C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

The Best Two-Way Training Splits for Inducing Hypertrophy and Unleashing Impressive Gains in Strength      I’m fond of full-body workouts.   In fact, if you’re new to training, and you stumbled upon this essay as you scoured the internet looking for the best split program to make you massive—not to mention massively strong—then understand that you’re better off utilizing full-body workouts.   At least at the start.   Eventually, you will want to move on to a split program of some sort, however.   Now, please don’t get me wrong (I mean, really, don’t), you could spend your entire training life doing nothing other than full-body workouts —whether they’re high-frequency “easy strength” programs, or heavy/light/medium programs, or just “basic” 3 day a week programs where all of the training is “ moderate ”—and never need anything else.   But eventually you’ll want to use some split programs, even if it’s just occasionally, and even if it’s don...

  A State-of-the-Art Mass & Power Program for Outlandish Gains      I’m fond of some forms of training over others.   This doesn’t mean, however, that I believe there is one training program or method that reigns supreme.   Some may make such a claim as that.   HIT enthusiasts—who seem to think like the Highlander in that there can be only one —I’m looking at you.   But there are also individual lifters and coaches who stumble upon a program that really works well for them , and they declare it to be the one program that stands above all others.   No, I believe that there are quite a few different training methods and programs that are effective.   But some are decidedly better than others, depending on your goals.   I like full-body workouts, high-frequency training, Russian-style power programs, routines that utilize the “big 4,” and old-school “classical” bodybuilding routines.   Those are all different, by the...

       This morning, I received a question from a reader asking if it’s possible to—not just get in shape or get a “good” workout—but to actually build a lot of strength, power, and mass using only dumbbells.  I responded that yes it is possible to, in fact, build a tremendous amount of overall muscle mass and strength using nothing but dumbbells.  Believe it or not, sometimes, as I explained to him, dumbbells might actually be better than barbells—and certainly, of course, better than machines—for those very goals.  Anyway, since about half of the material that I write these days—at least here on the blog—is precipitated by a reader’s question, I thought that this would make a good article, even though I have written material similar to this one before.  But if it’s true, then it bears repeating, especially in the world of strength and hypertrophy-training, where there seems to be just about as much misinformation as ever in the b...