C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Get Big and Strong Using this Old-School Workout Program      Old school bodybuilders—from the ‘70s and before—built their muscles with full-body workouts.  They started their lifting careers with basic, full-body training sessions using only a limited amount of exercises, with a limited amount of sets to boot.  As they slowly built up their work capacity, they added sets to their exercises, and then added new exercises once they had the ability to handle them.  They stuck with full-body workouts even as they began to use multiple exercises per bodypart for multiple sets.  Eventually, some of these classic bodybuilders began implementing split programs, but that was only if their workouts got so long that they were almost forced to change to a split system.  But then there were guys like Clancy Ross—perhaps bodybuilding’s original mass monster—who stuck with full-body workouts throughout his career.      The old-school way is in stark contrast to modern bodybuilding.  Today, it’s not

       Ken Waller is probably most well-known from the “documentary” Pumping Iron.  Although Pumping Iron primarily focused on Arnold’s rivalry with Ferrigno in the Mr. Olympia competition, the other main “story” of the pseudo-doc revolved around the rivalry of Waller and (fellow Mr. Universe competitor) Mike Katz.  Waller was sort of portrayed as the “villain” in the Universe competition to the more “All-American” Katz.  The problem is that the storyline was set up by the filmmakers, and none of it was actually true.  Katz and Waller were, in truth, actually good friends.      I still love Pumping Iron to this day, but I really wish I would have known that the Waller and Katz story was fabricated when I was a teenager.  Because before watching Pumping Iron, I liked Waller.  Afterwards, not so much.  Sometime in the late ‘90s, I discovered the truth (or “untruth,” I suppose) about Pumping Iron, and Waller has remained one of my favorite “Golden Era” bodybuilders ever since.      But th

Reimagining a Classic Bodybuilding Method for Strength and Power      When I first started lifting—not to mention reading bodybuilding magazines—in the mid to late ‘80s, most bodybuilders trained the same way.  By and large, although there were exceptions, mind you, so I don’t mean this as an entirely blanket statement, the majority of bodybuilders trained on either a 6-on, 1-off split, or a 3-on, 1-off split.  The body was split 3 ways.  Typically, one followed either a push (chest, shoulders, triceps)/pull (back and biceps)/legs split or an “antagonistic” split where you trained your chest and back one day, your shoulders, bis and tris the 2nd day, and, finally, your legs on the 3rd day.      Although this seems as if it’s a lot of volume, especially if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid of “high-intensity” training, it was actually less work than bodybuilders from previous eras.  Arnold, for instance, trained on a 6-on, 1-off split, but he trained each muscle group three times per w