C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Some Thoughts on Attaining Your Training Goals      It won’t be long—about a month and a half—and the gyms will be filled with new members, intent to get in shape or lose weight as part of their New Year’s resolutions.  They’ll probably quit sometime in February.      I have long believed that the reason for this—well, outside of the fact that it’s not something they really want to do in the first place—is because the approach they take, at least here in America, is wrong.  We live in a culture—at least, a gym culture; I suppose this applies to other areas, too—that is all or nothing .  You either train all-out, balls-to-the-wall, foot-to-the-floor (use whatever pithy little slogans you can think of) or you don’t train at all.  And to get in shape, it’s not just weights, either.  Nope, you gotta start running 5 miles a day, and throwing a medicine ball against a wall hundreds of times in a session, then battling...

  The Best High-Volume, High-Intensity, Low-Frequency Programs for Mass and Strength & Power      Yesterday, while I was finishing up, ironically enough, my latest high-frequency training article, I received an email from a reader.  He said that he’d been using a couple of my HFT programs the last few months.  He said that he got pretty good results from them, and he now understands why it is that I “push” them.  But, he also said, he had an issue.  He didn’t enjoy training with them as much as he did with high-volume, high-intensity, low-frequency programs.  He said that he just liked training with a multi-split program where he trained each muscle group just once per week.  So, he wanted to know what I thought was the “best” program that didn’t involve high-frequency or full-body workouts.  The remainder of this essay is essentially what I wrote to him, albeit in more detail and a lot more fleshed out.  Here...

       Stop trying to do so many things at one time.   Really.   Just stop.   If you want to achieve a goal— any goal, but we’ll stick with size and strength here—then you need to focus on that one goal.   Duh, right?   Pretty obvious.   But, as I’ve written in other essays, the obvious sure does seem to get overlooked by the vast majority of our lifting population.   So, obvious though it may be, let me repeat. Focus on one goal at a time .      I started thinking about all this, and the cognitive wheels began turning in my mind to write an essay on it, when I read these words from Dan John in an article of his on the same topic.   He wrote: One of the most overlooked aspects of muscle-building programs is a four-letter word: STOP. Stop playing basketball. Stop jogging. Stop doing cardio. I swear, if I get one more email like this, I will do something rash: “Hey, Dan: I’m interested in doing High...