C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  The Best High-Volume, High-Intensity, Low-Frequency Programs for Mass and Strength & Power      Yesterday, while I was finishing up, ironically enough, my latest high-frequency training article, I received an email from a reader.  He said that he’d been using a couple of my HFT programs the last few months.  He said that he got pretty good results from them, and he now understands why it is that I “push” them.  But, he also said, he had an issue.  He didn’t enjoy training with them as much as he did with high-volume, high-intensity, low-frequency programs.  He said that he just liked training with a multi-split program where he trained each muscle group just once per week.  So, he wanted to know what I thought was the “best” program that didn’t involve high-frequency or full-body workouts.  The remainder of this essay is essentially what I wrote to him, albeit in more detail and a lot more fleshed out.  Here...

  An Eder-Inspired High-Set, Low-Rep Program      After writing my last essay on the great Marvin Eder, I thought more and more about his Olympic lifting program (which is featured in that essay).  Of all the programs that he did, and recommended to others, I think that program might be his most effective for lifters after a combination of raw power and muscle mass.  I also think for the average gym-goer, however, it would probably be a bit “too much.”  So with that in mind I created a sorta kinder, gentler version that will be more effective for the vast majority of readers.      I would encourage you to read my Eder article, but if you don’t, then just know this: Eder was fond of high-set, low-rep workouts, especially when training for Olympic lifting, but combined his lifting workouts with bodybuilding workouts to create—what we would probably now call—a “hybrid” system of training.  The program below uses thi...

Chuck Sipes was a legendary "classical" bodybuilder who used ladder training to great success.      Some lifters struggle, believe it or not, with getting enough volume in their workouts.  And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s high-frequency, high-volume workouts or high-intensity, high-volume workouts.  A lot of the time the reason for this is because of fatigue .  For lack of a better term, the lifter “gasses out” too early in the workout from doing too much at one time.  To counteract this, a lifter needs a way to manage fatigue .  This is where “ladder training” comes in.      When doing more voluminous workouts, I love ladder training.  Let’s look at a few different methods of ladders, and how to plug the methods into a particular workout scheme. The Up/Down Method      The first method we’ll look at is what I call the “traditional” up/down method of ladders.  This is ...