C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Simple Methods to Improve Your Workouts and Obtain Better Results      Over the years, one of my most popular articles has been my “ Train Long, Not Hard ” feature that I wrote for Testosterone Nation around the beginning of this century.  The title comes from a saying of Arthur Jones, the creator of Nautilus equipment and the father of so-called “high-intensity training” and the whole one-set-to-complete-momentary-muscular-failure approach to workouts.  He and Mike Mentzer are responsible for brain-washing an entire generation of lifters and quite possibly ruining real strength training, at least here in America—though I’ll save my ramblings on that for another essay or you can read my article on REAL High-Intensity Training .  Anyway, his saying goes like this: “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.”  Jones, quite obviously, believed that “train hard” was the answer to that conundrum.  In my article...

Increase Your Workload and Work Capacity with this Size and Strength Building Method      Natural lifters and bodybuilders—in other words, those of us who don’t use any anabolic steroids, testosterone replacement, and other performance-enhancement drugs—need a different strategy from lifters and bodybuilders who do use them.  One of the tenets of my training philosophy, and, therefore, the methodology that my programs utilize, is that building muscle and strength, for the natural lifter, is not just about hard training sessions coupled with enough rest and recovery supplemented with a good nutritional strategy.  Instead, if you’re serious about building muscle and strength naturally, you need to follow workout programs that focus on increasing your work capacity—your ability to handle more and more “work” in the gym—through frequent training using big, compound lifts.  As you do this, and in order to do this, the workload of your training sessio...

  Welcome to the World of High-Intensity, High-Volume Workouts-Of-The-Day! First things first: read Part One of this series from September 15th of last month if you haven't already done so.  If you have, then we can move on... Let's keep things as simple as possible for the sake of "ease of workouts".  The workouts themselves will be hard enough without overcomplicating the program. Start off by training each of the core lifts - squats, bench presses, and deadlifts - on one day per week.  I like to train during the week when on this program - or when training someone on this program - and then take the weekends off for rest, relaxation, drinking cocktails, throwing down the gauntlet at an arm-wrestling tournament; ya' know, whatever it is you like to do with your weekends without having to think about also performing a hard-ass training session. So the split would look like this: Monday: Squats - pick any of the WOD below Wednesday: Bench Presses - pick any of the...