C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Some Thoughts on Training and Eating      When it comes to “getting in shape,” the average gym-goer tends to go about it wrong.  Man.  Woman.  Doesn’t matter.  The problem typically made is that they train “tough” and they also eat “tough.”  By this, I mean that one usually starts doing a hard-as-hell, bust-your-ass workout plan combined with a dietary regimen of very little calories.  Oh, this works.  For the short term.  Until it stops working completely, not to mention the fact that it’s mind-numbingly painful.      You can forgive the “average” person, I suppose.  They probably watched too many episodes of that god-awful “Biggest Loser” show, where such tactics of pain-as-progress were put on the television for the world to see.      But when you train big and eat little , you’re doomed to fail.  Training a lot and eating a little is the primary reason, I have a feeling, that most people don’t succeed at their fitness goals.  At least, not in the long term.      I’ve said it bef

     For the last few days, I've been working on a post/article on the original Muscle Beach Iron Guru Vince Gironda. That piece will be much more extensive than this one, but it will also be largely about his training principles, revolutionary as they were at the time Gironda unleashed them upon the bodybuilding world. But in rummaging/scouring through old Ironman and MuscleMag International articles, I came across an article in the October '95 Ironman where Gironda listed his weight-gaining suggestions. Gironda at his peak      Gironda had so many innovative - not to mention downright cool sometimes - training ideas that it would be almost impossible to discuss them in one article, but I will discuss a couple of other additional nutrition ideas he had at the end of this post. But first, the tips! Here they are*:Drink water during your workout. Drink at least one pint after each muscle group worked, but dont' drink out of a fountain, because you swallow air.      It&#

       Vince Gironda—the famed "Iron Guru"—had some of the wildest tips and techniques for building muscle than any bodybuilding trainer who ever lived.  Not only that, but he was solely responsible for some of the best training programs ever invented.      A little lesson from the past: Sometime in the late '90s (I can't remember the exact year), Charles Poliquin published his "German Volume Training" in the pages of the now defunct, but on the whole outstanding publication Muscle Media 2000 .  (This was before MM2K became just plain ol'  Muscle Media , and from then on just plain ol' sucked!)  German Volume training was decidedly effective, true, but Poliquin marketed it as some kind of new, "revolutionary" program, which it, sorry to say, clearly wasn't.  It was the old standby "10 sets of 10" regimen that I had written about in IronMan magazine  as early as '94, and the very program that Vince Gironda created  at