C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The 5x10 Workout Program      The longer that I have been training and working with other lifters, the more that I believe that simple, though not necessarily easy, programs are the best methods to use.  I think this is the case for the majority of lifters.  There are times when this is not so, but that’s usually for either elite athletes or programs for strength athletes at the top of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting.      In my last article on different ways that you can incorporate heavy, light, and medium workouts into your training, I mentioned a few ways that this can be done.  One of them is to keep your weights the same at each workout session but rotate the sets and/or reps.  This is in direct contradiction to the most popular method of H-L-M, Bill Starr’s 5x5 training, where you keep the sets and reps the same (5x5) but rotate the amount of weight used on the lifts.  The program here uses the firs...

The High-Set, Low-Rep Training Manifesto Part 3: Overhead Press Training       Part 1 - Legs and Back       Part 2 - Chest and Lats      It’s now time to turn our attention toward overhead training.  If you want to get as big, strong, and as jacked as humanly possible, you need to place overhead training in your lifting arsenal.  There are several reasons for its importance.  Before we get into those reasons, and then some different workout programs that are great for overhead work, I want to discuss something slightly tangential, but it also needs to be considered, especially if you’re going to get the results you want out of this series.      Assuming you have read parts 1 and 2—if you haven’t, you may be at a slight loss as to exactly what is being chewed over here, so please do so—you will know, by now, that this training methodology of high-sets (sometimes a lot of ...

  Another High-Frequency Hypertrophy Program for the Natural Lifter      I write a lot about high-frequency training (HFT).  I think on average—assuming the lifter has the time to make it to the gym frequently—it’s the best form of training for the natural lifter or bodybuilder.  When I first started writing about this form of training—which I have been doing now for more than 20 years, perhaps longer—my programs mainly focused on strength training or strength training along with concomitant mass gains.  Recently, however, I have created more and more hypertrophy programs using these methods.  Part of that probably has to do with the fact that I have personally been using HFT for my own physique goals.  As I am not getting any younger, my body often can’t handle the heavy weights that I used to enjoy training with, but it can handle high-frequency when done with “reasonable” weights.      There are differen...