C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Heavy/Light/Medium Training Part 6: Getting Bigger Starr in his competitive days A Sample Workout Program + Bill Starr’s Dietary Advice for Adding Bulk      Bill Starr had some damn sagely advice for getting bigger.   Heck, I suppose all of his advice was sagely, for that matter.   So, in this, the 6 th part of our ongoing series on Starr’s H/L/M training, I’m going to present that advice to you , dear reader.      We will cover both diet and training for getting bigger, because one won’t work without the other.      Before we go any further, this essay, just like the ones that preceded it, builds upon the other installments.   So, for the simple sake of clarification alone, it would be a good idea to read the parts before continuing here.   Here are the links: Part One – program design Part Two – upper body pressing power Part Three – building the squat Part Four – back and pullin...

What it Takes to Actually Achieve Your New Year’s Resolution(s)       I rolled out of bed this morning, went to the coffee maker to brew my morning cup of Joe, and then put on the local morning news while I listened to the spewing and sputtering sounds made by my generic Keurig.  I don’t usually watch the news in the morning.  I typically get out of bed and, as my coffee is brewing, begin lacing up my shoes for a morning walk while my dog Kenji paces back and forth in anxious anticipation of our almost daily exercise.  But it was so cold this morning, and with slight snow flurries coming down, I thought it would be good to take the day off from my usual walk (much, it must be said, to my dog’s chagrin).  So I turned on the news to see what the weather had in store this week in my adopted home state of Alabama.      But, don’t worry, it’s not the weather in the Deep South that I want to discuss for this essay....

  Some Slightly Rambling Thoughts, Musings, and Reflections on How One Should Train (and How I Train)      The other day I received a question from a reader who asked how I really train.  He said that, since I write about a lot of different training methods, he wanted to know how I actually trained.  He wanted to know this because he was confused about how he should train.  He said that he read a lot of the articles here on the blog, but he was confused because I seemed to recommend so many different training methods, and it left him a little bit bewildered and conflicted over the correct training methods for him—those weren’t his exact words, but I’m just paraphrasing in my own vernacular.      I have received questions such as this one before.  I even wrote an article over ten years ago entitled “My Training Philosophy” because of the confusion about the various lifting methodologies I recommend, but I figure...