C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

A 3 Days Per Week, “Moderate Strength” Program for Size and Power      Last week, I published a Q&A article based on a few questions that I had been asked in the preceding weeks.  One of the questions asked was if it was possible to do an “easy strength” program just 3 days per week.  I answered the question in the best way that I could—if you want to read my answer in full, then, well, read that article—but the more that I thought about it in the days since, the more I think that one of my answers might just be the way to set up a full-body program for 3 days per week of training.  I suggested that it might work for a 3 day program if you simply bumped up your total volume to around 15 reps per lift.  In this article, I want to outline in much more detail what this might look like and how you can use it to get the most out of a 3 day per week, full-body program.      In many ways, this shouldn’t really be thou...

  …but Moderate Most of the Time The great Tommy Kono, the inspiration for this essay Programming Made Simple      The legendary Tommy Kono—an Olympic gold-medalist in weightlifting and Mr. Universe; you don’t see that any-damn-more—believed in following the “American” system of weight training.  In the ‘60s (Tommy won the gold medal at the Olympics in ‘52 and ‘56; the silver medal at the ‘60 Games) he believed that too many American lifters were attempting to follow the Soviet-style (also used by the Cubans) that involved meticulously planning exactly what one was going to lift each day, and using a high-volume of training with multiple auxiliary movements (think of this as similar to Westside “conjugate” training today) or lifters of that era were following the Bulgarian style of heavy, daily maximal training.  And by the “American” system of training, Kono meant following simple, basic workout programs that rotated between hard, easy, and mo...

and Other S**t I Learned from a Lifetime of Training in Zen, Martial Arts, and Powerlifting Tom Platz's thighs were built through some of the most extreme, non-moderate training one can imagine!  And the results speak for theselves. Okay, so the title of this post is a little over-the-top.  It’s supposed to be.  But that also doesn’t make it any less true.  Whether you want to get in the best shape of your life, or win a powerlifting competition, or become a martial arts “expert,” or any dream that you have in life.  If you want to achieve any of those things, or anything else for that matter , then you must be determined to work extremely hard, moderation be damned. Modern “self-help” books recommend moderation as one of the ways to achieve your goals - especially in the West, where we think there is something “Eastern” to moderation, a balance of yin/yang or a balance of mind/body/Spirit.  But moderation is really NOT an Eastern “thing,” not any more at ...