C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Muscle-Building Tips and Advice for the Natural Bodybuilder      In my last essay on how to gain mass fast, I mentioned that the secret just might be getting stronger on a handful of exercises.   (This essay, I suppose, is just an extension of that last one.)   In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m right.   If you’re a natural bodybuilder, then the one thing more important than any other is to get strong on a dozen or so exercises, with your strength-focus in roughly the 5 to 10 rep range.      One approach is to achieve this is to focus on movements over muscles .   In other words, instead of going to the gym and “obliterating” or “destroying” (why do bodybuilders always seem to use military-sounding jargon for a lot of their training) your quad muscles with endless sets of leg extensions, leg presses, and machine whatever, how about just trying to get stronger on the squat?   Same goes for the...

       I received a question the other day via email.   It was succinct and to the point—and, when first received, I thought a bit generic.   “What’s the easiest way to gain mass fast?”   I get quite a bit of questions, and they are usually more in depth.   Most of them, truth be told, are the opposite of this question.   I find that a good many lifters have too many questions, usually because they overthink things too much or they are somehow searching for the “perfect” workout program (which doesn’t exist, by the way).   In the case of this questioner, I responded with a small litany of “the usual” advice for someone in need of quick mass gains: full-body workouts, compound movements, high-frequency training, the “big 4,” plenty of calories, lots of protein… yada, yada, yada.      Then last night, while I was watching one of those cozy little British murder mysteries on PBS and trying my absolute best to not...

Some Ready Made (yet Do-it-Yourself) Size and Strength Programs      In the 5 th grade, way back in 1983, I was obsessed with “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.   If you were a kid in the ‘80s, you may very well have experienced this obsession yourself.   According to Wikipedia, between the years ‘79 and ‘98, the books sold 250 million+ copies, so apparently it was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, sort of a big deal.   In fact, until I started reading muscle magazines voraciously starting around ’86, I’m pretty sure that the extent of my reading was comprised of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Conan the Barbarian novels, and various-assorted comic books.   (My favorite comic book series at one point was “Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters,” so take that TMNT.)      Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you’re not familiar, were exactly what they sound like: books where you, the reader, decided what happened to the m...

       If you’re a natural lifter who wants to gain plenty of muscle mass but also the strength to go with it, I think there are three things that are paramount.   First, you need to train heavy.   Second, you need to train often.   And third, you need to remain fresh while doing the first two.      If you’re a student of the lifting game, and if something about my above statement seems vaguely familiar, there’s an explanation for that.   I basically paraphrased the great Russian strength coach Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky, who, rather famously, said that the key to strength training was “to train as heavy as possible as often as possible while being as fresh as possible.”   That quote is well-known for a reason.   Following it judiciously will unlock a lot of strength and hypertrophy gains.      Of course, there are a couple caveats to that statement.   You need to be training with barbel...