C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A 10-Week Mass Building Regimen for Lifters Struggling to Pack on Size      I don’t like the term “hardgainer.”  I don’t mean to imply that some lifters don’t find it harder to pack on muscle size than others.  Some certainly do.  It’s just that when a lifter is labelled a “hardgainer” he (or she) often resorts to the kind of training that may not necessarily be what they really need.  I won’t go into all of the details here for why I find that to be the case.  If you want more information on that , then read my essay from last year “ The Myth of the Hardgainer .”      The gist of my theory, however, is that many lifters struggle to pack on muscle size because they do standard high-volume workouts, only to find that sort of training doesn’t work for them.  After that, they proceed to low-frequency, “high-intensity” workouts, but those don’t work, either.  It’s at that point that the lifter, or his lif...

  Why You May Not be a Hardgainer After All      Based on the title of this essay, there is a good chance you are going to end up reading something different than what you probably expected.   By the “myth” of the hardgainer, I don’t mean that hardgainers don’t exist.   It is certainly true that some lifters find it harder to gain muscle than others.   That’s simple genetics.   The “myth” is the fact that, just because you find it harder to gain muscle, doesn’t mean that there is just one way for you to train.      When a lifter is labelled a hardgainer—either by himself or by fellow lifters—the typical recommendation given is that he needs to train with a lot less volume than other lifters but with more “intensity”—intensity meaning the effort that is put forth in a set.   But I don’t think this is necessarily the case.      It is true that there are plenty of lifters that will find it h...

For this week's "Thursday Throwback," I have selected an article that I wrote ten years ago, when I was just about to turn 40.  In the ten years since I wrote this one, more and more lifters and bodybuilders, thankfully, use high-frequency training, which is really the gist of what this article is about. If you have tried both "conventional" bodybuilding training (fairly high volume, split workouts, going for the "pump") and "hardgainer" training (low volume, all-out "intensity", a couple days a week of training, full-body workouts), but haven't gotten good results from either kind of training, well, you might just be...  The Other Kind of Hardgainer [1] C.S. about ten years ago, when this article was originally written. I think the majority of lifters—even ones who have been training a long time and  should  know better—mistakenly believe that there are essentially two kinds of training, and two kinds of lifters: the "ea...