, always did what I asked of them) over the years, the largest culprit for lack of gains—hands d...

 Bulk-Building Brutality H.I.T. Training Using the Big 5 System Mike Mentzer, the most well-known H.I.T. proponent      I'll  admit it: I’m not a big fan of high-intensity training. [1]   While a few people are neutral on the subject, most people either love or loathe high-intensity training principles.   I have, for the most part, been in the “loathe” category.   However, I do think it has its place, and I also think it’s been effective for a lot of lifters—when used properly, at least.      In the past, I have been critical of it for several reasons:   I think it breeds laziness.   I think that it doesn’t allow the lifter to build enough power and strength when performed for high repetitions.   I don’t think that it’s effective at increasing work capacity.   I think it’s for “whiners” and “complainers” who claim to be “hard-gainers”, but who in fact want an excuse to not train frequen...

Mass Made Easy (or at Least Simple)      I have been lifting weights hard now for over 20 years—the “training bug” hit me big right out of high school, back in ’92.   (I had been lifting even before that, during my last few years of high school, but that training was just to help my martial arts; I more or less just played around with weights during those years.)   I devoured every single article that I could come across during my first few years of training.   There was no such thing as the Internet at the time—yeah, I know, that’s hard for some of you young ‘uns to believe—so this meant reading every single bodybuilding and fitness magazine that hit the newsstands.   And it also meant reading every damn article in each one of those rags.   (Luckily I also had an uncle who had a lot of old Iron Man and Strength and Health magazines from the ‘70s and before—I devoured the hell out of those magazines too, and later much of that stuff...