C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       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...

     Sometimes the best workouts for building muscle mass look almost easy to the casual trainee or observer.  Too many times, lifters equate how hard you train at each workout to the results that are produced.  But it just doesn’t work this way in reality.  Some of the biggest, strongest lifters and bodybuilders I’ve known looked as if they were taking it easy in their workouts.  When I first witnessed this as a young man in the gyms of the early ‘90s, I chalked it up to “genetics.”  After all, I was told in many of the magazines from that era that, if you were a “hardgainer,” you needed to train with brief but incredibly hard workout sessions.  But with many years of training—and training others—under my belt, I just don’t think that’s the case.  Now, don’t get me wrong (I mean, really don’t get me wrong), there are definitely times when you should train hard and push it in the gym.  But the majority of the time, belie...

An 8-Week Program for Monstrous Mass and Power Gains      Over the years, I have often received the following question from a reader (though it comes in various guises): “If you could only do one exercise for the rest of your life, what would it be?”  I understand the question.  Or, at least, I understand where the question comes from.  Readers simply want to know what exercise I deem the best.      The truth is that I never really answer that question.  Mainly because I just don’t understand it. On what planet would I live where I could only do one exercise?  But as said, I do understand the rationale for the question in the first place.  And the answer I usually give is something along the lines of this: “Well, I don’t know about one exercise, but if I could only do a handful, they would be these (fill-in-the-blank).”  And the truth is, if I’m being quite honest, that I don’t always give the same ex...