C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

George Turner’s Old-School Full-Body Program for Gaining 90 Pounds—that’s right, 90!—of Pure Muscle George Turner was in his 60s in this picture!      When it comes to old-school bodybuilders, George Turner remains one of my favorites.   Probably because of the fact that he was more than just a competitive bodybuilder.   He was a gym owner along with being a damn good writer of (damn good) training articles.   He was also a bit—how should it be said?—curmudgeonly.   But he was without a doubt curmudgeonly in the best possible way.   He was, in many ways, similar to Vince Gironda in that regard, just without the disdain for squats.   (That’s right, as much as I like Gironda, he wasn’t a fan of the barbell back squat.)   Myself, I love back squats.   As did Turner.      Anyway, that paragraphic preamble is just a way of writing that, as I was thumbing through an old IronMan magazine this morning, looking ...

       Before we get started here, I want to apologize for the delay in posts.  I have been working on, and formatting, my e-books so that I can start selling paperback versions of the same books.  Be on the lookout for those in the next week or two.  With that out of the way...       I have a semi-regular, semi-ongoing series which I have titled “Real Bodybuilding.”   The first installment—which I never, by the way, planned on being the first in a series of training articles—was some scribblings and thoughts on how old-school, real bodybuilders actually trained before the advent of large doses of various anabolic steroids in bodybuilding (which changed everything).   And after writing that one, there was enough interest in the topics discussed that I thought some follow-up articles and essays were in order.      Before we go any further, here are the links to the past installments.   Reading th...

  A.K.A. The Total Variety Regimen Old-School Advice for Breaking Through Progress Barriers (With a Little Help from Classic Bodybuilder and Writer Gene Mozee)        “Athletes in every sport suffer through periods of retrograde progress—plateaus, or slumps, during which they lose their edge and don’t play up to par.   Major league baseball players can’t get a hit, golfers can’t make a putt, basketball players can’t buy a basket, and quarterbacks can’t find a receiver with a pass.   Such is the nature of slumps.” [1]      So begins the legendary bodybuilding trainer and writer Gene Mozee in an article he penned for IronMan entitled “Plateau Busters: Punching Through the Progress Barrier” in the November, ’91 issue of that magazine.      I came across this article today while going through a box of magazines that I dragged out of my attic a week or so ago when researching my last essay on John Fa...

  How Classic Bodybuilders Gained Mass, Sculpted Their Physiques, and Achieved Fantastic Condition!          Ever since I first picked up a muscle magazine in the 1980s, I have loved the old-school, classic bodybuilders from the decades that came before me.   I realize that I’m old enough that even my training heyday of the ‘90s is now considered “old-school,” which, if I’m being entirely honest, seems quite odd to me.   However, when I think of old-school, I think of the “silver era” of bodybuilding (roughly the ‘40s and ‘50s) along with the “golden age” of bodybuilding (‘60s and ‘70s).      I still love those eras.   I love writing about those eras.   I love reading about those eras.   I love the training from those eras.      I think that the training wisdom from those bygone days of bodybuilding glory has a lot to offer the modern bodybuilder, especially the drug-free o...