C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A Double-Split Program for Weekend Strength Warriors      A good portion of the material I write on my blog is precipitated by questions I receive in emails.  Of course, a lot of the questions that I get have been covered in my various essays and articles, so I don’t write additional material about those questions.  This morning, however, I received a question that I thought might deserve its own essay since there might be other readers in a similar situation.  To paraphrase, the questioner asked me if it would be a good idea to use a “double-split” (where you train twice in one day) on the weekends since he has plenty of time to train on Saturday and Sunday but little time for training during the week.  His plan is to get 4 training sessions in on the weekend, then try to fit one more workout in during the week.  After a few emails back and forth to understand his training history, I told him that, yes, I do think it’s a good idea, espe...

Double-Split Training, Part Two Understanding Why Double-Split Training is Effective      Here’s a cool thing about double-split training: there’s an endless amount of variety that you have at your disposal when it comes to double-split workouts.   In fact, however-the-heck it is that you like to train, you can make your training a bit more effective by turning all of those workouts into double-split programs.      Do you like to train each bodypart once-per-week, by training one bodypart-per-day, and blasting the living hell out of it, then giving it a week to recover?   (As I’ve written many times before, this was a very effective training system that I used to pack on pounds of muscle when I was much younger.)   If that’s your cup of tea, no problem, here’s what your double-split program could look like: Mondays: Chest Tuesdays: Back Wednesdays: Legs (quads and hamstrings) Thursdays: Shoulders Fr...

      In the summer of ’91, I dove headlong into training.   I read all of the various bodybuilding magazines that I could get a hold of—or, at least, all of them that I could both afford and get a hold of.   I was lucky, however, in that I had an off-again/on-again training partner who had stacks of magazines from around that time frame—primarily Ironman , Muscle and Fitness , and Flex —and I also had an uncle who had many older issue of Iron Man and Flex , plus things such as Strength and Health , and other such forgotten magazines that seemed (to me, at least) as if they were from another era.      Ironman had the most influence on me due to the “hardgainer” articles written by such writers as Steve Holman, Randal Strossen, Bradley Steiner, and Richard Winnett.   All of these preached a “less-is-better” and “hard and heavy, but infrequent” training philosophies.   (Not to say that Ironman only presented training ph...