C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

     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 ...

A.K.A: Building Muscle and Strength Under Lockdown and Self-Isolation If you're anything like me (and I have a good feeling that many of you are), you haven't left the house in a couple days.  And I have a good feeling, you may even be reading this blog entry because you're surfing the internet a little more than usual in self-isolation/lockdown/quarantine mode - whichever one better suits your situation - in hopes of finding some ways to continue your gains (or at least not bring them to a grinding halt) while you have no way to make it to the gym.  But if you're also like me (and this where I also have a good feeling that many of you are decidedly not  like me), you have a full gym at your disposal in the confines of your garage, replete with squat rack, deadlift and Oly-lifting platform, a bad-ass Forza bench, a good 1,500 lbs of free weights, not to mention various other bands, chains, benches, and other assorted goodies such as sleds and sandbags.  Ok...