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...

       I first tried using high-set, low-rep training sometime in the early to mid ‘90s.  At the time, I was bodybuilding and not powerlifting, and had just started writing for some of the major bodybuilding magazines, but I still had plenty to learn.  Don’t get me wrong.  I had done some low-rep training, especially for a few sets at the end of a workout, but I had never done low rep training exclusively using really high sets.  At one point, however, I read an arm training article by Greg Zulak, where he mentioned that it was beneficial to do 15 to 20 sets of 2 to 3 reps on occasion.  Now, to be honest, I can’t remember the exact article—I tried to find it in my attic full of old magazines while this essay was churning around in my mind, but to no avail.  Anyway, after reading it, my workout partner Dusty and I decided to see how that kind of workout felt.  We had been training at the time with a lot of sets, but also a...