C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Bodyweight Training and More for Upper Body Size and Strength      You don’t need much equipment to build a good physique.  A lot of trainees spend all their time at the gym doing endless bench press exercises with barbells and dumbbells along with an assorted array of machine movements for their chest, shoulders, and triceps.  Most gym-goers could get equally good results, and perhaps even better gains, with little other than dips and push-ups, however.  Push-ups seem so “basic” that many think there isn’t much use for them once one gets past the beginner stage or has access to “better” exercises.  But they still work as well as about anything.  And old-school bodybuilders and lifters from yesteryear often called dips the “upper body squat” for a reason.  Dips can produce big-time upper body gains.      Dips and push-ups have been around for a long time.  Well over a thousand years ago, Roman and Gre...

In my recent post dealing with building a home gym (and designing home gym workouts), I ended with a discussion of effective workouts using nothing other than a barbell.  And then I gave some brief tips for "getting creative" with your workouts.  One of the things I mentioned was combining your barbell exercises with bodyweight movements, but I didn't go into any detail.  In my next post on building a home gym, and the training that goes along with it, I will discuss workouts incorporating a bench and some dumbbells.  But the more I thought about it, the more I decided I needed to write a post - and, in fact, the subject is worthy of multiple posts - dealing exclusively with bodyweight movements combined with basic barbell (and dumbbell) exercises. George Hackenschmidt was a turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) strongman who built almost all of his strength with nothing other than a barbell and bodyweight movements. These workout ideas are effective for both home gym t...

Home Workouts for Mass, Power, Strength, and Muscular Development! PART ONE: Just the Basic Barbell C.S.: Here is a photo I took of my home gym this past weekend. For well over a decade, I trained at a commercial gym.  When I wanted to take my powerlifting training seriously, however, in the late '90s, I decided it was time to trade in the commercial gym for a good home gym.  This is probably the opposite of what most people do, as many lifters will begin training at home on a basic weight set, then decide to acquire a gym membership once they "get serious" with lifting.  But I relished the idea of creating a good, dungeoness home gym free of the distractions on offer at any commercial gym. In this article (and the ones that will follow) I will offer some tips, tricks, and advice for creating a home gym conducive to hardcore mass and power training, and provide some ideas of the training you can do at each stage of your home gym's development. Getting Started To start...

A.K.A: Building Muscle and Strength Under Lockdown and Self-Isolation If you're anything like me (and I have a good feeling that many of you are), you haven't left the house in a couple days.  And I have a good feeling, you may even be reading this blog entry because you're surfing the internet a little more than usual in self-isolation/lockdown/quarantine mode - whichever one better suits your situation - in hopes of finding some ways to continue your gains (or at least not bring them to a grinding halt) while you have no way to make it to the gym.  But if you're also like me (and this where I also have a good feeling that many of you are decidedly not  like me), you have a full gym at your disposal in the confines of your garage, replete with squat rack, deadlift and Oly-lifting platform, a bad-ass Forza bench, a good 1,500 lbs of free weights, not to mention various other bands, chains, benches, and other assorted goodies such as sleds and sandbags.  Ok...