C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

AKA: The 90% Rule for Mass and Power Some Thoughts and Programs on “Skill Training” as a Method for Gaining Size and Strength      In my recent essay “Heavy and High,” I suggested that the key to gaining mass for the natural bodybuilder lies in the ability to do programs that utilize both heavy weights and a high workload.  When a lot of modern bodybuilders think about training for hypertrophy, they largely think along the lines of training hard and then coupling this with plenty of rest and recovery.  Almost every program you encounter—whether you read about them, watch a YouTube video discussing it, or have a casual conversation about them with a fellow gym-goer—revolves around the balance of “intensity” with rest days after workouts.  The harder, or more , you train then the more you should rest.  I’m not denying here that workouts do, and should , involve those considerations, but I prefer lifters to think in terms of workload and work ...

     Sometimes the best workouts for building muscle mass look almost easy to the casual trainee or observer.  Too many times, lifters equate how hard you train at each workout to the results that are produced.  But it just doesn’t work this way in reality.  Some of the biggest, strongest lifters and bodybuilders I’ve known looked as if they were taking it easy in their workouts.  When I first witnessed this as a young man in the gyms of the early ‘90s, I chalked it up to “genetics.”  After all, I was told in many of the magazines from that era that, if you were a “hardgainer,” you needed to train with brief but incredibly hard workout sessions.  But with many years of training—and training others—under my belt, I just don’t think that’s the case.  Now, don’t get me wrong (I mean, really don’t get me wrong), there are definitely times when you should train hard and push it in the gym.  But the majority of the time, belie...

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 ...