C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

How to Select the Weights Used During Your Workouts      Bill Starr said one time that the most confusing aspect of setting up a strength program is selecting the poundages to be used for the various sets of an exercise.   A lot of lifters can’t decide the weight to start with or the weights to utilize for all the intermediate sets as they work their way up to a heavy set of 5 or a max triple, double, or single.   Starr even said that he spent more time giving advice on this than any other subject in lifting.      I personally receive more questions about other things—a lot of lifters need help with an assortment of training stuff before they even get around to deciding weight selection—but I have noticed that this confuses a lot of lifters compared to many subjects.   And it’s not just beginners, either.   A lot of advanced lifters get confused, especially when changing over to a new program.      Pe...

  Simple, Easy-to-Follow Programs for Unleashing Size and Strength Gains     While working on the next installment of my series on HFT yesterday, I received an email from a reader who was a little confused—perhaps more than a little confused would be more appropriate—about how he should set up his workout program.  And, as with a lot of questions that I get asked and are then turned into an essay or article, I thought it would be good to write an article about some easy and simple workout plans that are also quite productive—the same kind of workouts that I suggested to this young man.      Periodically, I receive these sorts of emails from readers who are confused over some of my recommendations.  After all, I do write about various forms of training and lifting.  They are often different because, for one, different people respond well to different forms of training, and, two, different lifters have different goals....

        “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 ...

 The Mostly True Exploits and Tales of Bodybuilding, Powerlifting, and Other Strength Sports Across the South, from Texas to Alabama I wrote the original article (the inspiration for this piece) a little earlier than the time of this picture, where I squatted in the mid 500s at a bodyweight of 173 (around 20 years ago). Chapter One: The Mississippi Power Parable      From the first time I read "Powerlifting Basics: Texas Style" by Paul Kelso, and ever since I was enamored by the "fiction-style" articles of Bill Starr—of which he wrote plenty—I have wanted to write a book along mostly those same lines.      The seed of this began with an article I wrote in 2001 for IronMan Magazine  entitled "The Power Parable."  In the end, I began to write different "styles" of articles and got away from what you will read here.      The following is sort of a "redux" of that initial article.  Since I wrote this 22 years ago, the set...