C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Some Thoughts, Tips, and Ideas on the Standard Basics of Eating and Training      I often extol other lifters to “get back to the basics,” when it comes to both training and eating.  Sometimes you’re stuck in a rut and need to get back to the basics.  Maybe you haven’t seen any gains in either size or strength—whatever it is that you’re trying to gain—and so you need to get back to the basics.  Or maybe you’ve been following too many convoluted multi-exercise, multi-angle routines and need to get back to the basic barbell movements.      Anytime I get confused about my own training, I do the same thing.  It’s what everyone needs to do on occasion; get back to the basics of simple, but not necessarily easy, methods of training and eating.       Seems pretty common sense, which it is, but I realized something else the other day when I was having a conversation with a young man: not everyone understands what the basics actually are.      It happened this way: A few days ago, I was che

        “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” ~Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder      When it comes to building prodigious amounts of strength and/or muscle mass, you must learn to plan your training, program based on your plan, and then make assessments throughout the application of your program.  If you can’t do these three things, then, to be honest, you have little chance of success.  Planning, programming, and assessing may not be “sexy” but they are vital and necessary to achieving your goals.      It all starts with a good plan, and you must have a plan, but, as with the best laid plans of mice and men, it will often go awry, which is where assessment is as important as both the plan and the programming.      First, what do you want out of your training?  You can’t plan unless you’re specific about your goals.   I have written this elsewhere but it bears repeating here: you will not achieve your goals—in training, in life, in anything, really—unless you’re honest about w