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 ...

  The High-Set, Low-Rep Training Manifesto Part 1: Training the Legs and Back      In several of my recent essays and articles, I have discussed various HFT methods, most of them using higher volume.  Starting with this article, I’m now going to turn my attention to a series of essays on (what I believe to be) the most effective method for attaining a combination of muscle mass and serious strength: workouts that combine high sets with (relatively) low reps.  I’m going to do a series for one primary reason—different lifts/muscle groups should be trained in different ways.  I will cover legs and back (this one), shoulders (overhead press training), chest and lats, and arm training.  Each of those are best developed when trained a little bit different from one another.  So, we will have 4 parts, with, perhaps, some additional essays on how to bring the 4 together into a cohesive, holistic strength program or on anything else that come...