C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  An “Easy” Full-Body Muscle-Building Program      I have written quite a bit over the past year on high-frequency training.  I have a semi-regular, ongoing series discussing how to use HFT for various goals—general strength, powerlifting, fat loss, and whatnot.  Although I have written some about it—such as this post from last May—I would like to do a few different essays on HFT for hypertrophy .      The program I’ve designed for this article has its roots in the full-body workout programs of the old-time bodybuilders from the ‘30s and early ‘40s where they used, primarily, full-body workouts performed 3x per week and multiple exercises for a limited number of sets per exercise—often no more than 1 set per movement, sometimes 2 at the most .  In fact, it wasn’t until the likes of Clancy Ross and Leo Stern—who trained with each other in the military—that bodybuilders started utilizing 3 or 4 sets per exercise in t...

  …but Moderate Most of the Time The great Tommy Kono, the inspiration for this essay Programming Made Simple      The legendary Tommy Kono—an Olympic gold-medalist in weightlifting and Mr. Universe; you don’t see that any-damn-more—believed in following the “American” system of weight training.  In the ‘60s (Tommy won the gold medal at the Olympics in ‘52 and ‘56; the silver medal at the ‘60 Games) he believed that too many American lifters were attempting to follow the Soviet-style (also used by the Cubans) that involved meticulously planning exactly what one was going to lift each day, and using a high-volume of training with multiple auxiliary movements (think of this as similar to Westside “conjugate” training today) or lifters of that era were following the Bulgarian style of heavy, daily maximal training.  And by the “American” system of training, Kono meant following simple, basic workout programs that rotated between hard, easy, and mo...

  Designing Your Own Workout Program Part One: Full-Body Workouts      I thought it would be a good idea to do a series on how to design your own workout program.  How much interest there is in this first piece will determine how many entries total that I do in the series.  We will start with full-body workouts, since that is where everyone needs to begin their training journey.  If you’ve been following any “pre-designed” workouts—even if it’s one of my own here on the blog—you should also start your own programming design with full-body workouts.  And they are, of course, a great way to get “back-to-the-basics” of training no matter how long you’ve been working out, so this essay is also a good read for any of you “bro split” folks out there who have been doing one-bodypart-a-day workouts (or something similar) for no telling how long.      Following a workout program is essential to attaining the goals and res...