C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Some Thoughts on Training and Eating      When it comes to “getting in shape,” the average gym-goer tends to go about it wrong.  Man.  Woman.  Doesn’t matter.  The problem typically made is that they train “tough” and they also eat “tough.”  By this, I mean that one usually starts doing a hard-as-hell, bust-your-ass workout plan combined with a dietary regimen of very little calories.  Oh, this works.  For the short term.  Until it stops working completely, not to mention the fact that it’s mind-numbingly painful.      You can forgive the “average” person, I suppose.  They probably watched too many episodes of that god-awful “Biggest Loser” show, where such tactics of pain-as-progress were put on the television for the world to see.      But when you train big and eat little , you’re doomed to fail.  Training a lot and eating a little is the primary reason, I have a feeling, that most people don’t succeed at their fitness goals.  At least, not in the long term.      I’ve said it bef

      There is, at least in certain places online, a lot of “chatter” about whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting.  Many folks who used to previously tout intermittent fasting as some sort of miracle of modern dieting have backtracked, and now a lot of those “influencers” (or whoever-the-heck they might be) recommend a more standard, traditional approach to dieting for building muscle and burning fat.  Recently, there was even that god-awful “study” from the American Heart Association that showed a “91% increased likelihood of death” from heart complications by following intermittent fasting.  Now, this isn’t the place to discuss the real problems and politics around that so-called study, it will suffice for now to point out that its metrics were just plain wrong.   And, of course, on the flip side of all of that you also have the defenders, rightly so, of the benefits of various forms of fasting.      My point in this essay, however, is that most of the above—no m

A.K.A: The Wildest and Craziest Muscle-Building, Fat-Burning Diet the World has Ever Seen! That's Right—EVER! Off and on, over the course of the past decade or so, I have thought repeatedly about writing what you are now staring at on your computer (or phone) screen.  But for some reason, I could just never bring myself to do it.  Maybe if I would have decided to write it as a sort of "museum piece," an essay from my favorite decade of bodybuilding (that I personally trained during) where I looked at Stewart's dietary principles from a more critical angle, well, perhaps then I would  have written this several years ago.  For the longest time, my "It Came from the '90s" essays were the most popular posts on this blog, only recently overtaken by all of my "Classic Bodybuilding" articles.  But the thing is this : I actually agree with most of what Stewart says here, and I agreed with it the first time I read this bit of (what others would call) in

Three Ways to Make Dieting Easy—and Even Increase Your Performance By Matthew Sloan author Matthew Sloan      Any form of dieting can be stressful on the body, the mind, and your emotions, and sometimes the idea of "just push through it" isn't enough. Sometimes we all need some extra motivation or special methods to get us through the day or week. So here are three methods I personally use to make dieting easier, and I think any serious bodybuilder, lifter, or strength athlete can use them to his or her advantage. The 3 Methods      The first method is to just simply switch up your training . This switch up should be something " fun" or "exciting" to give yourself something to look forward to (because dieting for weeks on end can get repetitive). For example, if you are following my “lean mass-made-simple program” from a few posts back, and are getting bored with the training, then try something new for a day, then get back on

       Vince Gironda—the famed "Iron Guru"—had some of the wildest tips and techniques for building muscle than any bodybuilding trainer who ever lived.  Not only that, but he was solely responsible for some of the best training programs ever invented.      A little lesson from the past: Sometime in the late '90s (I can't remember the exact year), Charles Poliquin published his "German Volume Training" in the pages of the now defunct, but on the whole outstanding publication Muscle Media 2000 .  (This was before MM2K became just plain ol'  Muscle Media , and from then on just plain ol' sucked!)  German Volume training was decidedly effective, true, but Poliquin marketed it as some kind of new, "revolutionary" program, which it, sorry to say, clearly wasn't.  It was the old standby "10 sets of 10" regimen that I had written about in IronMan magazine  as early as '94, and the very program that Vince Gironda created  at