C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Can a Lifter Really Train Using Instinct Alone? My Slightly Rambling Thoughts on the Subject      Ever since I first picked up a bodybuilding magazine sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, I’ve read about so-called instinctive training.  Even then (as there are now) there were debates over whether or not one could train “instinctively.”  A lot of bodybuilders, once they became advanced enough, seemed to naturally incline toward instinctive training.  Vic Richards—perhaps bodybuilding’s first true “mass monster”—trained in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard manner, but he simply called it instinctive training.  He would show up at the gym, have absolutely nothing planned, then did whatever he thought felt “right” when he hit the weights.  On the opposite side of that, you had Mike Mentzer , and others who took a more “scientific” approach to training (or at least thought they did—there might be more science to what we call instinctive tr...