C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Musings on Lifting, Life, and the Reasons for Training (with a few workouts thrown in for good measure)      Why do you train?  It’s a question you must ask yourself and it’s a question that only you can answer.  To help you with the question, I can only tell you why I train.  But to do that, we have to go back to the past a little bit.  Why did I train?  What got me started in the first place?  What kept me going?  Why do I train now and why will I continue to train long into the future?      I started training when I was pretty young, around 13 years old.  It might have been 14.  I’m not really sure, though 13 sounds about right.  It would have been in ‘86 or ‘87, when my father bought me one of those cement-filled DP weight sets for either my birthday or Christmas.  I think it was my birthday, because I remember first training in the summer, and I was born in May.  My siste...

      “In my view the best equipment anyone has for confronting the adversity that comes with hard times is the possession of a healthy, powerful body and the sense of spiritual equilibrium that comes from being centered and in solid personal control.” ~Bradley J. Steiner*      Bradley Steiner, in the pages of Ironman , penned the words above in 1995.  Apparently, he thought the world was going through some hard times back then, though I’m not really sure exactly what it was.  Bill Clinton was in the 3rd year of his presidency.  Perhaps he didn’t like Clinton—I was a Perot man myself those days—and thought the world was headed in directions that could be detrimental for its future.  Steiner passed on from this life in December of 2020, when everyone was in isolation from Covid.  I wonder what he thought of the world then?  Oh, well.  Whatever it was that he thought in ‘95, his words ring true no matter ...