C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  A Simple Method for Using Bodyweight Workouts as a Form of Muscle Building      After writing my last bodyweight training article— Bodyweight Training and Beyond: Lessons Learned from Martial Arts —I started making some more notes for Part 4.  However, while I was doing that, I was thinking about trainees who might want a simple way to use bodyweight workouts to build muscle.  So, I’m writing this piece as sort of an “in between” essay before I finish Part 4 of my Bodyweight Training and Beyond series.      The method discussed here is good for you if you want to use bodyweight training as your primary method of hypertrophy.  This is not an article for elite athletes, who might need more strength, speed, power, or a combination of those 3.  It’s also not for you if you’re already well-versed in bodyweight training and are already capable of highly voluminous, intense bodyweight sessions.  However, if you a...

A Hybrid High-Frequency Training Program for a Combination of Size and Strength      For more than 20 years, I have preached the benefits of high-frequency training (HFT) programs.  First in the pages of some of the major bodybuilding magazines, such as IronMan magazine and Planet Muscle , and then on the blog when I started it in 2009.  For the most part, the training I recommended was for strength first, with size, if it occurred, as more of a side-effect of the strength and power training.  And for more than a decade, one of my favorite ways to use HFT is through so-called easy strength methods.  However, I have in the last couple years proposed the theory of using an “easy muscle” approach, where you largely keep the “tenets” of easy strength but do it for higher repetitions, with the sole goal of hypertrophy.      I’m not alone in thinking that this might be a good method for many seeking gains in muscle mass....

Some Thoughts on Attaining Your Training Goals      It won’t be long—about a month and a half—and the gyms will be filled with new members, intent to get in shape or lose weight as part of their New Year’s resolutions.  They’ll probably quit sometime in February.      I have long believed that the reason for this—well, outside of the fact that it’s not something they really want to do in the first place—is because the approach they take, at least here in America, is wrong.  We live in a culture—at least, a gym culture; I suppose this applies to other areas, too—that is all or nothing .  You either train all-out, balls-to-the-wall, foot-to-the-floor (use whatever pithy little slogans you can think of) or you don’t train at all.  And to get in shape, it’s not just weights, either.  Nope, you gotta start running 5 miles a day, and throwing a medicine ball against a wall hundreds of times in a session, then battling...