C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Part One: Arnold’s “Golden 6” Workout for Bulk-Building (Plus a Bulk-Building “Extra”)      I often wonder what my teenage life would be like if I was a teenager right now in this generation of text messaging, smart phones, Wikipedia (and therefore information at your fingertips), along with blogs, YouTube videos, and Instagram stories filled with an absolute plethora of mass-building, strength-gaining information.  But, the thing is, I’m glad that I was a teenager in the 1980s.  I think it’s the reason I have a vast, encyclopedic, almost kaleidoscopical knowledge of hypertrophy training and strength-building.  And I’m really not bragging about my bodybuilding “expertise.”  You see, I don’t think I’m different from anyone else.  Because anyone who read every single bodybuilding magazine that hit the newsstand month-after-month, year-after-year from cover-to-cover many times—and did so from the mid ‘80s all the way up to at least...

  Casey Viator’s Old-School “Killer” Biceps Program      Casey Viator is probably most well-known—almost infamous, truth be told—for his role in the so-called “Colorado Experiment” used by Arthur Jones to “prove” the validity of his brief, basic “H.I.T” Nautilus training over other training methodologies.  (Jones invented the Nautilus machine, by the way, so he had some money—and a reputation—at stake.)  Anyway, Viator gained over 60 pounds in only 28 days using (something like) just 12 workouts that lasted no longer than 30 minutes each.  This is not the place to get into the Colorado Experiment—I don’t think I’ve written about it before now, so maybe I’ll leave a future essay just to it—but let’s just say that a lot of the “facts” may not be the facts, after all.  Especially if Boyer Coe is to be believed.  In a few interviews with him in some of the ‘90s muscle rags, he said that Viator would actually sneak away from the Nautilus...

  The "Original" Rapid Mass-Gaining Regimen A picture of a young Ken Leistner, one of the modern "popularizers" of 20-rep programs such as the one below.       When writing my “Old School is Still the Best… and Always Will Be” essay, I mentioned that I would begin to write regular programs on various old school training regimens.  And even though it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote about a 20-rep squat program (in a post a few months back on power rack training), and even though several of my articles/posts have mentioned 20-rep squat programs, I still thought that this would be the best program to begin any series on old-school muscle-building.      The 20-rep squat program is the original mass-builder.  Before steroids even came onto the scene, a couple of men named J.C. Hise—who first used the program to great success—and Mark Berry—who first wrote about the program—made this form of training the method for pac...