C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

   The Mostly True Exploits and Tales of Bodybuilding, Powerlifting, and Other Strength Sports Across the South, from Texas to Alabama Chapter Two: Pulling Big A.K.A. The One in Texas with Deadliftin’, Tire-Flippin’ and Tobacco-Spittin’ Setting: East Texas, 2004      “Texas ain’t so bad,” Bubba said, about the time that we pulled up to the gate of my Uncle Kirk’s ranch in East Texas.  For Bubba, this was tantamount to a revelation.  Since we had left Mississippi, he hadn’t said a whole lot of good stuff about my home state.      “You changin’ your tune?” I asked, as we both got out of my truck.  I walked over to the gate to swing it open.  Bubba walked to the back of the truck, and the cooler full of ice-cold beer.      “Nah, Texas is too flat,” Bubba replied, as he cracked open a Budweiser.  “I’m just sayin’ that it ain’t so bad—it’s got some good-lookin’ gals, for instance.  But it needs hills.  And trees.  The only trees I seen so far are around ponds and lakes.”      I was ready to

  A.K.A “Simple Workouts + Heavy Training = Effective Results” C.S. dragging a sled on the cover of his book "Ultimate Strength."  Read on to discover why you MUST drag or carry different objects in order to maximize your results! I have written about it so many times that you wouldn’t think it needs repeating, but the truth is that it does!  I’m talking about getting “back-to-the-basics”, about our inability to stop making things so complicated, and just do simple, hard, basic, result-producing workouts.  And I also think that the truth is that we will always need to remind ourselves of this because it is in our nature to make things “complicated”, to always be searching for some more complex but somehow “better” program that will produce results even quicker for us.  Even though we really “should” know better, and even though we do know better, we tend to always make this mistake. And this goes for myself, as well.  Maybe not so much with barbell training, although at on

  Throughout the course of my lifting career, I've tried quite a few programs, putting them to the test where the "rubber meats the road" so to speak: the gym.  I've had some misses (Mentzer-style H.I.T. training would be a good example) and I've definitely had surprising successes, such as Sheiko-style training programs, which - when I looked at them on paper - I thought there was no way in hell his programs would work.  But, much to my surprise, I got stronger (and bigger while eating hardly anything) on a Sheiko program. Matthew Sloan warming up for a big deadlift session. I've often had success, too, with programs that are wildly diverse.  I built a lot of muscle mass with one-bodypart-per-week programs when I was much younger - more than 25 years ago!  And I've built an impressive amount of strength using very high-frequency training.  When I squatted and deadlifted well over triple my bodyweight in competition, I used HFT - Sheiko, Smolov, and my own