C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

       If you’re a natural lifter who wants to gain plenty of muscle mass but also the strength to go with it, I think there are three things that are paramount.   First, you need to train heavy.   Second, you need to train often.   And third, you need to remain fresh while doing the first two.      If you’re a student of the lifting game, and if something about my above statement seems vaguely familiar, there’s an explanation for that.   I basically paraphrased the great Russian strength coach Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky, who, rather famously, said that the key to strength training was “to train as heavy as possible as often as possible while being as fresh as possible.”   That quote is well-known for a reason.   Following it judiciously will unlock a lot of strength and hypertrophy gains.      Of course, there are a couple caveats to that statement.   You need to be training with barbel...

How to Design a “Hybrid” Easy Strength Program      If you have read even an inkling of my writings—especially over the last 20 years—you know that I’m a fan of high-frequency training (HFT).   Now, I must admit that this wasn’t always the case.   If you read my early articles for IronMan magazine—from, say, 1994 to the end of that decade/century—I often recommended infrequent training done for relatively “high-intensity” and (fairly) low volume.   But my views on training frequency, volume, and intensity shifted when I started powerlifting seriously in the late ‘90s and began to use the more frequent training regimens from (predominately) Eastern Europe and the heavy/light/medium system of Bill Starr.   Before trying these regimens, I often had trouble gaining muscle and just weight in general.   While using these methods, however, I had trouble not gaining weight even when I didn’t want to!      Not everyone will...

High-Frequency Training Parameters and Programming Ideas      Yesterday, I was sitting in my garage gym—pen and paper in hand as I jotted down some different article ideas—watching my son Garrett go through a lower body session when I told him the title for this article.   I thought “Train Easy, Repeat Often” was a pretty good title.   I originally intended it to simply be the title for a workout program.      Then Garrett said, “Okay, but how easy and how often?”      I stroked my beard as I began to mull over his question and the wheels began turning in my mind.   “Good point,” I replied.   “Maybe that’s what the article should be about.   I could still outline some workout programs, but I could mainly just explain how much you should train based on how frequent you want to lift.”      Garrett gave me a thumbs up, then returned to his sumo deficit deadlifts.   I doubt ...