C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  It’s About More Than Just Resting and Recuperating      In my last essay on “Plateau Busters,” I mentioned briefly the importance of proper recovery when your progress has stalled.   But recovery is important all the time.   If you do it “right,” then you won’t have too much stalled progress in the first place.      Part of the issue with recovery methods, at least in the West, is that too much emphasis on training is placed around volume, intensity, and “rest and recuperation.”   The prevailing understanding for most lifters—and I don’t want to generalize, but I believe this to be true—is that recovery will take care of itself if you train hard and then give your body plenty of time to “rest and grow.”   While that has some truth to it, I won’t deny, it’s not the whole picture.   Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.      I wish lifters would think more along the lines of proper programming . ...

Telltale Signs That Your High-Frequency Training Might Be Causing You Trouble!      In my previous post, I listed some of the benefits of HFT (high-frequency training).  The benefits are great—trust me, and I don't want to discourage anyone from setting foot on the HFT path.  But, to be honest, this kind of training is always best utilized by lifters who know their bodies well, who understand when to push it hard and when it's time to back-off.      This is not to say, of course, that HFT shouldn't be done by any lifters who are not  advanced.  While it's not the form of training I recommend for the beginner—that would typically be 3-days-per-week, heavy-light-medium training—its perfectly fine for intermediate lifters.  (While I'm on the subject of "beginners" and "intermediate", realize that you are still a beginner if you haven't built an appreciable amount of muscle and/or strength, no matter how long you've trained—even if ...

Revisiting the 20-Rep Squat Program Your 2014 Mass Gaining Protocol! “Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.”- Mark Rippetoe      For many of you, it’s time to get started on your New Year’s resolution. [1]   And it could be that—for some of you, at least—your resolution is a simple one: to get as big and strong as possible in the shortest amount of time.  If that’s the case, then this article is written solely for you.      In years past, there was one routine, and one routine only, that was seen as the holy grail of mass-building protocols: the 20-rep squat program.  I first read about this program more than 20 years ago in the pages of Iron Man magazine, and then in the pages of Randall Strossen’s book “Super Squats”, which I devoured in one sitting upon receiving it in the mail.  But the nucleus of the pr...