C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  A.K.A. The Total Variety Regimen Old-School Advice for Breaking Through Progress Barriers (With a Little Help from Classic Bodybuilder and Writer Gene Mozee)        “Athletes in every sport suffer through periods of retrograde progress—plateaus, or slumps, during which they lose their edge and don’t play up to par.   Major league baseball players can’t get a hit, golfers can’t make a putt, basketball players can’t buy a basket, and quarterbacks can’t find a receiver with a pass.   Such is the nature of slumps.” [1]      So begins the legendary bodybuilding trainer and writer Gene Mozee in an article he penned for IronMan entitled “Plateau Busters: Punching Through the Progress Barrier” in the November, ’91 issue of that magazine.      I came across this article today while going through a box of magazines that I dragged out of my attic a week or so ago when researching my last essay on John Fa...

An Old-School Technique for Breaking a Mass-Building Plateau      I can remember rather vividly my first plateau in muscle-building.  It was 1991, and I was only seventeen years old, but I had also been training hard for a couple of years prior to this.  (I started training at the age of 15, when my father bought me my first weight training set—a DP bench, and about 120 pounds of weight from the local Sears.  By the time I was 16, I started training at a commercial gym.  It was located adjacent to the dojo where I practiced Karate-Do consistently 4 to 5 days per week.)      At the time, I used a full-body routine, where I would train 2 or 3 days per week, focusing on the basics such as squats, bench presses, chins, barbell curls, and whatnot.  (To be honest—as ashamed as I am to admit it—I didn't discover the efficacy of deadlifts and the "quick lifts"—power cleans, power snatches, et al—until several years later.)  For the...