C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Use This Training Concept for Better Athletic Performance and/or New Gains in Size and Strength      In my article The Fighter’s Physique , I mentioned the benefit of “weaving” together one’s strength training with one’s fighting art in the same session.  While proper strength training improves athletic performance, martial arts or otherwise, it will have even more benefits when both the strength training and the sport one competes in are performed simultaneously.      This concept is nothing new.  The idea was originally “created” by German strength coach Peter Tschiene in the 1980s, though I have a feeling that other athletes going back decades—or perhaps even centuries—were already using the method, even if Tschiene coined the term “mixed training” and was the first to widely promote it.  Monks at the Shaolin Temple were combining resistance training—bodyweight calisthenics, isometric holds, and lifting stone locks (ca...

On Plain, Simple, but Effective Workouts and Progressive Training Programs       Zhazhou asked Nanquan, “What is the Way?”      Nanquan said, “Ordinary mind is the Way.”      “Just watch children playing.  Eat vegetable soup instead of duck stew” ~Matsuo Basho (the most famous haiku poet of Edo-era Japan; this was his advice to poets)      When in pursuit of our goals from resistance training—whether it’s size, strength, both, or just aesthetics—it’s only natural to look toward what you want to achieve down the road.  That is, after all, the reason that you are training to begin with.  You want to achieve.  You are in pursuit of mass and power.  Maybe you don’t want to just achieve but you want to excel.  But when we are constantly focused on the future, we take ourselves away from the now , the present moment where we are actually lifting.   ...

Unique Training Concepts and Ideas for Gaining Size and Strength or Getting in Shape      I have a lot of stuff that I’m trying to write.  So much that it can get overwhelming—a book I’m trying to finish but seem to constantly get stuck in neutral in the process, about 20 different notes for articles and essays, along with a handful of others that I’ve already begun and need to simply finish—that I don’t really know where to start.  Or finish.  With that in mind, I thought it might be good to just write an “odds and ends” essay, the very thing that you’re now reading.  These are a few of the ideas that I wrote down for some articles, but I’m not really sure if there’s enough there for each one to comprise an article of its own.  I thought, well, what-the-hell, I’ll just throw a few of them together in one essay.      With that short preamble out of the way, let’s get going and see where this thing will go. Rest-P...