C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Increase Your Workload and Work Capacity with this Size and Strength Building Method      Natural lifters and bodybuilders—in other words, those of us who don’t use any anabolic steroids, testosterone replacement, and other performance-enhancement drugs—need a different strategy from lifters and bodybuilders who do use them.  One of the tenets of my training philosophy, and, therefore, the methodology that my programs utilize, is that building muscle and strength, for the natural lifter, is not just about hard training sessions coupled with enough rest and recovery supplemented with a good nutritional strategy.  Instead, if you’re serious about building muscle and strength naturally, you need to follow workout programs that focus on increasing your work capacity—your ability to handle more and more “work” in the gym—through frequent training using big, compound lifts.  As you do this, and in order to do this, the workload of your training sessio...

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 ...

  Read On and Learn One of THE Keys for Becoming Strong and Powerful      In multiple articles, essays, and training programs that I’ve created, I’ve repeatedly mentioned the concept “same but different.”  It’s one of the most important concepts if you plan on getting brutally strong on a lift, any lift.  It’s so simple that—like a lot of simple things—its power is often overlooked.  But if you want to achieve your physique goals—not just strength and power but hypertrophy, as well—you need to put the principle into practice.      A couple things are key for continually increasing your strength.  First, you need variety.  As I’m fond of saying, or writing about in this case, everything works… for about 8 weeks.  Somewhere around that 8 week mark, most lifters need to make some changes.  If you’ve been at this training thing for awhile, then you probably should make changes long before even 8 weeks...