C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Some Thoughts, Tips, and Ideas on the Standard Basics of Eating and Training      I often extol other lifters to “get back to the basics,” when it comes to both training and eating.  Sometimes you’re stuck in a rut and need to get back to the basics.  Maybe you haven’t seen any gains in either size or strength—whatever it is that you’re trying to gain—and so you need to get back to the basics.  Or maybe you’ve been following too many convoluted multi-exercise, multi-angle routines and need to get back to the basic barbell movements.      Anytime I get confused about my own training, I do the same thing.  It’s what everyone needs to do on occasion; get back to the basics of simple, but not necessarily easy, methods of training and eating.       Seems pretty common sense, which it is, but I realized something else the other day when I was having a conversation with a young man: not everyone understands what the basics actually are.      It happened this way: A few days ago, I was che

     If you don't know already, I'm really not a fan of what is commonly called "H.I.T." training, and I'm REALLY not a fan of Mike Mentzer.  However, this doesn't mean that I have a problem with H.I.T. training as it was initially conceived.  What follows is a post I did around ten years ago that I thought would be good to re-post as a Thursday Throwback, especially since I have noticed a small resurgence of interest in Mentzer. REAL H.I.T.   Make  Real  Gains with Brief, Intense Workout Programs The back of Dorian Yates, probably the best-built  ALL TIME of any H.I.T. proponent.       For years now, high intensity training (commonly referred to as H.I.T.) has been one of the most controversial training methods in the bodybuilding world.    The proponents of H.I.T. seem to think that it’s the only method capable of truly transforming the “average”, drug-free bodybuilder.    On the other side you have proponents of  volume  workouts (one such proponent has bee

  A.K.A “Simple Workouts + Heavy Training = Effective Results” C.S. dragging a sled on the cover of his book "Ultimate Strength."  Read on to discover why you MUST drag or carry different objects in order to maximize your results! I have written about it so many times that you wouldn’t think it needs repeating, but the truth is that it does!  I’m talking about getting “back-to-the-basics”, about our inability to stop making things so complicated, and just do simple, hard, basic, result-producing workouts.  And I also think that the truth is that we will always need to remind ourselves of this because it is in our nature to make things “complicated”, to always be searching for some more complex but somehow “better” program that will produce results even quicker for us.  Even though we really “should” know better, and even though we do know better, we tend to always make this mistake. And this goes for myself, as well.  Maybe not so much with barbell training, although at on