C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Can a Lifter Really Train Using Instinct Alone? My Slightly Rambling Thoughts on the Subject      Ever since I first picked up a bodybuilding magazine sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, I’ve read about so-called instinctive training.  Even then (as there are now) there were debates over whether or not one could train “instinctively.”  A lot of bodybuilders, once they became advanced enough, seemed to naturally incline toward instinctive training.  Vic Richards—perhaps bodybuilding’s first true “mass monster”—trained in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard manner, but he simply called it instinctive training.  He would show up at the gym, have absolutely nothing planned, then did whatever he thought felt “right” when he hit the weights.  On the opposite side of that, you had Mike Mentzer , and others who took a more “scientific” approach to training (or at least thought they did—there might be more science to what we call instinctive tr...

A 6-Week HFT Program for Fixing Muscle Imbalances, Getting Stronger, and Feeling Your Best      Sometimes, the more a lifter trains, the worse he looks.  I say “he” for a reason.  You just don’t see this problem so much in women, but we’ll get around to that in just a little bit.  The problem, to put it quite simply, is imbalance.  If you spend the majority of your training time blasting your pecs and “bombing and blitzing” your biceps, you may, indeed, develop large, muscular, and even downright strong, pecs and biceps muscles, but at an expense.  Because if a lifter keeps this up, he will end up looking more like an ape than the well-developed towering mass of muscle that he wants.  Doubly so if he’s eating everything in sight.  His gut grows along with his chest and biceps, turning him into a mountain gorilla minus the strong back, traps, shoulders, and legs that I’m pretty sure all mountain gorillas probably have.  But...