C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  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.  Your goal(s), how you respond to training, your training history, y

        “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

 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 setting is in the late

  It never fails. It's an utter truth. And no matter how many times we remind ourselves NOT to do it, we do it anyway. So what is "it"?  IT  is our natural tendency to want to make things more complex; it's our natural tendency to slide away  from the simple, and to look for things of more complexity; it is our urge - no matter how many times we tell ourselves that it's going to be different - to NOT  do the basic training that we should  be doing! The "original" power-builder  Pat Casey built his mass and strength using the basics! Why do we do this?  The primary reason is probably nothing more than human nature.  We convince ourselves that we will get better results if only  we do more - more exercises, more sets and reps, more days of training, multiple exercises-per-bodypart, endless variations of different exercises... the list seems to go on and on. I suppose before going much further, I should add a caveat: variation  and volume  are both importan